International Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
John Baldessari, God Nose, 1965, oil on canvas, 68 x 57".
John Baldessari
MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA
BARCELONA
Through April 25
Curated by Leslie Jones and Jessica Morgan
“Pure Beauty” seems a funny name for a retrospective of an artist who cremated all his paintings in 1970 and voided the photographed faces of dozens of Hollywood starlets with signature colored spots, but of course an unsettlingly ironic humor runs through Baldessari’s career. This expansive exhibition should connect the proverbial dots with more than 130 works from five decades of collage, video, installation, and—yes— painting. In Los Angeles the artist’s influence looms (conspicuously) large. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays from Bice Curiger, David Salle, and ten others, Baldessari’s first British retrospective should reveal how far his pioneering brand of California Conceptualism extends.
— Michael Ned Holte
Rodney Graham, Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003, installation view, dimensions variable. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Rodney Graham: Through the Forest
MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA
BARCELONA
Through May 18
Curated by Friedrich Meschede
Through disturbances of perception and perspective, textual interpolations, looped narratives, and visual inversions, Rodney Graham’s art unfailingly challenges both the intellect and the senses, while his repeated references to a range of cultural giants are less a matter of appropriating their legacy than of opening it up. With more than one hundred works in media ranging from light boxes to Liquitex to film and video, as well as book works and Graham’s first foray into painting, the 2005 series “Picasso, My Master,” this midcareer retrospective draws on three decades of the Canadian artist’s production. The catalogue, designed by Filiep Tacq, features contributions from Julian Heynen and Christa-Maria Lerm-Hayes, Yves Gevaert, and curator Meschede.
— Michael Archer
Thomas Schütte, Melone 1:5, 1986, wood and paint, eleven parts. Installation view, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, 1987. Photo: Tomasz Samek. © 2009 Thomas Schütte/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Thomas Schütte
MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
MADRID
Curated by Patrizia Dander and Thomas Weski
Using irony and subtle humor to challenge monumentality, Thomas Schütte’s work counters the “straightness” of modernity with gestures of stumbling and failing—a strategy that should prove key in taking on the bombastic architecture and difficult National Socialist past of Munich’s Haus der Kunst. Centered around an eighteen-foot-high Styrofoam and plaster “anti-monument”—here referencing Schütte’s “Mann im Matsch” (Man in Mud) series—this substantial survey brings together more than one hundred works made since the early 1980s, including sculptures, architectural models, watercolors, and ceramics. Curators Dander and Weski highlight Schütte’s reflections on “ambivalence, tension, and conflict” throughout this wide range of media, but the accompanying catalogue is dedicated solely to the artist’s newest watercolors.
— Dominikus Müller
Jane and Louise Wilson, Erewhon (Denniston), 2004, color photograph on aluminum in Plexiglas box, 70 7/8 x 70 7/8".
Jane and Louise Wilson
CENTRO DE ARTE MODERNA DA FUNDAÇÃO CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN
LISBON
Through April 18
Curated by Isabel Carlos
The Wilsons possess an uncanny ability to elicit the historical and psychological reverberations of architectural space through their eerie, seductive, and hauntingly atmospheric film and video installations of sites such as the abandoned East German secret-police headquarters of Stasi City, 1997, and the ruined New Zealand hospitals of Erewhon, 2004— places that are decrepit, out of time. While the CAM exhibition focuses mainly on work produced in the past three years, “Suspending Time” will nonetheless be the largest survey of the sisters’ output to date, comprising several multichannel installations, including their most recent, Songs for My Mother, 2009, and five site-specific sculptures. Accompanied by a catalogue with texts by critic Mark Cousins, curator Isabel Carlos, and others, this show should be a primer for anyone interested in the elegant interweaving of real and depicted space by means of the moving image.
— Barry Schwabsky
Robert Longo, Untitled (Gretchen), 1980, charcoal and graphite on paper, 96 x 60".
Robert Longo
MUSEU COLECÇÃO BERARDO
LISBON
Through April 25
Curated by Caroline Smulders
Robert Longo was in on the ground level of what’s now called the Pictures generation, having participated in the seminal New York exhibition organized by Douglas Crimp in 1977. But though Longo has received as much market attention as his peers, he hasn’t always gotten as much respect; there’s a crowd-pleasing drama to his drawing and sculpture, which are generally grand in scale, high in contrast, and often strong with a less-than-subtle intimation of apocalypse. A Damien Hirst before his time—he relishes guns, tidal waves, and mushroom clouds the way Hirst does sharks and dead butterflies—Longo seems to see everything in literal black and white. This retrospective of more than one hundred pieces from the past thirty years (it began at Musee d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, France) offers a chance to get a handle on the Pictures people’s bad boy.
— David Frankel
Lee Lozano, Untitled, 1961.
Lee Lozano
MODERNA MUSEET
STOCKHOLM
Through April 25
Curated by Iris Müller-Westermann
“Smoking remains attractive,” Lee Lozano once noted, “because it is an excuse to make a little fire.” And indeed, this artist—who pointedly withdrew from the scene in 1972 and just as pointedly opted to “boycott women”—was known for making sparks fly. In the early 1960s, Lozano portrayed the polymorphously perverse: lewd, surreal cartoons of mouths, pricks, and pussies in various modes of assembly, which soon evolved into harder-edged “tool” paintings, equally rich with metaphoric association. Her later systems-based paintings and text pieces seem better behaved but in fact deeply complicate any notion of “cool” Conceptualism. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Jo Applin, Lucy R. Lippard, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, and the curator, this retrospective of some sixty paintings and hundreds of works on paper focuses on the vicissitudes of Lozano’s multifaceted, hot-and-bothered oeuvre.