© Bernar VenetBERNAR VENET -Rétrospective 2019 -1959
Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon ( September 21, 2018 – January 6, 2019 )
This exhibition presents a remarkable and previously unseen ensemble of 170 artworks, including Venet’s early performances, drawings, diagrams, and paintings, as well as the photographs, sound works, films and sculptures that retrace 60 years of creation. This is the most ambitious retrospective ever devoted to the artist.
It aims to examine the different stages that led a certain young artist, of twenty years of age, at the beginning of the 1960s to seek to ‘remove any form of expression contained in the artwork in order to reduce it to a material fact’. He then went on to appropriate astrophysics, nuclear physics and mathematical logic, and took a break of 5 years before finally returning, albeit unexpectedly, to his easel. These paintings were followed by sound works, poetry, and later by indeterminate lines, accidents, random combinations, and dispersions, culminating in the indefi nite and curved lines of the monumental sculptures in Corten steel, dedicated to the urban space.
Bernar Venet’s protean work remains little known today, partly because it is partially exhibited, in certain ‘periods’ or selected in terms of a specific medium (his works made using tar, and steel sculptures, etc.). Today, it deserves to be seen in its entirety so that the public can gain an insight into the scale, ambition, complexity, poetry and simplicity of his work.
When one retraces the artist’s career, we uncover the context in which it was born (the appearance of happenings in 1959, Nouveau Réalisme [New Realism], Fluxus and the Nice School in the 1960s, the ‘invention’ of minimal and conceptual art in the United States, where Bernar Venet settled as early as 1966), as well as the relevance and quality of its creation. This is the aim of this retrospective. The exhibition is curated by Thierry Raspail
© Tadashi KawamataTADASHI KAWAMATA - Para-site project
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts ( August, 25 - October, 28 2018 )
As part of the Pushkin Museum XXI initiative, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts presents Russia’s first site-specific installation of contemporary Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata. Kawamata creates nest-shaped installations in the permanent exposition areas and at the director’s office, using materials found during deconstruction of old buildings in the Museum quarter. These installations has been created exclusively for the Pushkin State Museum.
Joana Vasconcelos Marilyn (AP), 2011 © Joana Vasconcelos, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2018JOANA VASCONCELOS - I’m your mirror
Museo Guggenheim Bilbao ( June 29 – November 11, 2018 )
One of the most notable artists of the past decade, Joana Vasconcelos works in sculpture and installation. She became internationally renowned at the 2005 Venice Biennial, where she presented The Bride (A noiva) and in 2012, she presented a selection of her creations at the Palace of Versailles, making her the first woman to present her work in the Baroque palace. Vasconcelos’ works–some of which very technically complex–move, have sound or light up, issues that the artist resolves in her studio in Lisbon with a large team of collaborators. To create them, Joana Vasconcelos uses a wide variety of materials from everyday life, such as household appliances, tiles, fabrics, artisan ceramics, bottles, medications, urinals, showers, cooking utensils, telephones, cars, or plastic cutlery. With them, she constructs stunning, playful, and direct images that make reference to sociopolitical topics related to consumer, postcolonial, and globalized societies, addressing a variety of subjects that range from immigration to gender violence. Her work always incorporates her sense of humor, also suggesting open as opposed to dogmatic meanings, and approaching, by requiring the participation of the spectator in its interpretation and viewing, the so-called relational aesthetics that emerged at the end of the 1990s. Filled with outside references ranging from Louise Bourgeois to popular culture, from metalworking to fashion, from artisan creation to the most advanced engineering, the main themes of her work cover the subject of identity, in all of its dimensions, viewed through the lens of her condition as a woman and as a Portuguese and European artist.
Ai Weiwei - Human Flow Film - © Ai WeiweiART BASEL 2018
Art Basel (Basel) ( June 14 – 17, 2018 )
The anchor of Art Basel’s show is its Galleries sector. Visitors will discover a breadth of Modern and contemporary works including paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations, prints, photography, video and digital art by more than 4,000 artists.
@ Fundació Antoni TapiesANTONI TÀPIES - Political Biography
Fundació Antoni Tapies - Barcelona ( Juny 8, 2018 - February 24, 2019)
Tàpies’ work was made against a political background as diverse as the post-war era, Francoism, anti-Francoism and the establishment of democracy in Spain. Despite censorship, Tàpies’ Informalist and abstract aesthetics became the sign of a silent politicisation. During the last years of the Franco regime, his painting served as an indirect agent and demonstrated an unusual capacity for mobilisation. On an international level, Tàpies triumphed as the representative of a new generation of Spanish artists that chimed with the cosmopolitanism of Abstract Expressionism and the Art Autre promoted by Michel Tapié. His works were included in important events, such as Documenta, the Venice and São Paulo biennales, and Carnegie International. His formal exuberance, and the paradoxical and enigmatic nature of his oeuvre, made him one of the most outstanding figures in modern art.
