American artist Anne Collier (*1970) questions the medium of photography by working with found materials from popular culture. Her conceptual works are based primarily on photos of the 1970s and 1980s, gleaned from magazines, advertising, record covers, book illustrations and film stills. By photographing these printed images and putting them into new contexts, she pursues a reflexive archaeology of the uses of photography. Collier is interested, above all, in images with an emotive visual undertone, such as waves, eyes, clouds and romanticised sexism. With analytical elegance, Collier reflects the deceptive imagery that shapes our everyday lives and, in doing so, reveals the tension between the photographic subject and the act of photographing.

he first major exhibition on Tudor and Jacobean portrait miniatures in the UK for over 35 years, Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver will bring together key works from the National Portrait Gallery and major loans from public and private collections to showcase the careers of the most skilled artists of the period, Nicholas Hilliard (1547? – 1619) and Isaac Oliver (c.1565 – 1617). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, miniature painting was regarded as an art form at which the English excelled above all others, and Hilliard and Oliver gained international fame and admiration. The exhibition will explore what these exquisite images reveal about identity, society and visual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Highlights include Hilliard and Oliver’s portraits of Elizabeth I, as well as images of James I, his wife Anne of Denmark and his three children Henry, Elizabeth and Charles (later Charles I), and miniatures of some of the most famous figures of the day, such as Sir Walter Ralegh and Sir Francis Drake.

Inspired by the figure of Tethys – a sea goddess in Greek mythology, the daughter of the sky (Ouranos) and of the earth (Gaia) – Julius von Bismarck has conceived the original project “Die Mimik der Tethys” (the expressions of Tethys), for which he has moved the oceans. That is at least the sensation produced by the presence of a buoy hung over the Palais de Tokyo’s Palier d’honneur, corroded by sea salt and covered by dry seaweed. In perpetual motion, the buoy reproduces the movements of its original setting, off the Atlantic coast. It is in this way that the visitors find themselves metaphorically under the ocean, and can directly perceive the sway of its waves, which can be either gentle, or wild. The artist works on the human perception of natural phenomena, either by using highly technical approaches, or by simple site specific gestures. As he puts it: “it’s about the perfect image we have of nature. In reality, it doesn’t look like we imagine it does in a Caspar David Friedrich pastoral painting.” The astonishing sensation created by his moving buoy does indeed depict a misappropriated or modified vision of nature, transforming the building into a submarine […]

With this original project, Franck Scurti is extending his stroll through art history and the signs of daily life. After approaching the social and economic crisis in a series of sculptures alluding to Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (2018), creating a remake with scraps from Edvard Munch’s famous Scream (Le Cri, 2011), the artist is here going back over Paul Gauguin’s Yellow Christ. The interest that Franck Scurti has for such figures is that, in their time, they set out to replace the cold positivism of impressionism by a new humanism. This is a transition that the artist finds to be salutary and active in the current world. The environment he has produced for the Païpe, conceived as a picture in three dimensions which the visitors are asked to walk around, is organised around a chair leg, rotated through 90°, with a Christ-like look. On the floor, his dismembered corpse produces a shock wave that reverberates across the entire space. The curved rear wall will be totally covered by a silk-printed pattern produced from a bag of baguettes found by the artist. This highly connotated pattern – a multiplication of bread – will then fade out progressively until its almost […]

“It’s strange, I must have been away too long, the faraway, my home, is in my dark dreams. It’s strange, with strangled words, while drowning. I screamed alone in the water, in a fever (…) Such will be the title of Julien Creuzet’s show; or not” “It’s strange, I must have been away too long, the faraway, my home, is in my dark dreams. It’s strange, with strangled words, while drowning. I screamed alone in the water, in a fever (…) Such will be the title of Julien Creuzet’s show; or not” is the beginning of a poem, a first-person litany, of a voice that soon doubles up and multiplies. It’s also the title of Julien Creuzet’s solo show at the Palais de Tokyo, or not. This exhibition will come alive in the form of secular pop songs. A deep-sea landscape in a plastic pool. An unaccentuated rhyme illuminated by a bluish light, turning around on itself. A parrot glitching with a guitar on its foot. A melodic meandering along jagged shores. An array of ragmen’s stalls at the Croix-de-Chavaux market. A breath and a riff. A choreographic score derived from a Dogon ceremony. Sirius B rotating to the beats […]

The Middle East, unrecognised countries, radioactive or forbidden zones seen as “unintentional natural parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has explored or inhabited. From these zones marked by violence or whipped up by great conflicts, the artist delivers a silent, sometimes mystical image, using video and photography. His moving pictures made up of still shots, which are often long and devoid of human presence, talk of the impossibility to grasp such abandoned, transformed spaces, filled with beliefs and run through with stigmata. Louis-Cyprien Rials is presenting at the Palais de Tokyo a film and a series of objects made with Ramon Film Productions. This production company, set up by Isaac Nabwana I.G.G., brings together Ugandans from various origins in a studio not far from the Wakaliga road, in a ghetto in the suburbs of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Together, they have been writing and producing successful, low-budget films for over ten years. Their feature-length movies are inspired from Chinese Kungfu films and convey the violence of American action movies. With Louis-Cyprien Rials, they produce an adaptation of Rashomon(1950) by the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. The result is hybrid: it mingles filmic and cultural references, while leaving open the […]

Some utterances are the very act that they describe. The philosopher of language J.L. Austin called them “performative” during a series of lectures in the 1950s – published posthumously as “How to Do Things with Words” and translated into French as “Quand dire c’est faire” (when saying is doing) – thus upturning linguistics by opening out a new field based on a theory of acts of language. As for Angelica Mesiti, for several years she has been developing research into non-verbal communication. Her ambitious video installations, both the fruition of long-term explorations and chance encounters, explore the potentialities of language which, beyond speech or writing, are contrary to any explicit expression, but still remain possible as a means of communication. As the artist says, “words are not my tool; all my training is about expression in a different way.” Her solo show at the Palais de Tokyo, the first in a French institution, is entitled “Quand faire c’est dire” (when doing is saying), a symbolic reversal of a performative utterance. Covering the 2012-2017 period, the exhibition highlights an iconic selection of Angelica Mesiti’s works, most of which having never been displayed in France. Deployed over a broader extent in the […]

