Curated by Katharina Dohm

More than most photographers, Philip-Lorca diCorcia has quite deliberately operated between fiction and fact, between the staged moment and the spontaneous one. As the title of his remarkably sustained and tantalizingly personal project “A Storybook Life” suggests, even pictures of family and friends can slip into make-believe. With some 120 images dating from the mid-1970s through the present, this survey gathers material from that and other key series; on view will be portraits of Hollywood hustlers, chaotic urban street scenes, and dramatically lit head shots of pedestrians in Times Square caught unawares as they emerge from under the scaffolding of dark construction sites. Studies of nearly naked pole dancers highlight diCorcia the provocateur, but it’s the enigmatic subtlety of his pictures that really gets under your skin. Travels to the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands, Oct. 5, 2013–Jan. 14, 2014.

— Vince Aletti

Curated by Martin Engler

Can the radical nature of Piero Manzoni’s work be appreciated in a museum retrospective mounted fifty years after his death? What power do his cans of “Artist’s Shit” still wield now that they no longer shock? Aiming to refocus our attention on the moment “when bodies become art,” curator Martin Engler posits that Manzoni’s primary target was the mythologization and commodification of the human body in postwar gestural abstraction. This exhibition brings together some 120 works—including Manzoni’s Day-Glo polystyrene monochromes, as well as documentation of the people he signed and then titled “Living Sculptures”—by the Italian artist and others. Connections both to the historical avant-gardes and to Conceptual art will emphasize the late artist’s use of diverse strategies, from travesty to debasement and humor, to savagely critique the body’s reification in art. Travels to the Palazzo Reale, Milan, Oct. 2013–Jan. 2014.

— Anthony White