For the first time, the exhibition will bring together groups and series of works that in the mid-1950s and 1960s established Tàpies’ identity as one of the key European artists of the post-war era, as well as works that highlight the artist’s commitment to the visualisation of the anti-Franco political struggle. In the context of this exhibition, works from the Fonds of the Fundació and loans from European collections will reveal Tàpies’ career from a biographical perspective that, far from illustrating the artist’s life, sets out to examine the life of the works in an itinerary that activates a rich and polysemic sense, and where politics is not always explicitly recognisable.
Bernardí Roig, Wittgenstein House (Viena) , 2017 - © Bernardí Roig, 2018BERNADÍ ROIG. Films 2000-2018
Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma
( April 21 - September 2, 2018 )
The project, conceived as a retrospective, aims to analyse and review the complex universe of Majorcan artist Bernardí Roig (Palma, 1965) based on the presentation and decoding of his audiovisual work. The pieces will be installed in an exciting scenic arrangement, emphasising the initiatory journey between appropriation and recreation of his images and visual constructions.
These works tell us about an insatiable and nonsensical sisyphic absurd where the solitary figures of each of the videos act, caught in the repetition of gestures, in a sameness spiral. Either carrying a lamp on his back, sewing his mouth forever, spinning with a spotlight on his head without being able to get out of the claustrophobic spaces of rationalism, climbing a mountain constantly to never reach the ruins of the language philosopher’s cottage, or trapped between laughter and the aphonia of mute insults.
Art Paris Art Fair - Photo © Emmanuel Nguyen NgocART PARIS ART FAIR 2018
Grand Palais - Paris ( April 5th - 8th 2018 )
2018 marks the 20th anniversary of Art Paris Art Fair. Since its foundation in 1999, the fair has established itself as Paris' leading modern and contemporary spring art event. The 2018 edition will play host to 142 galleries presenting more than 990 artists from 73 countries providing an overview of European art from the post-war years to the current day, while leaving room for the new horizons of international creation from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Open to all forms of artistic expression, including video art and design, Art Paris Art Fair offers a theme-based approach emphasising discovery and rediscovery. This year's guest country is Switzerland and the fair will also be taking a close look at the French art scene with a new theme developed especially for the twentieth anniversary as well as the usual monographic exhibitions in Solo Show and emerging artists in Promesses.
Perspective view of Art Biofarm. © junya.ishigami+associatesJUNYA ISHIGAMIi - Freeing Architecture
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain ( March 30 - June 10, 2018 )
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents Freeing Architecture, the first major solo exhibition devoted to the work of Junya Ishigami. An important and singular figure of Japan’s young architecture scene, Ishigami, winner of the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2010, is the creator of a conceptual and poetic body of work in which the landscape occupies an important place.
For the exhibition Freeing Architecture, conceived specifically for the Fondation Cartier, Ishigami reveals twenty of his architectural projects in Asia and in Europe. These projects will be presented through a series of large-scale models, accompanied by films and drawings, which document their different stages of conception and construction. In dialogue with Jean Nouvel’s iconic building, this event is also the first large-scale solo-show that the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has devoted to an architect.
Marc Chagall "Au-dessus de la ville" 1914-1918 Galerie Nationale Tretiakov @ Adagp Paris 2017CHAGALL, LISSITZKY, MALÉVITCH. L'avant-garde Russe a Vitebsk (1918-1922)
Centre Pompidou, Paris ( March 28 th - July 16 th, 2018 )
The exhibition devoted by the Centre Pompidou to the Russian avant-garde between 1918 and 1922 focuses on the work of three of its iconic figures: Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malevich. It also presents works by teachers and students of the Vitebsk art school founded in 1918 by Chagall: Vera Ermolayeva, Nicolai Suetin, Ilya Chachnik, Lazar Khidekel and David Yakerson.
Through 250 works and documents never seen together before, this event sheds light for the first time on the post-revolutionary years during which the history of art was written in Vitebsk, a long way from Russia's big cities.