For his first solo show in France, Theaster Gates has initiated a new project, pursuing the exploration of social histories of migration and inter-racial relations. He thus deals more exactly with questions of black subjugation and the resulting imperial sexual domination and racial mixing, while concentrating on an episode in American history. These themes allow Gates to explore new cinematographic, sculptural and musical futures while examining the history of land ownership and race relations in North Eastern, United States. The starting point of this exhibition, entitled “Amalgam”, is the story of Malaga Island, a small isle in the state of Maine, in the USA: In 1912, the governor of the state of Maine had all of its inhabitants expelled. This poor population, made up of an interracial, mixed community of about 45 people, considered to be “indolent” by many of the local inhabitants, was forced to spread out through the region, some of them even being condemned to psychiatric institutions. The term “Amalgam”, which currently seems outdated in English-speaking culture, was used to describe a racial, ethnic and religious mingling. It has acquired for Theaster Gates a “loaded” significance, calling for a new series of works made up of videos, […]

Franz West (1947–2012) brought a punk aesthetic into the pristine spaces of art galleries. His abstract sculptures, furniture, collages and large-scale works are direct, crude and unpretentious. Visitors to this major retrospective will be able to handle replicas of his Passstücke (Adaptives) – papier-mâché pieces made to be picked up and moved. They were a turning point in the relationship between art and its audience. He also created playful sculptures incorporating objects from everyday life such as a hat, a broom, or even a whisky bottle. In his final years he produced large, brightly coloured and absurd sculptures both for galleries and public spaces. Born and based in Vienna, West collaborated with numerous artists, musicians, writers and photographers. He has been a vast influence on younger artists – his friend and collaborator Sarah Lucas has contributed to design of the exhibition.

In collaboration with MoMA PS1 New York, KW presents a solo exhibition around the work of the late Iranian theater director Reza Abdoh (1963–1995). Over a career that spanned twelve years, Abdoh pushed his actors—and audiences—to their limits. His aesthetic language was relentlessly, recklessly inventive, borrowing from fairy tales, BDSM, talk shows, raves, video art, and the history of avant-garde theater. The hallucinatory dreamscapes he produced spoke forcefully and eloquently to the ugly political realities of his time—from government-sanctioned racism to the Reagan administration’s refusal to acknowledge the AIDS crisis to warmongering at home and abroad.

David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) came into prominence in the East Village art world of the 1980s, actively embracing all media and forging an expansive range of work both fiercely political and highly personal.(…) KW Institute for Contemporary Art is pleased to present the exhibition Photography & Film 1978–1992 that will be the first to solely concentrate on Wojnarowicz’s photographic and filmic work. It will present over 150 works including photographs, test prints, silkscreens, 16mm and super-8 film, and collaborative video works.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Bauhaus, Die Neue Sammlung is having an exhibition that discusses the significance of this pioneering reform design college today. Simultaneously, Die Neue Sammlung is taking the opportunity to highlight its own historical links to Bauhaus. For the first time the museum will showcase historical objects from its own holdings in Munich. In cooperation with the artist Tilo Schulz an installation is realized interlocking 40 historical objects and responses to them by five contemporary artists. Invitations have been taken up by designer Ayzit Bostan, poet Barbara Köhler, architect Anupama Kundoo, composer Junya Oikawa, and artist Sofie Thorsen to explore one Bauhaus object and develop an independent work of their own.

A show by the internationally renowned New York-based Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, aka Shoplifter, who creates installations from synthetic hair. The subtly humorous installations are massive, allowing viewers to enter them and to stroke the hair.

This is the first retrospective in the UK of the Egyptian-Canadian artist of Armenian origin, Anna Boghiguian (Cairo, 1946). Informed by her interest in philosophy and her continuous travels, Boghiguian’s work comments on the human condition through the perspectives of global trade, mass migration, colonialism and war. The exhibition will feature large-scale installations of cut-out paper figures, alongside paintings, collages and books, as well as components of the artist’s studio brought to St Ives. While addressing current global concerns, the exhibition resonates with the local context of St Ives as an artists’ community, and Cornwall’s industrial history in terms of seafaring and trade.

Over 150 photographs to discover the creative journey and themes animating the quest of this great photographer He has travelled throughout the world with his camera, recounting people, wars and humanitarian emergencies, along with stories of great poetry and extraordinary, pulsating nature. After working for two years on the archive of Paolo Pellegrin, the exhibition presents the themes that animate the work of the photographer who, over decades has entwined the vision of a reporter with the visual intensity of an artist. Winner of eleven editions of the World Press Photo Award and a member of Magnum agency since 2005, Pellegrin’s work is analysed in two large sections: the first one is dedicated to the human being, the second is focused on his vision of nature, showing intense and suffering scenes. On the occasion of the exhibition, there will also be a preview of the first part of the photographic project realised by Paolo Pellegrin at L’Aquila last January, within the ambit of the photographic commission entrusted to MAXXI. Gallery 1 on the ground floor will be featuring a 2 x 3 metres wide polyptych composed of 140 small images in high contrast black and white that portray corners and details of what is a […]

This exhibition showcases some of the most impactful photographs captured over the last 60 years. It includes many of his iconic war photographs – including images from Vietnam, Northern Ireland and more recently Syria. But it also focuses on the work he did at home in England, recording scenes of poverty and working class life in London’s East End and the industrial north, as well as meditative landscapes of his beloved Somerset, where he lives.​ Sir Don McCullin was born in 1935 and grew up in a deprived area of north London. He got his first break when a newspaper published his photograph of friends who were in a local gang. From the 1960s he forged a career as probably the UK’s foremost war photographer, primarily working for the Sunday Times Magazine. His unforgettable and sometimes harrowing images are accompanied in the show with his brutally honest commentaries. With over 250 photographs, all printed by McCullin himself in his own darkroom, this exhibition will be a unique opportunity to appreciate the scope and achievements of his entire career.

