Whatever happens in the months ahead, autumn is sure to once again be a should-I-stay-or-should-I-go season. In the art world, most museums are back to regular programming – which this year often means catching up on postponed exhibitions – accompanied by often extensive online activities. Whether you want to mainly visit shows closer to home, or avoid in-person events altogether, there will be something for you to enjoy in our review of the season’s best.
In Tokyo, in the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, the Mori Art Museum will be hosting another first: “Chim↑Pom (Title TBD)” is “a world-first attempt to paint, in exhibition format, an overall picture of [the Tokyo-based art collective’s] practice as they mark their 16 years of art and activism.” The show will include pieces documenting their projects tackling topics from nuclear war and national boundaries to consumerism and poverty. The MAM Digital programme accompanying the exhibition will include online talks, film screenings and calls for public participation. [Chim ↑ Pom, Build-Burger, 2016, Courtesy: ANOMALY and MUJIN-TO Production
Photo: Morita Kenji]
M+, Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture, is finally en route to its grand opening. The Herzog & de Meuron-designed building was already completed earlier this year. In August the museum shop and café opened to the public, soon to be followed by the hotly anticipated exhibition spaces. It is expected to become the cultural focus of the West Kowloon Cultural District, dedicated to art, design, architecture and moving image, with a focus on Hong Kong visual culture from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Already open is the new Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai. The new building designed by Atelier Jean Nouvel covers an area of 13,000 square metres, 10,000 of which are dedicated to exhibition space. They are already being put to good use, with three blockbuster exhibitions: “Light: Works from Tate’s Collection” is on loan from Tate Britain, “Joan Miró: Women, Birds, Stars” is presented in association with Barcelona’s Fundació Joan Miró, and “Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming” comes fresh from the Palace Museum in Beijing.
“Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” is mirrored in two ways. The exhibition takes place simultaneously at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The largest retrospective of the American artist’s work also features mirroring doubles, offering a sense of both déjà vu and discovery to visitors exploring both. [“Flag,” 1954-55, by Jasper Johns. © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.]
After years of delays, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles is finally set to open in September. Designed to showcase the collections of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as its members, the Renzo Piano-designed building will host retrospectives and thematic series, exhibitions on art, technology, artists, history and social impact of movies and cinema, as well as film screenings and talks. Opening exhibitions include “Stories of Cinema, the Oscars® Experience” and the first Hayao Miyazaki retrospective in North America.
With construction delays on a global scale affecting new builds, renovations and extensions all over the world for the past year and a half, we are now in for a glut of grand openings. When David Chipperfield’s extension debuts in October, the Kunsthaus Zurich will become the largest museum in Switzerland. The new structure is set to house art from the 1960s onwards, rotating exhibitions, as well as the controversial Emil Bührle collection, founded by the arms manufacturer who acquired the core of his significant collection in Nazi-occupied Paris.
An artwork worth travelling for (if and when we can) finally opened in June. Sculptor Cristina Iglesias created a site-specific installation in the bay of her native San Sebastián. Poured into the foundation of the old lighthouse on Santa Clara Island, a cast-bronze ‘cave’ welcomes in the waves and fills the entire building with the sound of the ocean. A short ferry ride away from the Basque city, the installation titled “Hondalea” will be open to the public daily except Mondays until 26 September. However, it is a permanent installation, gifted to the city by the artist, so it should reopen in 2022, pandemic permitting.
René Magritte once came up with the idea of a “universal machine for making paintings”. In an exhibition titled “The Magritte Machine”, Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum shows how the surrealist painter engaged in automation and serialisation to a certain degree within his own work. More than 95 paintings are grouped together according to recurring themes, motifs and visual elements and arranged into seven sections: 1. The magician’s powers; 2. Image and word; 3. Figure and background; 4. Picture and window; 5. Face and mask; 6. Mimicry; 7. Megalomania. [René Magritte, Attempting the Impossible, 1928, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota. Courtesy Ludion Publishers. © René Magritte, VEGAP, Madrid, 2021]
The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, founded by contemporary art collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, will be showing the results of the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media. American artist Martine Syms was awarded the commission for “exploring new terrain in contemporary art.” Neural Swamp “is an immersive video installation that builds upon Syms’s interest in the proliferation, circulation and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems that erase or make invisible Black bodies, voices and narratives.”[Photo: © Martine Syms, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.]
At the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art” is the first opportunity ever to see the collection outside of Russia. Put together in the early 20th century by Mikhaïl and Ivan Morozov, two brothers from a Moscow merchant dynasty, it is considered to be one of the most prominent collections of impressionist and modern art in the world. It includes masterpieces of modern French art from the likes of Manet, Rodin, Monet, Lautrec, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin and Matisse, as well as Russian artists like Repin, Vrubel, Korovin, Golovin, Serov, Larionov, Goncharova and Konenkov.
Partly overlapping and equally hotly anticipated is Martin Margiela’s first solo show as an artist; Lafayette Anticipations, the art foundation of the Galeries Lafayette, has invited the fashion designer to transform its exhibition spaces. The show will feature over 40 works, including installations, sculptures, collages, paintings and films never before shown in public. There has never been any doubt that Margiela is a fashion artist. Now he has the opportunity to prove himself as a capital-A Artist.[Margiela does not wish to reveal any of his artworks before the opening of the show, and only shared ‘teasers’ to stir the public’s interest.]
“Helmut Newton: Legacy” was originally scheduled to open on what would have been the photographer’s 100th birthday, on 31 October 2020. Now the opening is planned for the same date exactly a year later. The Museum für Fotografie in Berlin has gathered over 300 photographs, including the most iconic fashion shots and nudes, but also unknown or forgotten images. The exhibition is set to tour internationally from summer 2022. [Helmut Newton, Thierry Mugler Fashion, US Vogue, Monte Carlo 1995, © Helmut Newton Estate, courtesy Helmut Newton Foundation]
“Dürer Was Here: A Journey Becomes Legend” will close at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, Germany on 24 October, before moving on to the National Gallery in London. 500 years ago, the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer spent a year travelling from Nuremberg to the Netherlands, working along the way. The exhibition juxtaposes 90 pieces by Dürer with 90 works by contemporaries he inspired or met on his travels, including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder. It also features original pages from the historic copy of Dürer’s travel journal. [Photo: Albrecht Dürer, Kopf eines Walrosses, 1521, British Museum, London, © The Trustees of the British Museum]
The National Museum in Warsaw is honouring one of Poland’s most prominent painters of the 19th century. “The Artist: Anna Bilińska 1854–1893” gathers paintings and drawings by the first Polish female artist to gain international recognition. It traces her career from Warsaw, via the Paris art academy, to international acclaim in renowned exhibitions.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.