Presos políticos @Santiago SierraARCO madrid 2018
Ifema . Feria de Madrid ( February, 21 - 25 )
ARCOmadrid 2018 meeting in Halls 7 and 9 at Feria de Madrid to a total of 211 galleries from 29 countries, of which 160 are part of the General Program, joining these sections curated: “What is going to happen is not "the future", but what we are going to do” collaboration with CNP Partners and a selection of 20 galleries; Dialogues, with 14 and Opening, with 19.
JOAN MIRÓ / Sin título (Diseño para estarcido), ca. 1946. Fundació Joan Miró. © Successió Miró 2018JOAN MIRÓ . Order and disorder
IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez ( February, 15 - Juny, 17 . 2018 )
Joan Miró’s work lives on and continues to question the present age. It is one of the landmarks of the early avant-gardes of the 20th century that refuses to be relegated to the mausoleum of art history, a place where creation loses all possibilities of conflict. The exhibition Joan Miró. Order and Disorder explores the traces of indiscipline left by the artist in the course of his career. From the very outset, discipline and the process of learning were a kind of captivity from which he began to free himself when he arrived in Paris.
From then on, Miró moved along a strange path in which artistic and cultural order were always questioned. His paintings became a permanent conflict that exploded between 1969 and 1973; his characters engaged in a fight between reality and representation; and his work expanded towards society with his prolific production of public art, posters understood as urban graffiti and his participation in Morí el Merma, a theatrical celebration of the death of the dictator.
Jasper Johns, Painting with Two Balls (1960). Courtesy of photographer Jamie Stukenberg © The Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 2017. © Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2017.JASPER JOHNS - Something Resembling Truth
The Broad Contemporary Art Museum - Los Angeles ( February 10– May 13, 2018 )
A landmark exhibition, Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ features more than 120 extraordinary paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by one of America's greatest artists. Featuring signature works from the Broad collection with loans from more than 50 international public and private collections, The Broad's presentation marks the first comprehensive survey of Jasper Johns in Southern California in more than 50 years. A collaboration with the Royal Academy in London, Jasper Johns: 'Something Resembling Truth' traces the evolution of the artist’s six-decade career through a series of thematic chapters, encompassing the full range of Johns’ materials, motifs and techniques.
Courtesy Art Basel © Art BaselART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2017
Miami Beach Convention Center ( December 7 - 10, 2017 )
Leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa show significant work from the masters of modern and contemporary art, as well the new generation of emerging stars. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, films, and editioned works of the highest quality are on display in the main exhibition hall. Ambitious large‐scale artworks, films and performances become part of the city's outdoor landscape at nearby Collins Park and SoundScape Park.
David Hockney - John Baldessari, © David Hockney Foto: Richard SchmidtDAVID HOCKNEY - 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life
Museo Guggenheim Bilbao (November 10, 2017 – February 25, 2018)
After his monumental landscape exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2012, David Hockney turned away from painting and from his Yorkshire home and went back to Los Angeles. Slowly he began to return to the quiet contemplation of portraiture, beginning with a depiction of his studio manager. Over the months that followed, he became absorbed by the genre and invited sitters from all areas of his life into his studio. His subjects—all friends, family, and acquaintances—include office staff, fellow artists, curators, and gallerists.
Each work is the same size, showing his sitter in the same chair, against the same vivid blue background, and all were painted in the same time frame of three days. Yet Hockney’s virtuoso paint handling allows their differing personalities to leap off the canvas with warmth and immediacy. This exhibition presents David Hockney’s recent portraits created with a renewed vigor, offering an intimate snapshot of the LA art world and the people who have crossed the artist’s path over the last years.
William Kentridge, Basta y Sobra . Foto ©Joaquín Cortés / Román LoresWILLIAM KENTRIDGE . Basta y sobra
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía ( November 1, 2017 - March 19, 2018 )
The exhibition organized by the Reina Sofía Museum states that the scenic work of Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955), winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts 2017, can not be understood as a parallel speech to the plastic. On the contrary, it is a same essence that finds different manifestations that are continuously fed back. The own evolution of the intellectual and professional trajectory of Kentridge, uncommon artist in the museums of Spain, perfectly testifies the symbiosis of both "worlds".
Kentridge moved in his youth to Paris for a year to study theater and mime. On his return to South Africa, in 1982, he continued his work in theater and in film industry, but it was the plastic arts that at the beginning of the 90s positioned him internationally, gaining great recognition after his participation in the first Johannesburg Biennial (1995).