In 2019, as an exceptional cultural highlight, the Fondation Beyeler is mounting a unique exhibition devoted to Pablo Picasso’s masterpieces of his early Blue and Rose periods. This will be the most comprehensive presentation ever seen in Europe of Picasso’s paintings and sculptures from 1901 to 1906, each one of which is a milestone on the road to recognition as the twentieth century’s paramount artist. Picasso’s pictures from this period are counted among the most beautiful examples of modern art and are certainly some of the most valuable art works anywhere in the world.

The group exhibition IPARTERV 50+ presents a selection from the latest (or, in case of concluded oeuvres, the last) works of the artists who were represented at the Iparterv exhibitions of 1968 and 1969. Additionally, the exhibition features works by contemporary artists reflecting on specific works by Iparterv-artists or the Hungarian neo-avant-garde in general.

This presentation in the two vitrines in Untitled is the third in a series based on the rich exhibition archive of Witte de With. The long-term projectContemporary Arab Representations ran from 15 September 2002 until 2 November 2003.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a solo exhibition presents a new co-commission by the Beirut-based artist and ‘private ear’. Featuring three newly designed sound instruments, over ninety sourced objects and an audio work, Earwitness Theatre (2018) explores the political effects of listening through the hallucinatory world of the ear-witness. The new commission is presented alongside Abu Hamdan’s recent film Walled Unwalled (2018), which together develop the artist’s ear-witness investigation into the Syrian regime prison of Saydnaya, which the artist was invited to carry out in partnership with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths University, London, as part of a broader enquiry. Abu Hamdan’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in partnership with Chisenhale Gallery, London; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. It will ibe presented at the partner venues throughout 2019.

Firelei Báez was born in 1980 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, and currently lives and works in Newa York. With a convergence of interests in anthropology, science fiction, black female subjectivity, and women’s work, Baéz is interested in how culture and identity are shaped by inherited histories. Approaching selfhood as malleable, her work serves as a defense against culturally predetermined ethnic stereotypes as maintained and perpetuated by dominant narratives. Drawing attention to the incomplete nature of our communal stories, Baéz creates alternate environments in which cultures, disparate or alike, can commune. In this exhibition, a new body of work is presented featuring three paintings and a large-scale installation manifest from the artist’s research on the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) and its enduring significance.

“I would prefer not to,” is a famed and much repeated line in Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853). Bartleby is the character of this fiction piece, first published in two-parts and later compiled as a single story. As an office desk worker who had worked in the dead letter office, which administers undeliverable mail, Bartleby sees no way out of the system. Dropping out of a system—for example, the one of the so-called art world—has been a recurring move for many who have little to no expectations of, or common beliefs in, a normative, and especially urban, environment. An exhibition with an audio script by Sarah Demeuse and Wendy Tronrud, as well as a soundtrack by Mario García Torres in collaboration with Sol Oosel explores various cases of dropping out. In a deserted gallery environment, illustrated through the color scales of dawn, morning, high noon, twilight, and night, two sound pieces are available. On the one hand, an audio-script is accessed through wireless headphones; on the other, a music soundtrack is featured as the exhibition’s lyrical ambience. The exhibition is considered an emotional cartography of dropping out. Demeuse and Tronrud’s script asks what force fields—economic, gender, race, […]

Postwar European and American Art from the Schulhof Collection

This retrospective of seven decades of the work of Washington, DC sculptor Nancy Frankel will celebrate her ninetieth birthday in 2019. Working in various media since the 1950s—including wood, Plexiglas, Hydrocal, design cast, and steel—Frankel has explored a fundamentally geometric vocabulary, with moments of whimsy, the title of one of the works in this show. In addition to her freestanding works in three dimensions, a few of her many graphite drawings and tempera paintings will be represented, as well as a large wall relief.

Standing at the foot of Australia’s sacred sandstone monolith known as Uluru, Michael B. Platt and Carol A. Beane envisioned a world invisible to many others. The world is at once primordial and imminent, spiritual and mortal. This exhibition is a collaborative offering from one of Washington’s most prolific pairs; an offering of visibility from one world into another. Inspired by the ancestral stories told by the indigenous keepers of Australia’s most sacred grounds, Platt and Beane fuse poetic image with word. The union culminates in an aesthetic experience of the human spirit that that transcends time, place, and identity.

This exhibition is dedicated to one of the most remarkable Czech poets and visual artists associated with Modernism, Jiří Kolář (1914-2002). During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, Kolář encountered considerable challenges, including a prison sentence for the critical stance towards the system expressed in his poetry. Whether because “images” were less easily censurable than “words” or for other, personal reasons, from about 1959, he focused exclusively on visual arts – especially various experimental forms of collage. Yet most of his mixed-media works remained profoundly concerned with the word/image relationship, and can best be described as “visual” poetry. The selection is representative of the main aspects of his oeuvre as it evolved over several decades. It includes a wide variety of collages in diverse techniques: both early works and those of his mature period; on very small scale and large ones; two-dimensional and sculptural.

This first major exhibition drawn from our Corcoran Legacy Collection features strong and provocative photography and sculpture donated by Tony Podesta over the past decade to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, now part of the American University Museum’s holdings. Podesta has earned the reputation of being a fearless supporter of challenging contemporary art by women. He is an important patron of the arts nationally and internationally, with an outsized impact all across the Washington art world.

