As October approaches, New York braces for a confluence of three recurring exhibitions: Greater New York, Performa, and the New Museum Triennial all open next month, each offering encounters with local and international perspectives on a changing world. Elsewhere, highlights include a retrospective of pathbreaking Surrealist Meret Oppenheim, a group show of feminist and queer artists whose work upsets patriarchal norms, and the biggest museum survey to date devoted to celebrated photographer Deana Lawson.
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Sofía Táboas
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and kurtimanzutto, Mexico City & New York. Photo Agustín Estrada From a recreation of a corner of a pool to boats filled with plants, Sofía Táboas’s works make unexpected interventions to disrupt our sense of place and prompt reflections on the relationship between manmade structures and nature. In “Thermal Range,” her solo exhibition at Museo Jumex, Táboas digs into an even subtler environmental element, with sculptures and paintings that incorporate algae and other natural materials to indicate changes in temperature. For a companion exhibition titled “Ambient Temperature,” Táboas has selected thirty-five works from the museum’s collection—by artists including Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Kuri—that take audience members on a poetic journey from heat to cold through color, mood, and subject.
Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Oct. 7, 2021–Feb. 13, 2022.
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Greater New York
Image Credit: Photo Parker Menzimer Delayed a year by the pandemic, the fifth edition of MoMA PS1’s quinquennial exhibition is at last here. Don’t come expecting a show about Covid, however. MoMA PS1 curator Ruba Katrib and independent curator Serubiri Moses, who worked in collaboration with PS1 director Kate Fowle and MoMA’s Ines Katzenstein, have promised an expansive view of the city’s art scene. The curatorial framework encompasses two seemingly opposed modes—surrealism and documentary, which combine in piquant ways in works by artists such as E’wao Kagoshima, Carolyn Lazard, Alan Michelson, Kayode Ojo, Raque Ford, and Ahmed Morsi.
MoMA PS1, New York, Oct. 7, 2021–Apr. 18, 2022
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Paula Modersohn-Becker
Image Credit: © Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal The early German Expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) is best-known for her portraits of mothers and children that adapt a radically modernist approach for a traditional subject. This retrospective will feature 116 paintings and drawings spanning the artist’s short career, the majority of which was spent at the Worpswede art colony in northern Germany, punctuated by several stints in Paris, where she immersed herself in the work of the Post-Impressionists. Highlights include Self-Portrait on the Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906), a half-length portrait of the artist standing topless clutching her pregnant belly, often credited as the first nude self-portrait by a female artist.
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Oct. 8, 2021–Feb. 6, 2022
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Witches and Feminism
Image Credit: Courtesy Hammer Museum The fifteen midcareer feminist artists assembled from across the globe for this exhibition channel the ethos of medieval women who boldly defied the oppressive norms of Christianity and marriage. Artists Vaginal Davis, Bouchra Khalili, Every Ocean Hughes, Laura Lima, Teresa Margolles, and others summon the spirit of radical resistance that characterizes witchy women. Co-curator Connie Butler describes them as simply “badass.” Together, these artists confront present-day efforts to subjugate women—including the persistence of gendered and racialized violence—as well as global labor issues viewed through a feminist lens.
Hammer Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Oct. 10, 2021– Jan. 9, 2022.
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Performa
Image Credit: Courtesy Performa. Photo Romke Hoogwaerts For its ninth iteration, the New York performance art biennial Performa promises to animate the city’s public spaces and help overcome the isolation and loss of the Covid-19 pandemic. As always, Performa has commissioned artists to realize new projects, but this time the performances take place outdoors, at sites across New York’s boroughs. Choreographer Madeline Hollander is working with twenty-five dancers from troupes whose shows were canceled in 2020. Filmmaker Shikeith is debuting his first opera, on themes of Black masculinity, in a series of sunset performances on Rockaway Beach. The three weeks of free presentations also include commissions from Kevin Beasley, Ericka Beckman, Sara Cwynar, Danielle Dean, Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation), and Tschabalala Self.
Various venues, New York, Oct. 12–31, 2021.
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Mika Rottenberg
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth © Mika Rottenberg In her videos, Mika Rottenberg creates absurdly humorous portraits of women at work in pearl processing plants and at nail salons. Convoluted systems and structures often reminiscent of Rube Goldberg’s stand in for global supply chains, and bodily secretions (sweat, snot, fingernail clippings) are turned into products. For this show, the artist will create a new body of kinetic sculptures, building on past works like animatronic ponytails that hang from the wall, or an air conditioning unit that drips onto a hotplate below, producing a continual sizzle. In addition, Rottenberg will debut Remote, a new video made in collaboration with filmmaker Mahyad Tousi. Written while New Yorkers were on lockdown, the work reflects on labor conditions in the time of coronavirus.
Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Denmark, Oct. 14, 2021– Feb. 6, 2022.
