U.S. 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.
View of Urs Fischer, "Agnes Martin," 2007, Regen Projects II, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White.
Urs Fischer
NEW MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through January 24 2010
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni
From ink-jet prints to environmental installations and sculptures made of wax, bronze, and bread, Urs Fischer has an uncanny knack for taking just about any material or place and making it into an Urs Fischer. For his first major solo show at an American institution, he has been given free rein to fill the entire New Museum, which will house a mirrored labyrinth, towering aluminum abstractions, and an assortment of works both old and new. This eclectic mix should prove edifying to those who struggle to grasp Fischer’s deliriously multifarious production; a catalogue with texts by curator Massimiliano Gioni, Bice Curiger, and Jessica Morgan promises further help in this regard. The last time Fischer showed in New York, he excavated the floor of Gavin Brown’s gallery. Let’s hope come November the New Museum is still standing.
— Scott Rothkopf
Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932, oil on canvas, 63 7/8 x 45".
Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity
MOMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
NEW YORK
Through January 25 2010
Curated by Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman
A 1927 visit to the Bauhaus was part of the inspiration for Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s conception of the Museum of Modern Art. Now, for the first time since 1938, the American home of modernism will devote a major exhibition to its European precursor. Organized in collaboration with three German Bauhaus collections (and adapted from an exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin this past summer), the show includes works by such masters as Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy, as well as by their students. It will put on view not only the Bauhaus’s effective marriage of elemental forms and industrial production but also the complex history surrounding this influential school, from its birth in mystical visions of social and artistic harmony to its dissonant end in the extremes of politics, technicism, and formalism.
— Sean Keller
Man Ray, The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, 1916, oil on canvas, 52 x 72 3/8".
Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention
THE JEWISH MUSEUM
NEW YORK
Through March 14 2010
Curated by Mason Klein
Man Ray’s art demonstrates remarkable heterogeneity: Along with the photographs for which he’s best known, the artist made paintings, drawings, sculptural assemblages, films, even the stray book. According to curator Mason Klein—who assembled the two hundred–some works in the artist’s first US multimedia retrospective in more than twenty years—much of Man Ray’s disparate output reflects an ongoing concealment of his Russian-Jewish roots, a project epitomized by his adoption of a pithy nom de plume in lieu of his unmistakably ethnic given name, Emmanuel Radnitzky. While a provocative gambit, using the stratagem of identity politics is a risky move: Will Klein’s presentation result in a more nuanced appreciation of this avant-garde icon or manufacture a smoking gun that simplifies Man Ray’s protean oeuvre?
— Margaret Sundell
Damián Ortega, Elote clasificado, 2005, one of a set of four digital prints, 11 x 14".
Damián Ortega: Do It Yourself
INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
BOSTON
Through January 18 2010
Curated by Jessica Morgan
Due in part to his background as a political cartoonist, Mexico City–based Damián Ortega has a knack for animating objects in unexpected yet incisive ways. Cosmic Thing, 2002, a fastidiously exploded 1983 VW Beetle whose disassembled parts are suspended in midair, is characteristic: at once playfully destructive and rigorously diagrammatic. A common car in Mexico, the Bug is one of many stereotypically Latin American products stacked, rolled, or pulled by Ortega, along with tortillas, pickaxes, and bricks. Indeed, this exhibition, which includes eighteen sculptures, photographs, and videos made between 1996 and 2007, promises not only technical finesse but a wry commentary on the movement of global commodities. An accompanying catalogue features essays by Gabriel Kuri and Jessica Morgan and a selection of the artist’s writings.
— Jess Wilcox
Cody Critcheloe, Fool’s Gold, 2009, still from a color video.
Heartland
SMART MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
CHICAGO
Through January 17 2010
Curated by Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann, and Stephanie Smith
Seeking idiosyncratic culture in the American interior, the curators of “Heartland” embarked on a series of road trips that took them down the Mississippi River corridor and around the Great Lakes of the upper Midwest. Logging thousands of miles and diligently reporting findings on a blog, the team identified thriving local and regional arts infrastructures whose political, economic, and aesthetic anatomies are organized very differently than are those of their counterparts on the coasts. This kaleidoscopic survey—featuring fourteen artists, initiatives, and groups and a wide ranging catalogue—was first exhibited at the Van Abbe museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, bringing a nuanced survey of midwestern culture to a European audience; the show has been reconceived here to foreground the resourcefulness, invention, and self sufficiency that drive these central but peripheral producers.
— Michelle Grabner
Charles Burchfield, The Night Wind, 1918, watercolor, gouache, and pencil. © The Museum of Modern Art.
Charles Burchfield
HAMMER MUSEUM
LOS ANGELES
Through January 3 2010
Curated by Robert Gober
The eye for selection and sensitivity to space evident in Robert Gober’s sculptures and installations were last directed to curating in 2005, when the artist chose items from the Menil Collection in Houston to accompany his own work. Now Gober has assembled a full-fledged survey devoted to watercolorist Charles Burchfield (1893–1967), whose visions of the American scene are by turns ecstatic and morbid, mystical and bleak. The exhibition presents ephemera from Burchfield’s life (doodle-filled journal pages, correspondence with his early supporter Alfred H. Barr Jr.) alongside seventy-four watercolors. Psychedelic avant la lettre, the paintings feature plants, stars, insects, and dilapidated houses that melt or radiate shimmering coronas; a vocabulary of synesthetic marks lets the landscapes breathe, buzz, and hum their lost innocence.