With this first comprehensive European exhibition the Aedes Architecture Forum presents the work of Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA from Bangladesh, who received the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016 for the Friendship Centre on the flood plains of Gaibandha in northern Bangladesh. With further projects such as the Gulshan Society Mosque in Dhaka and the Cyclone Shelter in Kuakata, he gained widespread international acclaim. Careful arrangement of structures in areas marked by extreme climatic conditions, combined with local building techniques and materials, Kashef Chowdhury’s buildings are exemplary of an architecture that serves society with radical simplicity and poetry. With an atmospheric installation, the exhibition curated by Niklaus Graber and Andreas Ruby, invites visitors on a journey to Bangladesh and the architectural worlds of URBANA. Bangladesh, which has been stigmatized in many respects as a peripheral region, has hardly been present on the global architectural map. However, this is likely to change in the near future. One reason for this is the architecture of Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA. At first glance, Kashef Chowdhury’s buildings – such as his stormproof school or island-shaped village near the Bramaputra River – seem to have emerged directly from the local context of Bangladesh, which is one of […]

Czech visual artist Roman Kames will present the talk and exhibit A Far Cry, paintings inspired by his time spent in the mountains of Ladakh – the western Himalayas, at the Embassy of the Czech Republic on January 24, 2019, at 6 pm.  

Today, hardly anyone knows who they were, even though they made a part of art history: artists such as Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Helene Funke, and Erika Giovanna Klien contributed significantly to Viennese Modernism and artistic trends that manifested after the First World War. To commemorate these artists, their art, and their emancipatory achievements, a long overdue retrospective has now been staged in the Lower Belvedere.

This is the first major exhibition of Pierre Bonnard’s work in the UK since the much-loved show at Tate 20 years ago. It will allow new generations to discover Bonnard’s unconventional use of colour, while surprising those who think they already know him. Born 1867, Bonnard was, with Henri Matisse, one of the greatest colourists of the early 20th century. He preferred to work from memory, imaginatively capturing the spirit of a moment and expressing it through his unique handling of colour and innovative sense of composition. The exhibition concentrates on Bonnard’s work from 1912, when colour became a dominant concern, until his death in 1947. It presents landscapes and intimate domestic scenes which capture moments in time – where someone has just left the room, a meal has just finished, a moment lost in the view from the window, or a stolen look at a partner.

Vladimír Komárek vo svojej tvorbe rozvíjal dedičstvo imaginatívnej línie, pozoruhodného fenoménu českého umenia 20. storočia. Jej silným impulzom bol symbolizmus poetiky Jana Zrzavého, ktorý ovplyvnil aj Komárkovo umelecké vnímanie sveta. Z prieniku skutočnosti so svetom snov a fantázie vznikali jeho vizuálne obrazové predstavy ako „všedné zázraky“. Vo svojej tvorbe rozvinul lyricko-poetickú koncepciu, v ktorej transformoval predmetnosť reálneho sveta do reči metaforických symbolov a znakov.

“Jeho ateliér je čiernou skrinkou – tak ju chápe kybernetika. Poznáme vstup a výstup, nevieme však, čo sa deje vnútri. Nikdy sa to ani nedozvieme, pretože vstupom do tohto priestoru by sme narušili jeho procesy.(…) Skutočné obrazy maľuje Marek vždy sám. Ten proces je nezrozumiteľný. V rýchlom tempe v ňom preblikávajú vedomé, nevedomé, podvedomé, fakty, fikcia, kompozícia, mytológia, farby, plochy, linky, ťahy, fyzika a mágia. Všetko do seba rýchlo naráža a vzájomne sa koriguje i neguje. Celé to trvá zväčša veľmi krátko a končí sa znenazdajky. Výsledkom sú praobrazy a apokryfy.” prof. Peter Redjar Uol. / Mišo Ormos

Rakúsky maliar Franz Grabmayr je kľúčovou osobnosťou postabstraktnej maľby a je súčasťou európskej umeleckej scény. (…) Prírodné motívy a motívy tanca spájajú jeho schopnosť výtvarne stvárniť silu a dynamiku prírody a schopnosť vyjadriť živosť, rytmus a výraz figúr v pohybe.

An incongruous combination of dry humor, graphically explicit themes, and candy-hued, child-like forms seemingly built from the simple geometries of early video games pervades the digital animations of Wong Ping (*1984). For his first large-scale institutional solo show, the Hong Kong-based artist presents newly commissioned and recent videos, each within a new, specially conceived sculptural installation.

Daniel Dewar (b. 1976) and Grégory Gicquel (b. 1975) create sculptural objects that combine traditional craftwork, figurative motifs, and a wildly surreal sensibility. For their first institutional exhibition in Switzerland, the British-French artist duo presents an ensemble of newly commissioned and recently constructed wood pieces in which the fragmented bodies of humans and other mammals appear.

Nicolas Jasmin’s artistic approach can be understood as pictorial archaeology. Jasmin has developed a method that combines painting with laser technology. A laser beam works its way through layers of paint that have been applied to hessian and exposes them to the primer, thereby revealing traces of the formation process. Jasmin also practises pictorial archaeology in terms of his subjects: he finds them in art history, in pop and everyday culture – in short: in our collective pictorial memory – and recontextualises them. Wide-ranging series of works thus arise in which Jasmin repeatedly explores simple gestures and forms. In the process, he is guided by both prescribed rules and happenstance, always questing after the unconscious and enigmatic aspects of his pictures.

A tour-de-force multi-screen film installation, Manifesto draws on the somewhat anachronistic literary form of manifestos – declarations of belief usually combined with a call for action. Artist Julian Rosefeldt revisited dozens of 20th-century manifestos, examining their relevance and power today and blending foundational texts of art movements including Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism to create thirteen new texts written as monologues. Sole actor Cate Blanchett performs the monologues as different characters in diverse settings (…).

Say hello to Schubert: a robot constructed by video art pioneer Nam June Paik (Seoul, 1932-2006) out of nine vintage radios, a gramophone speaker and three screens. The screens display experiments involving televisions from the 1960s and his performances, in which he played the American cellist Charlotte Moorman as a human cello to the music of Schubert.

