The big themes of the spring season in the world of museums and biennials are migration and mutation. The former is the loose focus of this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest art festival, which will explore artists who live in diaspora. But it is also the subject of a range of retrospectives for artists whose work provides a rebuke to the notion of national borders as fixed, immutable things.
Transformation was a core component of Surrealism, an avant-garde that is turning 100 this year. It is, however, not the only movement celebrating an anniversary in 2024—Impressionism, the French movement launched in 1874, is now 150 years old. Both -isms are being toasted in big shows this season.
But it is not just living artists and modernists who are being feted. An Angelica Kauffman retrospective, long in the works, is finally here, and so is a restoration of a prized Jan van Eyck painting.
Below, a look at 60 must-see museum shows and biennials to visit this spring.
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Gunter Brüs at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Image Credit: ©Günter Brus and Kunsthaus Bregenz/Courtesy the artist/Photo Markus Tretter Gunter Brüs, an artist associated with the Viennese Actionist movement of the 1960s, unfortunately did not live to see the opening of this show. When he died earlier this month at 85, he was praised as a key performance artist whose painful provocations defined an era of Austrian art. In these works, Brüs would do violence to his own body; in one performance, he cut himself with razors to a point where he had to the end the piece because he was so physically exhausted. That work, titled The Real Test (1970), is no less intense when viewed 54 years on in the form of the photographic documentation that appears in the Kunsthaus Bregenz’s career-spanning survey, among the largest exhibitions ever devoted to him.
Through May 20
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“Lala Rukh: In the Round” at Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates
Image Credit: Courtesy the estate of Lala Rukh and Grey Noise, Dubai Much of Lala Rukh’s art is so spare that it borders on depicting nothing at all. The works for which she is best known—the ones that appeared in the 2017 edition of Documenta, the important art exhibition in Kassel, Germany—resemble notational systems that are based on the repetitive structures of music from the Indian subcontinent. But she also made works that looked quite unlike these: urgent posters about violence against women in her native country of Pakistan, photographs of beaches and oceans, and an animation featuring barely-there forms set against a black void, not to mention her activism with the Women’s Action Forum. Fittingly, Rukh’s first-ever survey lives up to its title by sampling all these various parts of her oeuvre together.
Through June 16
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“IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism” at Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
Image Credit: ©Foundation Paul Delvaux, Sint-Idesbald/Sabam Belgium, 2024/Photo J. Geleyns – Art Photography/Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels With Surrealism turning 100 this year, museums are trotting out all their dreamy artworks related to that movement, which placed an emphasis on the subconscious, hidden desires, and sexual subversion. Among the biggest shows dedicated to Surrealism this year will be this survey, which, in keeping with other recent ones focused on that avant-garde, seeks to show that it did not only happen in France, with Belgians like René Magritte and Paul Delvaux having made their own significant contributions as well. In tribute to the Belgian strain of Surrealism, this show lures works by Dalí, Man Ray, and other giants to Brussels. Meanwhile, a show at the Bozar art center happening simultaneously looks specifically at Belgian Surrealism.
Through July 21
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“Esther Mahlangu: Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting” at Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town
Image Credit: Photo Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images Many of Esther Mahlangu’s abstractions are done in the style of traditional Ndebele painting, wherein members of her community array dazzling pigments to create starbursts and other forms. Yet Mahlangu, who is now in her late 80s and has been painting since she was 10, does not only paint on canvas—she has also adorned BMW cars, Belvedere vodka bottles, and Commes des Garçons garments. Having figured in the famed (and famously polarizing) 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre,” whose conception of global art remains influential, Mahlangu is now getting a 100-work retrospective in the same year that she figures in the Venice Biennale.
Through August 11
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"Philippe Parreno: VOICES" at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul
Image Credit: ©Philippe Parreno/Photo Cheolki Hong/Courtesy Leeum Museum of Art A typical Philippe Parreno show harnesses sculptures, video, sound, and more, all in search of ways to visualize the things we cannot see: time, the flow of life, the relationships between people and objects. What, exactly, is his Leeum Museum show? The museum describes it as “a synaesthetic exhibition of meticulously choreographed scenography combining data sequencing, DMX, and artificial intelligence that will expand perceptions on how to view and experience art and exhibitions.” Whatever that ultimately ends up being, it is likely to be just as cryptic and alluring as the rest of Parreno’s output.
February 28–July 7
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Angelica Kauffman at Royal Academy of Arts, London
Image Credit: ©National Trust Images/Photo John Hammond/National Trust Collections One of the very few women associated with the Neoclassicist movement of the 18th century, Angelica Kauffman found fame during her lifetime with paintings that situated her moneyed commissioners within ancient settings. In so doing, the Swiss painter aided in the movement’s larger goal of returning order and modesty to art. But despite the fact that her history paintings were well-loved in her day, Kauffman does not currently occupy the same reputation as Neoclassicists such as Jacques-Louis David and Antonio Canova. That may soon change with this long-awaited showcase at the very institution which Kauffman helped to form.
