previews

  • Lucio Fontana, Ambiente Spaziale Num. 51-A1 (Struttura al neon per la IX Triennale di Milano) (Spatial Atmosphere No. 51-A1 [Neon Structure for the IX Milan Triennial]), 1951, neon, 7' 6" x 22'.

    Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space

    The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)
    250 South Grand Avenue
    December 6–February 27

    Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
    Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW
    June 23–September 11

    Curated by Alma Ruiz

    Southern California’s role in postwar art is due for a critical reappraisal. Curator Alma Ruiz’s “Suprasensorial” constitutes a valuable contribution to this regionalist project, attempting a double reorientation by locating precedents of Californian Light and Space art of the late 1960s in the work of Latin American artists such as Lucio Fontana, who made his first neon environment in 1951. The exhibition will include five immersive installations—by Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Hélio Oiticica, the last in collaboration with Neville d’Almeida—dating from 1951 to 1999. Conceived in places such as Milan, Paris, and New York, the works speak less to local aesthetics than to international networks of exchange.

    Travels to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, June 23–Sept. 11, 2011.

    — Irene Small

  • Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1943-1977

    CCS Bard Hessel Museum
    Bard College Campus
    June 25–October 31

    Dia:Beacon
    3 Beekman Street
    June 25–October 31

    Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
    5905 Wilshire Boulevard
    October 31–January 16

    Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
    Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW
    February 24–May 15

    Curated by Lynne Cooke

    Artists and critics wax rhapsodic about
    Blinky Palermo, but a deep understanding of his work is only beginning to emerge. His no fewer than six posthumous European surveys, excepting a resolute and spectacular 2007 retrospective in Düsseldorf, have not done Palermo any favors, confining him to the dubious role of distinctly German quasi-Expressionist. Dia’s stunning holdings of the late Metal Pictures Palermo made in New York City, together with catalogue contributions by curator Lynne Cooke, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Suzanne Hudson, and others, promise an American perspective on one of the first transcontinental artists—at last.

    Travels to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Feb. 24–May 15, 2011; Dia:Beacon, NY, and CCS Galleries at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, June 25–Oct. 31, 2011.

    — Christine Mehring