Working across video, sculpture, and performance, Virginia Lee Montgomery interrogates the relationship between physical and psychic structures and the uncanny materiality of lived experience.

Gustav Klimt created the famous Beethoven Frieze for the XIVth exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, which was held between April 15 and June 27, 1902. Conceived as a tribute to the composer Ludwig van Beethoven, the presentation epitomized the Secessionists’ vision of an encompassing synthesis of the arts. Twenty-one artists worked together under the direction of Josef Hoffmann. At the center of the exhibition, in the main hall, stood Max Klinger’s Beethoven statue. In addition to Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, the show featured wall paintings and decorations by Alfred Roller, Adolf Böhm, Ferdinand Andri and numerous other artists. The stated objective was to reunite the separate arts—architecture, painting, sculpture and music—under a common theme: the “work of art” was to emerge from the interplay of the design of the rooms and the wall paintings and sculptures. Klimt’s monumental wall cycle was located in the left-hand aisle, which visitors to the exhibition entered first. An opening in the wall offered a view of Max Klinger’s Beethoven statue, hinting at the intended synergy of architecture, painting (Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze) and sculpture (Klinger’s Beethoven). With nearly 60,000 visitors, the XIVth exhibition was one of the Secession’s greatest public successes. It also proved crucial to Klimt’s […]

Explore today’s home through the prism of yesterday’s imagination. Are we living in the way that pioneering architects and designers throughout the 20th century predicted, or has our idea of home proved resistant to real change?

Koloman Moser’s oeuvre continues to exert a lasting fascination. As a universal artist Moser masters the disciplines of painting, graphic art, arts and crafts, and interior design as well as fashion and scenography. To an impressive extent Moser embodies the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art as advocated by the Vienna Secession. He is considered one of the most important pioneers of Viennese Modernism, one of the most influential artists of Viennese Art Nouveau, and is—alongside Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffmann—one of the leading artists of Vienna’s artistic renewal. To commemorate the centennial of his death, the MAK is honoring Koloman Moser (1868–1918) with one of the most comprehensive solo shows to date on his great and visionary work. The exhibition delves deep into the oeuvre of this exceptional artist and demonstrates just how instrumental Moser was in influencing the search for a new, modern design vocabulary in fin-de-siècle Vienna.  This is the first time that many of the 500 or so exhibits, largely taken from the MAK Collection, have been made accessible to the public. Structured chronologically and divided into five chapters, the MAK exhibition recalls every step of Moser’s unusual career: from painter to all-round designer and finally […]

Video Art and New Media from the Kunstmuseum Bern Collection

Annette Kelm’s photographs show precise fractious motifs that quote the still life, object or studio photography, or the classical architecture shot, yet without ever fully complying with the conventions governing these genres. They flatten things into the plane or subject them to multiplication in series. Often captured in frontal views and in great detail, the minimal and yet visually opulent object worlds underscore their translation into the two-dimensional space of photography. Kelm’s conceptual approach, the exceptional sharpness of her images, and the neutral lighting lend the scenes rendered in her works a peculiar salience. The emphasis on the factual precludes any symbolism strictly speaking, yet the cultural or ideological burden with which certain objects are fraught is unmistakable. This focus on formal criteria and the eschewal of narration of any kind are also destabilized by the selective insertion of props that bear no readily recognizable relation to a picture’s central object. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien turns the spotlight on works in which architecture, design, or constellations of seemingly mundane objects are revealed to be visual manifestations of complex genealogies. The Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffsbau in Berlin, an iconic building that houses facilities for experiments in fluid mechanics and […]

The Kunsthaus Zürich presents Oskar Kokoschka – Expressionist, migrant and pacifist – in the first retrospective of his work in Switzerland for 30 years. The highlights among the more than 200 exhibits include the monumental ‘Prometheus Triptych’ and the ‘Mural for Alma Mahler’, which have never before been seen in Switzerland.

With the exhibition ‘Doppelganger’, Kunsthal Rotterdam is presenting a site-specific installation by the Dutch artist Willem Besselink. The exhibition – part of the ‘Kunsthal Light’ programme – reflects the artist’s thought process. For this installation Besselink drew his inspiration from the architecture of the Kunsthal, designed by Koolhaas, and from the building structures and materials of HAL 6 in particular. Some details of the building, such as the angle of inclination of the floor and the turned supports of the roof structure, form the points of departure for this installation (1:1 scale) that will radically transform and emphasise the structure of the space. Visitors will suddenly find themselves standing amongst some of the building’s architectural structures that they would normally have passed without noticing.

“Výstava Oheň vecí hovorí o meniacom sa vzťahu ľudskej, geologickej a astronomickej mierky, o prelínaní subjektívnych príbehov s veľkými naratívmi zeme či času. Hovorí tiež o fotografii a slove ako médiách záznamu skutočnosti, o ich nepresnostiach a obmedzeniach. (…)” Katarína Poliačiková

In cooperation with CARE Austria, the Weltmuseum Wien presents “Experience Thailand”, a collection of selected works by photographer Alexander von Wiedenbeck. This photo series is the outcome of a successful collaboration between the engaged artist and CARE over the past few years.

Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955) is an artist of materials, sensations and ideas. His references include literature, especially poetry, music, religion and thought. He considers himself, above all, a sculptor, although his creative process has included multiple disciplines. His work addresses the very condition of being: its physical and spiritual essence, ontological awareness of present and past, moral codes and dogmas, and our relationship with nature. (…) The MACBA exhibition will feature works from the 1980s to the present, in a journey showing the dialogue that takes place between works that represent the human figure and those that are abstract. This tension is the thread that runs through the whole of his work, a corpus that highlights the strength of binomials such as weightlessness/compactness, light/dark, silence/sound, spirit/matter and life/death.

