Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal

It’s hard to believe that twenty-five years have passed since Pipilotti Rist made I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much. In that breakout video work (completed while she was still in school), the artist—appearing as a blurry image, breasts exposed, hair tousled, speech and actions variously sped up and slowed down via bare-bones tech tweaking—delivered a hysterical (in all senses of the word) rendition of John Lennon’s “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” Over the ensuing decades, Rist’s oeuvre has expanded to include large-scale multimedia installations, sculpture, and all manner of investigations of and about the body. For her first substantial survey show in the UK, approximately thirty major works will be presented (accompanied by a catalogue including essays by the curator, Elisabeth Bronfen, Chrissie Iles, Stefanie Müller, and Konrad Bitterli, and a contribution by Rist), perhaps offering a glimpse of just what kind of woman Rist has become.

— Johanna Burton

Curated by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavit

As exemplified by the Memphis group’s antic asymmetries or the high-low architectural fugues of Michael Graves, Hans Hollein, and even Philip Johnson (who killed his own master narrative with New York’s ersatz-Georgian AT&T building), postmodern style once enjoyed a reputation as the most bemusing interlude in recent design history. But a renewed appreciation of all things po-mo has been building lately, and this show—encompassing some 250 exhibits, from Ettore Sottsass’s iconic Casablanca sideboard to Grace Jones’s Constructivist maternity dress, with ample interdisciplinary input from Devo, Rei Kawakubo, Peter Saville, Haim Steinbach, and many, many more—will make it official: Postmodernism is the new modernism.

— Elizabeth Schambelan

Curated by Nav Haq

How do you fit several dozen museums into one medium-size art institution? It helps if they’re all at least semifictional and manageably scaled, as in this forty- artist survey of museological mimicries. The reflexive finale of the Arnolfini’s year of fiftieth birthday celebrations, the show collates the continuum from Marcel Duchamp’s 1943 monographic trove in a suitcase, the Bôite-en-valise, to Marcel Broodthaers’s grand upending of taxonomic categories, to quixotic present-day examples such as Bill Burns’s Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals. (Plus, expect turns by Stuart Brisley, Tom Marioni, and Tomas Saraceno, among others.) “Museum Show,” then, ought to diversely illuminate why artists set up their own museums manqués—beyond the obvious appeal of ruling the roost without worrying about budgets, funding, acquisitions, etc. Most likely, it’ll also make one wonder how such a lulu of a curatorial concept went unclaimed for so long.

— Martin Herbert

Curated by Clément Chéroux and Angela Lampe

As perhaps no other painter of his generation, Edvard Munch (1863–1944) gave radically innovative form to the traumas of the modern psyche. That he did so in perfect sync with the dawning media age in which he lived is the intriguing premise of one of the largest Munch exhibitions ever assembled in France. Including some 140 diverse works of painting, drawing, photography, film, and sculpture, this exhibition explores Munch’s later career, his twentieth-century output. An unexpected agility with the camera and a propensity for filmic and theatrical poses in his paintings underscore his enthrallment with the period’s new image technologies.

— André Dombrowski

Curated by Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey

A decade after MoMA’s much-contested but hugely popular Gerhard Richter retrospective, Tate Modern curators Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey, in a departure from the 2001 exhibition’s painting-only approach, will survey the German artist’s career by looking chronologically and comprehensively across a half century of practice. Including, in addition to paintings, a selection of drawings and photographs, as well as the largest assortment of Richter’s glass works ever assembled, the show will also be the first outside Germany to present the monumental Stroke, his sixty-five-foot-long painting of a single gestural mark completed for a German school in 1980. Organized with an eye to the distinct historical contexts and diversity of aesthetic modes in which Richter has worked, “Panorama” promises a new look at the artist just in time for his eightieth birthday in February.

— Graham Bader

Curated by Rotor

Nearly forty years after completing his thesis at London’s Architectural Association, Rem Koolhaas, the frequent-flying founding partner of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), will have a homecoming. Coinciding with the completion of the firm’s first permanent building in London—the Rothschild bank headquarters—this exhibition will explore the global range of OMA’s influential practice, from its formation in 1975 through celebrated recent projects such as the Seattle Central Library (2004), Porto’s Casa da Música (2005), and the ongoing China Central Television headquarters in Beijing. In keeping with the extralarge ambitions of their subject, the Belgian design collective Rotor will coordinate a vast selection of OMA materials—including models, drawings, photographs, mock-ups, furniture prototypes, and films—as well as live events, an OMA-specific shop (think thick books), and “interventions” to the Barbican’s Brutalist complex itself.

— Sean Keller