Curated by Scott Rothkopf

The “OS” in the title of Wade Guyton’s Whitney show this fall stands for “operating system,” and if Guyton’s singular and inimitable practice—misusing print technology to make drawings and paintings that are sly, slick, and confounding—is less hegemonic than Windows, it is one that has earned him recognition as one of the most influential artists of his generation. This exhibition of approximately ninety works made between 1999 and today will include, in addition to the artist’s iconic printed paintings and works on paper, sculptures (such as his mirrored, stainless-steel “U Sculptures,” 2005–12, and the infamous deconstructed Marcel Breuer chairs) plus two new large-scale works conceived especially for the Breuer building. The show’s catalogue will feature an interview with the artist by Donna De Salvo and an extended essay by Rothkopf, whose previous landmark authorship on Guyton’s work makes him the ideal arbiter for this first midcareer survey.

— Rachel Kushner

Curated by Leah Dickerman

It’s been one hundred years since Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian abandoned the depiction of objects in the world. With due fanfare, the Museum of Modern Art will reexamine the beginnings of abstraction, at once marking the centennial of that watershed moment and inadvertently reminding us of the subsequent backlash, as “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925” will be—surprisingly—the first large-scale survey of its kind at MoMA (the very bastion of modernism) since Alfred Barr’s “Cubism and Abstract Art” in 1936. Marshaling four hundred works, both canonical and obscure, and a catalogue with two dozen scholarly texts, the exhibition will bring us modernism as an open, sundry, thrilling affair: Abstraction developed over time, resonant with its era, and on an international scale; its media exceeded painting to include environments, film, photography, poetry, music, and dance. Following her rigorous Dada and Bauhaus exhibitions, Dickerman promises to deliver another one for history.

— Christine Mehring

Curated by Doryun Chong

With roughly three hundred works by some sixty artists, “Tokyo 1955–1970” presents an extensive roster of art produced in the capital of Japan during this key period. The exhibition and its catalogue (with essays by Chong, Michio Hayashi, Mika Yoshitake, and Miryam Sas) encompasses not only Gutai, Anti-Art, and Non-Art—movements that have been well known in the US for some time—but also aspects of postwar Japanese art hitherto less known in the Western Hemisphere, including the graphic realism of Hiroshi Nakamura and Tiger Tateishi and intermedia projects by the collective Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop). The heterogeneity of material in the show—ranging from painting, sculpture, photography, and film to performance, design, and architecture—demonstrates that the history of the avant-garde in Tokyo was not monolithic, but instead made up of multiple compelling narratives that paralleled other developments in radical art around the globe.

— Reiko Tomii

Curated by Jennifer Gross

Long the odd man out of post-1960s art histories, Richard Artschwager has, for nearly five decades, synthesized various strains of contemporary practice—from Minimalism to Pop to appropriation—into an idiosyncratic oeuvre all his own. While Donald Judd was fabricating boxes and shelves out of industrial materials, Artschwager clad similar forms in Formica; years before Allan McCollum cast his surrogates, Artschwager was constructing similarly generic tableaux. This retrospective—containing roughly 120 works from all periods of the artist’s career and occasioning a catalogue with essays by the curator, Yale University Art Gallery’s Jennifer Gross; Cathleen Chaffee; Ingrid Schaffner; and Adam D. Weinberg—should put into clear view an artistic contribution that often eludes attention. Artschwager’s “blps,” for example, are often installed in overlooked places; but once you see them—as may be said of his practice at large—everything else is thrown into strange relief.

— Alex Kitnick

Curated by Jill Lloyd and Ulf Küster

The work of Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) embodies fin de siècle contradictions like that of few other painters. Fluidly mixing Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and naturalism, Hodler’s style offered an international vocabulary that also revealed a deep attachment to his native Switzerland. His paintings illustrate the alienation of the individual under the modern collective order, with figures frozen in haunting landscapes and rigidly parallel groupings. This fall, the Neue Galerie will mount the largest Hodler retrospective ever assembled in this country, comprising eighty-five of his works—paintings and drawings made between 1889 and 1918—and augmented by photographs of the artist taken by Gertrud Dübi-Müller, furniture designed by Josef Hoffmann for Hodler’s apartment, and a catalogue with essays by Ulf Küster and Jill Lloyd (the show’s curators), Oskar Bätschmann, Alessandra Comini, Sharon Hirsh, Paul Müller, and Peter Pfrunder.

— André Dombrowski

Curated by Michael Cohen

Two poles that inform Tony Conrad’s diverse oeuvre are the flicker and the drone. The former, via a seeming slowing down of the mechanics of film, interrupts the medium’s illusion of continuity. The latter, conversely, represents a principle of dedifferentiation, as it causes otherwise discrete sonic elements to meld together, producing a concrete psychoacoustic experience. This survey, the first in more than twenty years, shows how Conrad incorporated both of these techniques into public interventions and educational projects. The show includes episodes and artifacts from Conrad’s early-1990s cable-access series Studio in the Streets, two musical performances, rarely seen films from the 1970s, and an installation of new works. A catalogue with essays by Branden W. Joseph, Andrew Lampert, Tabea Lurk, and Jay Sanders; a panel discussion with the artist; and an extensive program of film screenings at Anthology Film Archives will complement 80WSE’s exhibition.

— John Miller

Curated by Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith, and Thomas J. Lax

The latest installment of the Studio Museum’s legendary “F” series (which brought us “Freestyle” [2001], “Frequency” [2005–2006], and “Flow” [2008]) promises a wildly heterogeneous installation of works made during the past five years, highlighting twenty-nine emerging artists of African descent including Sadie Barnette, Jamal Cyrus, Noah Davis, Taisha Paggett, and Nate Young. As this exhibition series has been a veritable launchpad for numerous artists to date, “Fore”—taking as its title the heads-up alert to those in the path of a projectile—is sure to get the art world’s attention. Fore can also be a designation of vanguardism, and in the tradition of the game-changing concept of “post-black” introduced by Thelma Golden in the context of “Frequency,” this edition, curated by Lauren Haynes, Naima J. Keith, and Thomas J. Lax, will no doubt establish its own discursive terms, in the space of the show and in the attendant catalogue featuring an essay on each artist.

— Suzanne Hudson

Curated by Stefan Kalmár and Richard Birkett

In the eighteen years since Bernadette Corporation emerged from New York’s downtown fashion and art scenes, there have been moments when the collective has seemed the sharpest and most conceptually ambitious expression of its age. Artists Space is now producing a BC “retrospective” in typical restyled form, encompassing a new photo shoot along with relics from the group’s early fashion line, cine-tracts like Get Rid of Yourself (2003), pages from the short-lived magazine Made in USA (2000–2001), and more recent forays into poetry and sculpture—all displayed within a total exhibition architecture conceived with set and production designer Gideon Ponte. No doubt the just-past of the ’90s underground will seem very now, though BC’s knack for late-capitalist tones and tremors should forestall both nostalgia and political kitsch.

— Bennett Simpson