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.
Aleksandr Rodchenko, Novyi Lef, nos. 8–9, 1927, ink on paper, 8 15/16 x 6 1/16".
Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova
MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
MADRID
Through January 31 2010
Curated by Margarita Tupitsyn
Though the Russian avant-garde’s commitment to interdisciplinarity arguably exceeded contemporary notions of multimedia practice, exhibitions of Constructivist art today tend to examine the period by way of gender, medium, or a single artist’s output. This show cuts across categories by presenting diverse works by two of the movement’s most influential practitioners, revealing the aesthetic currents that shaped their various projects from 1917 to 1929. The approximately 350 objects on view will include Liubov Popova’s textile designs and canvases from her early Painterly Architectonic series, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s iconic cinema posters, the artists’ costume and set designs, and their respective contributions to the landmark 1921 show “5x5=25.”
— Nicole Rudick
Francesco Vezzoli, Salvidor Dalí, 1998, cotton embroidery on canvas, 12 1/2 x 12 1/4".
Dalí Dalí Featuring Francesco Vezzoli
MODERNA MUSEET
STOCKHOLM
Through January 17 2010
Curated by Caroline Corbetta and John Peter Nilsson
Once maligned as Surrealist schlock, Dalí’s prescient forays into popular amusement and unbridled marketeering have lately come to the fore of scholarship on the mustachioed Catalonian. First, there was the 2003 exhibition devoted to his New York World’s Fair pavilion, followed by “Dalí and Mass Culture,” “Dalí and Film,” and now Dalí and . . . Francesco Vezzoli! The show opens with a concise overview of the master’s paintings, peppered with paraphernalia like jewelry and Schiaparelli gowns, and continues on to the first European retrospective devoted to Vezzoli’s own splashy meditations on sex, dread, and hype. A catalogue featuring essays by the curators, as well as contributions by Hal Foster and Chrissie Iles, among others, promises to confirm Dalí’s once-overlooked step-parentage of Warhol’s media-savvy children.
— Scott Rothkopf
Sophie Calle, Peace Dove (Nikolaiviertel), 1996, framed color photograph, 52 x 40 1/8". From Die Entfernung—The Detachment, 1996.
1989
KUNSTHALLE WIEN
VIENNA
Through February 7 2010
Curated by Cathérine Hug and Gerald Matt
Twenty years since the end of the cold war and finally, a proper jubilee! “1989: The End of History or Beginning of the Future? Comments on a Paradigm Shift” assembles the work of thirty-three artists who speak to the rupture the titular year represents. Eschewing pedantic sociohistorical analyses of the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain, the exhibition will be organized around ten central concepts, ranging from “Anatomy of Melancholy” to “Illusions of Capital.” Expect to experience space-hungry installations such as Ilya and Emilia Kabokov’s Great Archive, 1993, alongside more concentrated efforts—like Nedko Solakov’s 2007 Film related to Top Secret (1989–90). Hear Susan Philipsz singing the “Internationale” as Pushwagner regales you with stories of nightmarish totalitarian systems in the oversize drawings from his 1969–75 graphic novel, Soft City.
— Brigitte Huck
Spread from Artforum 13, no. 3 (November 1974). Lynda Benglis advertisement.
Lynda Benglis
IRISH MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
DUBLIN
Through January 24 2010
Curated by Caroline Hancock and Judith Tannenbaum
A selection of Lynda Benglis’s work—from her process-oriented poured-latex sculptures and fallen paintings of the 1960s to the videos and pleated gilt sculptures that followed—is being exhibited across four institutions, in as many countries, each iteration with its own curatorial conceit. IMMA’s installation (the artist’s first solo in a European museum) will foreground the inextricability of synthetic and bodily material by emphasizing the artist’s staging of selves and concomitant media interventions, including the controversial 1974 ad in which Benglis posed as a suntanned, lubed-up, dildo-wielding vixen. A fully illustrated monograph boasts an interview, an extensive chronology, and new essays alongside a surfeit of ephemera.
— Suzanne Hudson
Mark Boulos, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 2008, still from a two-channel color video, 15 minutes.
Morality
WITTE DE WITH
ROTTERDAM
Through June 1 2010
Curated by Juan A. Gaitán and Nicholas Schaffhausen
It seems a given among contemporary practitioners that all art is political and therefore implicitly holds an ethical position. No doubt that idea will be healthily interrogated in Witte de With’s ambitious nine-month project comprising five exhibitions, film and performance programs, a three-day symposium, a website, a culminating publication, and an intriguingly broad list of artists, ranging from Sarah Morris to Nedko Solakov to participants in the Polish punk scene of the 1980s. What needs to be taken into account is an anthropology of morals that instantiates moralities, not morality, and countermands any universalist ideal of Kant’s founding question of ethical action, “What ought I to do?” The answers offered by this hugely ambitious project will surely be kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic, and highly contestable.
— Steven Henry Madoff
Wilhelm Sasnal, Mein Bauchnabel (My Belly), 2006, oil on canvas, 39 x 55".
Wilhelm Sasnal
K21 KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN-WESTFALEN IM STÄNDEHAUS
DUSSELDORF
Through January 10 2010
Curated by Julian Heynen
Perhaps the most internationally renowned artist to have emerged from post-Communist Poland, Wilhelm Sasnal shuttles restlessly among styles and between painting and film, driven by a skepticism toward master narratives and singular modes of representation that lends his work an implicitly critical politics. Focusing on the medium for which he is best known, this exhibition of eighty paintings from the past decade—the artist’s largest survey outside Poland to date—enables an unprecedented overview of their compelling formal variety. The fully illustrated catalogue features essays by Sasnal’s earliest apologists, who have been tasked with reevaluating their own initial assessments—a rare case of critical reflexivity, and perfectly in pitch with Sasnal’s own dynamic practice.