Curated by Eva Badura-Triska and Karola Kraus

Few artists have as radically collapsed the presentation of their art with its making and meaning as Franz West. His installations, which combine furniture, designed wall segments, or complete rooms with “artworks” proper (his own or those of historical figures or contemporaries), insist on the inseparability (the shared formal vocabulary and shared contexts) of art, design, and their display. Centered on these so-called Kombi-Werke, this exhibition, “Where is my Eight,” which was conceived with the artist before his passing this summer and is cocurated by Badura-Triska, the foremost auithority on West, hinges on art practice and art history: It may be the most important West retrospective ever.

— Christine Mehring

Curated by Heike Eipeldauer

It behooves the twenty- first century to look and look again at pioneering assemblagist and feminist provocateuse Meret Oppenheim (1913– 1985). Her famous “Object,” aka Le Déjeuner en fourrure, which she produced at the astonishing age of twenty-three, will not travel to this retrospective. But some two hundred items will, including paintings, drawings, photographs, fashion designs, and sculptures—for example, versions of her Urzeit Venus, a hermaphroditic fetish, drafted in pen and ink (1933) and sculpted in terra-cotta (1962) and bronze (1977). The catalogue will feature texts by Elisabeth Bronfen, Christiane Meyer-Thoss, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, as well as reminiscences by Oppenheim’s colleagues and friends; a parallel volume, published by Oppenheim’s niece Lisa Wenger, will bring to light a selection of the artist’s previously uncirculated writings. Travels to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Aug. 16–Dec. 1.

— Frances Richard