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Meret Oppenheim
Image Credit: Modern Museet, Stockholm. Photo Albin Dahlstrom. © ProLitteris The Berlin-born Surrealist Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985)—best known for her iconic furry teacup sculpture—is the subject of an overdue traveling retrospective. “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition” opens this month in Bern, the Swiss city where she lived for over thirty years. It includes some two hundred objects. Many works are sculptures that showcase Oppenheim’s signature wit and humor. In My Nurse (1936–37), a pair of high-heeled shoes lie upside down in a tray, where they suggest a whole chicken ready for roasting. But her output was wide-ranging, encompassing geometric abstract paintings and jewelry designs as well—all of which are represented in this landmark show.
Kunstmuseum Bern, Oct. 22, 2021–Feb. 13, 2022; Menil Collection, Houston, Mar. 25–Sept. 18, 2022; Museum of Modern Art, New York, Oct. 30, 2022–Mar. 4, 2023.
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Georg Baselitz
Image Credit: Museum Ludwig, Cologne © Georg Baselitz, 2021 The German Neo-Expressionist painter and provocateur Georg Baselitz began his career as a student of socialist realism in East Berlin, before crossing the border in 1957. Influenced by movements like Mannerism, Expressionism, and Art Brut, he developed a scabrous style of distorted figuration intended to reflect the social and psychic tumult of postwar Germany in the early 1960s, arriving at his signature method—painting upside down—in 1969. Organized chronologically, this retrospective spans the artist’s six-decade career, from controversial early canvases like Die Große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain, 1962–63), a grotesque figure clutching his outsized genitalia, to recent bodies of work like the “Avignon” series (2014), a suite of upside-down nude self-portraits.
Centre Pompidou, Paris, Oct. 20, 2021–Mar. 7, 2022
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Sreshta Rit Premnath
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist. Photo SITE Photography Waiting is the central theme of “Grave/Grove,” Sreshta Rit Premnath’s solo exhibition, which highlights the toll that incarceration and bureaucratic delays can take on vulnerable populations. The artist’s sculpture, video, photography, and installation work have addressed experiences of invisibility and misrecognition among marginalized communities, with a focus on the politics of borders, bodies, and labor. “Grave/Grove” is accompanied by a related presentation at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, as well as a publication of an issue of Shifter, a journal the artist founded in 2004.
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 22, 2021–Feb. 13, 2022; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, through Feb. 27, 2022.
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Prospect New Orleans
Image Credit: Photo Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes The 2021 edition of Prospect New Orleans, titled “Yesterday We Said Tomorrow” after a 2010 album by New Orleans–born jazz musician Christian Scott, presents the work of fifty-one artists and collectives at museums, cultural spaces, and public sites across the city. Curated by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi, the exhibition centers the history of the African diaspora and its relationship to contemporary issues of ecology, class, and race. Highlights include a film on ancestry and migration shot in New Orleans by Tiona Nekkia McClodden, a multimedia installation and performance produced by the Neighborhood Story Project in collaboration with local spiritual leaders, and a series of ceramics by Candice Lin referring to the city’s nineteenth-century meat industry. Five artists who took part in Prospect’s first edition in 2008—Mark Bradford, Willie Birch, Dave McKenzie, Wangechi Mutu, and Nari Ward—have been invited to return. Due to damage caused by Hurricane Ida, Prospect.5 will have staggered openings, with all participating venues slated to open by November 13.
Various venues, New Orleans, Oct. 23, 2021–Jan. 23, 2022.
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New Museum Triennial
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist Since the last New Museum Triennial, held in 2018, there has been a pandemic with no end in sight, a worldwide reckoning with systemic racism, and an alarming increase in the frequency of extreme weather events caused by climate change. In response to all this turmoil, curators Jamillah James and Margot Norton have taken as their theme the twinned notions of perseverance and resistance. Titled “Soft Water Hard Stone” after a Brazilian proverb (soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole), the show will feature forty rising talents. Among those showing in New York for the first time are Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Blair Saxon-Hill, and Yu Ji.
New Museum, New York, Oct. 28, 2021–Jan. 23, 2022
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Hrair Sarkissian
Image Credit: Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation A Syria-born photographer of Armenian descent, Hrair Sarkissian remains committed to using a large-format camera in a digital age, relying on chance and natural conditions to shape his work. He captures images that evoke the psychological undercurrents of political unrest and the diasporic histories of the Middle East. In “Execution Squares” (2008), the emptiness of early-morning city streets summons the foreboding of public hangings without the gruesome spectacle; “Background” (2012) surveys old-fashioned photography studios and mourns disappearing ways of life and forgotten fantasies. “The Other Side of Silence,” Sarkissian’s first mid-career survey, collects three decades of work, including his best-known photographic series as well as his forays into installation and moving-image work.
Sharjah Art Foundation, Oct. 30, 2021–Jan. 30,2022; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Apr. 26–June 19, 2022; Bonnefanten, Maastricht, summer 2022.