The spirit and the identity of the museum are being renewed with the latest presentation of the MAXXI Collection: on display are more than 30 worksby a total of 26 artists in a major group show that opens with a section dedicated to some of the 70 new acquisitions, including those by Monica Bonvicini, Katharina Grosse and Paolo Di Paolo, which have in 2018 enriched the museum’s holdings and which are part of a policy of expansion, valorization and safeguarding of the collection. In the second part of the gallery are more than 20 works, including pieces by Bill Viola, Giulio Turcato, Alighiero Boetti, Pablo Echaurren, Pei-Ming, Labics and Aldo Rossi reflect on the status of the work of art, the image and its perception in relation to space. With analogic instruments and new technologies, the thematic exhibition intends on the one hand to highlight the works’ strong link to painting and its traditions and on the other create a counterpoint between the abstract and the figurative.

A Terrible Beauty: Rubens’ Head of Medusa in Vienna encounters the version now in Brno Rubens produced a famous Head of Medusa already much celebrated by his contemporaries: in 1629/30, Constantijn Huygens saw a version in the collection of his friend Nicolas Sohier in Amsterdam, and he begins his report by describing his inability to forget the painting – and noting how glad he is that it hangs in his friend’s house and not his own. There were two versions of this terribly beautiful composition: at the time, the Duke of Buckingham owned the picture now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. For the first time ever, Point of View #23 reunites and juxtaposes the two versions: the Moravian Gallery in Brno has agreed to loan their Medusa, executed in oil on panel, to the Kunsthistorisches Museum so that both paintings can be examined and studied together, in collaboration with the University of Antwerp, as part of a project supported by the Flemish government.

mumok is presenting the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of the Austrian artist Ernst Caramelle. The exhibition includes all the phases of his work from 1974 to the present and attractively combines the artist’s various media and conceptual approaches. This exhibition does not focus entirely on chronology, but rather on the connections between works in different media (photos, videos, and reproductions of media images), mural painting, the so-called Gesso Pieces and Sun Pieces, drawings, watercolors, and prints. Caramelle’s work combines both abstraction and emblematic figuration—up to the point of floral formlessness. Formats vary from miniatures to large-scale wall paintings. Thematically, these works in many different media explore perception, the nature of space, media representation, artistic productivity, and the role of the artist and his embroilment in the market and with the museum. Ernst Caramelle will paint two new murals for mumok, with both thematic and formal links to the works in the exhibition.

With a selection of works from our collection, this exhibition presents different lines of development in painting from the 1950s to the 1970s. It includes works by Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Roland Goeschl, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Kriesche, Karel Malich, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt, Helga Philipp, and Zdeněk Sýkora. The 1950s saw a radical shift and break with tradition in the fundamentals of painting in favor of new media-based forms of art. Key impulses came from minimal art and conceptual art. Their sober principles are reflected in abstract and geometrical painting with its formally reduced compositions and its rejection of narrative and illusionist representation. At the same time, painting explored its own relationship to space and to perception. In Eastern Europe from the 1960s there was increased reception of constructivist modernism, as a counter to socialist realism and in the course of post-Stalinist liberalization. Analytical trends are seen in contemporary painting in Austria as a sign of its international intentions. Curated by Rainer Fuchs

“Friedrich von Borries. Politics of Design, Design of Politics” is the programmatic title of the exhibition by Friedrich von Borries. In a series of interactions with and interventions in the Collection, architect and design theorist von Borries sets out to demonstrate the extent to which there is an intrinsically political side to design and how design can shape and change politics. How can design contribute to society’s social and cultural development? The presentation will be complemented by a subjective reflection on Friedrich von Borries’ own output to date and interactive platforms for the museum visitors.

The Berlinische Galerie is to show video sculptures by Raphaela Vogel (*1988) at the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. The spatial installation is part of a festival to mark the 10th anniversary of Videoart at Midnight.

Art Brut from Japan, Another Look features works by twenty-four Art Brut creators who are working in Japan today. It comes as a follow-up to Art Brut from Japan, the first-ever exhibition of this kind of art outside Japan, which was presented at the Collection de l’Art Brut in 2008. Since then, the impact and influence of that groundbreaking exhibition have been considerable, and Art Brut from Japan has been shown at art centers, museums, galleries, and art fairs in Europe and North America, as well as in notable exhibitions within Japan.

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents for the first time in Russia an extensive solo exhibition of Jacques Lipchitz, a major personality in the 20th century sculpture, a foremost figure in the School of Paris, a close friend of Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine and Pablo Picasso. The project is a part of the 70th anniversary celebration of the Israel State foundation. The artistic oeuvre of Jacques Lipchitz can now be found in different countries, forming part of best world museum and private collections. His solo exhibitions’ story started in 1920, while his retrospective shows’ record dates back to 1936. A Soviet art historian Abram Efros defined Lipchitz’s artworks as ‘the highest point, the climax of Russian integration’ into the western art world. The exhibition at the MMOMA will introduce the Moscow public to the art of one of the most significant sculptors of the 20th century. Besides, it will be a historic event for the world art scene, and rightfully so, as Lipchitz, a Franco-American artist of Jewish origin, was born in the Russian Empire, and now an extensive display of his works will be open in Russia for the first time ever.

Music and youth culture, commemoration and traditions, languages ​​and homeland – 22 impressions depict the everyday life of secular and religious, long-established and newly arrived Jews in Germany. Using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the exhibition explores keywords, concepts, and what is “Jewish” in Germany today. In the process, light is shed on very different aspects of the German-Jewish present and perceptions of norms are critically examined.

This exhibition brings together more than forty works by renowned artist Fernand Léger (1881–1955). Léger was enthralled by the vibrancy of modern life. His paintings, murals, film and textiles were infused with the bustle and rhythm of the metropolis. He drew on photography and new forms of communication that boomed during the ‘mechanical age’ of the twentieth-century such as typography, advertising and graphic design.

South Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho’s new film commission Anomaly Strolls2018 has been shot in-part in Liverpool. Extending their project News From Nowhere 2009, the artists use science fiction to question the role and importance of art to our present day society. As they have said: ‘Sci-fi is always the fable of the present. By employing a way to look at the future instead of the present, we wanted to address current issues, especially in relation to what art is and what art could be.’ Filmed in deserted alleyways and pubs across the city, Anomaly Strolls reflects on the experience of being human today. Related to the new commission, the exhibition also includes Moon and Jeon’s 2012 film El Fin del Mundo (The End of the World). On separate screens, we see different points in time: a man remains committed to creating art as a global catastrophe unfolds, while a woman goes about a sanitised life in its aftermath. Documenting relics of the past, she comes across a strange object the man had incorporated in his artwork. The encounter triggers profound new emotions in the woman, and her strange discovery connects our two protagonists across time.

This exhibition brings together more than forty works by renowned artist Fernand Léger (1881–1955). Léger was enthralled by the vibrancy of modern life. His paintings, murals, film and textiles were infused with the bustle and rhythm of the metropolis. He drew on photography and new forms of communication that boomed during the ‘mechanical age’ of the twentieth-century such as typography, advertising and graphic design.

Alex Katz (1927) is highly recognisable and admired by a younger generation of artists and the public. His elegant paintings present a modern, quintessentially American take on the classical themes of portraiture, landscape, figure studies, marine scenes and flowers. A group of works selected from the ARTIST ROOMS collection, this exhibition will provide viewers with the opportunity to see a substantial body of his work. The display will showcase works including Pansies 1967 and West Palm Beach 1997.

South Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho’s new film commission Anomaly Strolls2018 has been shot in-part in Liverpool. Extending their project News From Nowhere 2009, the artists use science fiction to question the role and importance of art to our present day society. As they have said: ‘Sci-fi is always the fable of the present. By employing a way to look at the future instead of the present, we wanted to address current issues, especially in relation to what art is and what art could be.’ Filmed in deserted alleyways and pubs across the city, Anomaly Strolls reflects on the experience of being human today.

This exhibition launches the extensive programme organised by the Museum to mark the 200th anniversary of its foundation. It offers a survey of the museum’s history that focuses on the dialogue between the Museum and society; heritage policies in Spain; the trends that have guided the growth of the museum’s collection and its transformation into a place that has allowed Spanish and foreign writers, intellectuals and artists to reflect on the country’s past and its collective identity.

Trisha grew up in California; now she lives and works in New York – and wherever she’s exhibiting. This is her fifth solo show with us since she first came to Air de Paris in 2002. She discovered Jean Painlevé’s films at school – like Michel Houellebecq, who was exhibiting here at the same time as the second part of our Painlevé series. The third part is vintage photos, mainly from the 1930s, of insects, small crustaceans and marine creatures, and we’re scheduling her with that.

Wolf’s works reflect living conditions in major cities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago, and Paris and address issues such as population concentration, mass consumption, privacy, and voyeurism.

An exhibition by Antje Majewski with Agnieszka Brzeżańska & Ewa Ciepielewska, Carolina Caycedo, Paweł Freisler, Olivier Guesselé-Garai, Tamás Kaszás, Paulo Nazareth, Guarani-Kaiowa & Luciana de Oliveira, Issa Samb, Xu Tan, Hervé Yamguen.  

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting the most extensive exhibition of the work of Philippe Vandenberg (1952–2009) to date, comprising some 80 paintings and over 120 drawings and prints. This is the first solo show at a German museum to feature the Flemish artist, who was highly acclaimed in his home country and whose radical and unsparing oeuvre is just now being discovered by a broader international audience.

In the Greek saga, the hero Odysseus survives dangerous adventures on his odyssey and completes mysterious tasks – returning home at the end perhaps as a different person. Like a contemporary Odysseus, in this exhibition, the artist Jonathan Meese (born 1970 in Tokyo and based in Berlin) sets off on an imaginary journey, making various stops along the way. In drawings, pictures and sculptures from over 20 years of artistic production, encounters with the most diverse, ambivalent protagonists and situations take place, which the artist approaches in his archaic role as symbolic redeemer and liberator. Visitors to the exhibition get to accompany the plucky, provocative artist on his voyage, but where will it end?

Radovan Čerevka patrí k výrazným sochárskym osobnostiam vizuálneho umenia začiatku 21. storočia, ktorý vzišiel z umeleckej scény na Slovensku. Jeho tvorbu charakterizuje kódovaný výtvarný jazyk nesúci mediálnu informáciu, vplyvu, sily jej použitia a najčastejšie vojenských a civilizačných konfliktov, alebo ekologických katastrof.

Under the general name of AIDS Anarchive, the collective Equipo re has been developing a research and production work on the cultural and social dimension of the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis in Spain and Chile, as well as on selected case studies from other Latin American contexts.

Die Ausstellung «The Quiet Eye» zeigt erstmals ausgewählte Farbfotografien von Felicitas Vogler sowie Gemälde und Zeichnungen von Ben Nicholson, die Felicitas Vogler dem Kunstmuseum Bern vermachte.

Alaways linked to the underground scene, a spokeperson of the 90s’ generation, which grew up amongst precariousness and the web, the G8 in Genoa and TV series, Michele Rech, under the pseudonym of Zerocalcare is the protagonist of a large exhibition organised in co-production with Minimondi Eventi. The project is organised around four core themes – Pop, Tribes, Struggle and Resistances, Non-Reportage – and it traces every year of his work featuring posters, a wide selection of illustrations, record covers, original illustrated pages from his 9 books, T-shirts, logos and a site specific work designed by the artist for this occasion.

Retrospective exhibition at Fridericianum, organised in collaboration with M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, and curated by Anders Kreuger.

