Curated by Sara Arrhenius

Imprinting the organic onto the built environment, Tomás Saraceno worked with arachnologists and astrophysicists for several years to make Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, the awe-inducing room-size installation first presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale. His inquiry into the correlating geometric structures of spiderwebs and the universe, interweaving ideas of scale and habitation, will evolve at Bonniers, where Saraceno installs a new iteration of the work—a complex, crowd-engulfing network of black elastic cords that simultaneously represents the impossibly minute and the incomprehensibly expansive. Accompanied by a catalogue, the exhibition will incorporate background materials such as drawings, photographs, texts, and films.

— Nana Last

Curated by Iris Müller-Westermann

“Smoking remains attractive,” Lee Lozano once noted, “because it is an excuse to make a little fire.” And indeed, this artist—who pointedly withdrew from the scene in 1972 and just as pointedly opted to “boycott women”—was known for making sparks fly. In the early 1960s, Lozano portrayed the polymorphously perverse: lewd, surreal cartoons of mouths, pricks, and pussies in various modes of assembly, which soon evolved into harder-edged “tool” paintings, equally rich with metaphoric association. Her later systems-based paintings and text pieces seem better behaved but in fact deeply complicate any notion of “cool” Conceptualism. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Jo Applin, Lucy R. Lippard, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, and the curator, this retrospective of some sixty paintings and hundreds of works on paper focuses on the vicissitudes of Lozano’s multifaceted, hot-and-bothered oeuvre.

— Johanna Burton

Curated by Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker

Though Alice Neel (1900–1984) could sometimes appear matronly (she played a bishop’s mother in the 1959 Beat film Pull My Daisy), she was a political radical and a bohemian whose portraits questioned social and artistic categories with enduring acumen. While she mastered the figural distortions developed by modernists before her (limbs like pulled taffy, faces with not-quite-level eyes, oversize heads heavy with psychic burdens), she rendered her subjects with a sincerity that modernists typically feared. The MFA’s sixty-eight-work retrospective spans more than fifty years of painting and includes subjects that range from a nursing woman to a family in Spanish Harlem, from a cowlicked Robert Smithson and a toothy Frank O’Hara to a man named Joe Gould sporting an impressive three penises.

— Sarah K. Rich