Since that time, he has combined the practice of drawing with cinema and theater, becoming a multidisciplinary artist who has also cultivated scenography, collage, engraving, sculpture and video art. From 2003, Kentridge began to be interested in sculpture and video installation and to include references to theater, opera and film in his new works.
©Juan Muñoz. Double Bind, 2001. Instalación en PLANTA, 2017JUAN MUÑOZ - Double Bind
PLANTA Fundación Sorigué. La Plana del Corb, Lérida (October 20, 2017 - October 20, 2022)
If someone wonders why Double Bind, the monumental piece that Juan Muñoz made for the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, is considered one of the fundamental works of contemporary sculpture, now has the opportunity to discover and experience it in PLANTA, the a new project that the group and the Sorigué Foundation have launched in their facilities, near Lérida.
Double Bind was created in the year 2000 to appear as part of the "Unilever Series", a specific commission that the Tate entrusted to Juan Muñoz and that was curated by James Lingwood and Susan May. The realization of this project - the second of the series, behind I Do, I Undo and I Redo, by Louise Bourgeois - was the definitive international recognition to place Muñoz among the most respected artists of the twentieth century. The unexpected death of the sculptor, a few months after the inauguration, truncated his promising career, being Double Bind its last great work.
August Rodin - Andromeda.© agence photographique du musee Rodin - Pauline HisbacqAUGUSTE RODIN - Hell according to Rodin
Fundación MAPFRE Casa Garriga Nogués . Barcelona (11 October 2017 - 21 January 2018)
This exhibition brings together a hundred sculptures and around thirty drawings, that have only been shown on rare occasions, plus various mock-ups and models that give an insight into the creative process of the sculptor and the evolution that the Gates were subjected to over the years. Considered the central work of the French sculptor’s career, who spent more than twenty years working on it, this monumental piece offers a spectacular view of hell, frenzied and tempestuous, yet also sensual and evocative.
The exhibition Hell according to Rodin, organized to coincide with the centenary of the death of the artist, looks back over the history of this iconic work that the artist never considered to be finished, and which was exhibited only once. The sculptures, models and drawings provide an insight into Rodin's creative process, as well as his career as a whole, in that the Gates reflect a condensed version of his stylistic explorations out of which came some of his best known works such as The Thinker, The Kiss and Ugolino, considered to be genuine landmarks in the History of Art.
Anthony Caro - Purling 1969 - ©Barford Sculptures, courtesy Annely Juda Fine ArtFRIEZE LONDON & FRIEZE MASTERS 2017
Regent’s Park ( London ) ( 5 – 8 October 2017 )
Frieze London features more than 160 of the world’s leading galleries. View and buy art from over 1,000 of today’s leading artists, and experience the fair’s critically acclaimed Frieze Projects and Talks programmes
Frieze Masters features more than 130 leading modern and historical galleries from around the world, showcasing art from the ancient era and Old Masters to the late 20th century.
© Lluis LleóLLUÍS LLEÓ - All Mighty Pencil
Centre d´ art Tecla Sala ( September 28, 2017 – January 7, 2018 )
The exhibition presents a set of seven large format papers, made this past year that, along with others of medium format, complement one of the most delicate series of the artist. Each of the great papers of Nepal are built by eighteen others who are sewn together, are an allusion to the value of small things, the constancy and the requirement, the seed of all the great works of the human being.
Lluís Lleó has used during his career a permanent dialogue with the role as territory of reflection and experimentation with painting. Paper, like the skin itself, is the subject and witness of the passing of time and of each and every human experience. From the life of the artist, from this go and return between the frantic activity of the city of New York where he lives and the mental reference of the memory of his Empordà landscape, he claims the experience of painting as a tool in which the times , the manual processes and the final result form a personal and poetic attitude.
Joan Brossa "Tinter abocat", 1969. Foto: Toni CollJOAN BROSSA - Poesía Brossa
MACBA Museu d´Art Contemporani de Barcelona ( September 21, 2017 - February 25, 2018 )
MACBA presents a comprehensive survey of the work of this pioneering artist, through his books, his visual investigations, and including his work in the theatre, cinema, music and artistic actions.
Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919-1998) was first and foremost a poet, but we believe it is necessary to see this in relation to his way of working, his poiesis. This exhibition establishes a dialogue and confronts Brossa’s work with the artists Marcel Marien, Nicanor Parra and Ian Hamilton-Finlay. Brossa was a poet, but his works stood at a crossroad of languages. Frequently collaborating with other artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, comedians and even magicians, his work constantly went against the grain and beyond the limits between disciplines.