The exhibition “museum global. Microhistories of an Ex-centric Modernism” at K20 focuses on selected instances of a transcultural modernism that is situated beyond the Western canon. With microhistories from Japan, Georgia, Brazil, Mexico, India, Lebanon, and Nigeria (1910 to 1960), the museum interrogates not just an Eurocentric version of art history, but its own perspectives as well.

Výstava priblíži fotografiu nie ako užitočné, rýchle záznamové médium, „dokument doby”, ani ako prostriedok digitálnej manipulácie, ale ako nástroj vhodný na široké využitie v súčasnom umení.

With 119 works by 69 artists, including 48 paintings, 14 sculptures and 12 models and drawings by architects, this first-ever all-round retrospective at the Berlinische Galerie marks the centenary of the best-known of all little-known creative communities and its dramatic origins.

The Musée du Louvre and the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg are joining forces for an outstanding exhibition based on the collection built up by the Marquis Campana mostly between the 1830s and the 1850s. For the first time since its dispersion in 1861, the exhibition will provide a comprehensive overview of the 19th century’s largest private collection. With over 12,000 archaeological objects, paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art, and comprising both ancient and modern artefacts, it was a rich, diverse collection of the highest quality. The exhibition will showcase over 500 works, including such masterpieces as the Sarcophagus of the Spouses and Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. It presents the romantic figure of Giampietro Campana, his passion for collecting, and how he brought together this extraordinary collection by way of excavations, the antique and art market, the network of collectors between Rome, Naples, and Florence, and his links with scientific institutions. The Marquis Campana aimed to represent Italy’s cultural heritage, both ancient and modern; as such, the collection was a founding moment in the affirmation of Italian culture during the Risorgimento—the emergence of the Italian nation in the 19th century. After a high-profile trial in which Campana was convicted of embezzlement in […]

In 2012, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna initiated a new seriesof exhibitions for which remarkable creative individuals are invited to present their own personal selections of objects drawn from the museum’s historical collections. The museum’s collections number more than four million objects, and span a period of five thousand years. The first exhibition, titled The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas, was selected and curated by the painter and draughtsman Ed Ruscha. This was followed in 2016 by the exhibition During the Night, selected and curated by the British ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal.

A journey into a technological and surreal imaginarium, through artificial intelligence, dreams generated by computers and creative algorithms On the occasion of the exhibition Low Form. Images and visions in the age of artificial intelligence, artapes presents a selection of videos created by some of the most interesting artists active today. Their research reflects on the status of art in an age of information technology and digital technology, investigating the socio-cultural implications of our present. The exhibited videos, primarily created digitally and through the use of computer-generated images (CGI), combine diverse and wide-ranging cultural references, in a blending of disciplines that reinstates the variety and hybridism of globalised culture.

With the founding of the Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau in 1898, Dresden became an important center of the international Arts and Crafts and Reform Movement for several decades in light of its innovative design and social renewal. The opening of the Deutsche Werkstätten to women as artistic collaborators at the beginning of the 20th century was virtually unknown until today. It is largely thanks to Karl Schmidt’s (*1873-1948) engagement at the time of the reform movement that numerous women were commissioned as designers immediately after the founding of his company and that their products were produced under their names. For the first time, Against Invisibility – Women Designers at the Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau 1898 to 1938 presents 19 women who worked in the context of the Deutsche Werkstätten in the early 20th century.

Martha Rosler is considered one of the strongest and most resolute artistic voices of her generation. She skillfully employs diverse materials to address pressing matters of her time, including war, gender roles, gentrification, inequality, and labor. From her feminist photomontages of the 1960s and 1970s to her large-scale installations, Rosler’s vital work reflects an enduring and passionate vision. Martha Rosler: Irrespective showcases both well-known and rarely seen selections from more than five decades of work. Installations, photographic series, sculpture, and video represent a practice continually evolving and reacting to the shifting contours of political life. Throughout, Rosler’s work has been characterized by intellectual rigor and sharp wit, along with a sense of urgency directed at social and political issues that remain as relevant and immediate as when they first emerged.

The New York sculptor Eva LeWitt’s primarily abstract work often manifests as site-specific installation. She addresses the sculptural concerns of weight and volume and plays with the tension between industrial and hand fabrication. Using soft and pliable, semitransparent and semiabsorptive materials—including acetate, latex, and sponge—LeWitt subtly renders variations in tone. Alongside these formal investigations, she explores the expressive properties of light, both in the works themselves and in the spaces they inhabit.

Ulla von Brandenburg has up to now developed an extensive, complex and characteristic oeuvre to which the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the Whitechapel Gallery London are devoting two different exhibitions and a joint, substantial publication.

This exhibition, curated by Raqs Media Collective, will be a multi-layered site of discovery that explores the concept of a future in which multiple histories and geographies are placed in dialogue, giving way to a plurality of possibilities and queries by following paths that interlace, entwine and expose relations between objects, feelings and concepts, while simultaneously tracing indeterminate spaces between them.

Artists: Harun Farocki, Azin Feizabadi, Forensic Architecture, Natasha A. Kelly, Erik van Lieshout, Henrike Naumann, Emeka Ogboh, spot_the_silence, SPOTS, Hito Steyerl, Želimir Žilnik

In her works, Cady Noland (b. 1956) uncovers the violence we encounter every day in scenarios of spatial and ideological demarcation.

In a sketch for a film, Michelangelo Antonioni notes: “The Antarctic glaciers are moving in our direction at a rate of three millimeters per year. Calculate when they’ll reach us. Anticipate, in a film, what will happen.” Metaphorically speaking, to feel cold means to feel deeply alienated. Alienation was already a dominant concern for sociologists around 1900: the alienation of man from society through individualization, alienation from nature through urbanization, alienation from work through mechanization. For philosophers like Theodor W. Adorno, alienation thus turns into a key concept in terms of the role art plays in and for society: Without alienation there is no art, and ultimately it is only art that prevents total alienation. Repro: Installation view: Antarctica. An Exhibition on Alienation, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Photo: Jorit Aust