March 1–June 30
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“Lygia Clark: Project for a Planet” at Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo
Image Credit: Fundação Edson Queiroz, Fortaleza The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark deliberately designed much of her output to be manipulated by its viewers. Her “Bichos” sculptures of the 1960s, for example, are metal contraptions that can be folded up and collapsed as desired; they count among the defining works of the Neo-Concretist movement, which sought to lure art into everyday life and explore how formal experiments in geography might function when viewed in the world at large. To that end, this 150-work retrospective will feature public activations of a variety of works by Clark, including the “Bichos.” Please do touch the art.
March 2–August 4
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“Roy Lichtenstein: A Centennial Exhibition” at Albertina, Vienna
Image Credit: ©Estate of Roy Lichtenstein/Bildrecht, Wien 2024/MMK Frankfurt The Whitney Museum’s expansive Roy Lichtenstein retrospective is still two years off, but Europe is getting its own smaller show of the sort this spring. The exhibition will feature 90 works by the celebrated Pop artist, whose famed paintings of the 1960s import imagery from comic books and cast it a size so large, its Ben Day dots appear gigantic. In later works, Lichtenstein would apply a similar style to abstraction, parodying the obsession with originality that often accompanied painters who worked in that mode. A range of rising painters have mulled similar themes in recent years; the Albertina show should resonate in a climate where figuration is back in a big way.
March 8–July 14
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“Delcy Morelos: Interwoven” at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis
Image Credit: ©Delcy Morelos/Courtesy the artist These days, Delcy Morelos is well-known in parts of the US and Europe for epically scaled installations of sweetly pungent dirt. A new one will figure in this survey, but on the whole, the exhibition pulls back further, showing that before Morelos went big, she worked relatively small, creating paintings, drawings, and woven works. With their repetitive patterning and their spare visual language, they have a tendency to look like natural formations seen from afar. They meditate on the relationship between people and the natural environment around them—in particular to the Amazon, a region that has been key to the development of Colombia, where Morelos was born and is now based.
March 8–August 4
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Nina Beier at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France, and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland
Image Credit: Photo Vegard Kleven/Courtesy the artist and Standard (Oslo) The Danish-born sculptor Nina Beier specializes in creating cryptic assemblages that enlist everyday objects, only to render them bizarre: cups that pour beans into neat piles, for instance, or a porcelain sculpture of a dog with its face broken off. What, exactly, causes these pieces to be so memorable? It’s hard to say, yet the mystery and oddness of them nags at one’s memory. Fittingly, this mid-career survey is split across two institutions that are 2,000 miles apart from each other, rendering it unlikely that most viewers will ever be able to see the whole thing.
March 8–September 8; March 22–September 8
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Biennale of Sydney
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist Twenty-four editions and fifty years on from its founding, the Biennale of Sydney remains Australia’s biggest art exhibition, and will once again prove its worth to the international scene with this show, curated by Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero. Their broad theme will be cosmological visions, with a special emphasis on the power of the sun and all that it brings to life as we know it. International stars, such as Monira Al Qadiri, Frank Bowling, Josh Kline, and Petrit Halilaj (working collaboratively with his partner Alvaro Urbano), will be present, but the focus, largely, is on homegrown talent, in particular First Nations artists awaiting greater recognition. Among them is Dylan Mooney, a Yuwi, Torres Strait and South Sea Islander artist who has been commissioned to make a work paying tribute to Malcolm Cole, an Aboriginal activist who gained attention among the queer community.
March 9–June 10
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“Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940” at Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, Texas
Image Credit: Photo Matthew Sherman/Collection of Josh Feldstein Surrealism, the Martinican writer Suzanne Césaire famously said, “nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations.” There was no reason this European movement couldn’t apply to nations like hers, she claimed, because its emphasis on fantasies was already embedded in the Caribbean psyche. Her words have been proven true by the range of contemporary artists of the Caribbean and African diasporas, from Ana Mendieta to Naudline Pierre, that are assembled for this ambitious show. The exhibition proves that there is still more to understand about the legacy of Surrealism, which this year turns 100.
March 10–July 28
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“Chantal Akerman: Traveling” at Bozar Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist In 2023, Chantal Akerman received renewed attention after her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles topped Sight and Sound’s survey of the greatest movies of all time, beating out famed works by Yasujiro Ozu, Alfred Hitchcock, and others for the #1 spot. The film features a housewife who does nothing much at all for more than three hours—an endurance test that situates the viewer within her own sense of confinement. Now regarded as a feminist landmark, Jeanne Dielman remains thrilling, as does the rest of Akerman’s oeuvre, which takes up themes about displacement, alienation, and the relationships between women, all via long takes that encourage slow, meditative viewing. Her first-ever retrospective will feature documentation related to her movies, as well as installations, photography, and, naturally, her films themselves.
March 14–July 21
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Yokohama Triennale
Image Credit: ©Lieko Shiga/Courtesy the artist This triennial, among the biggest recurring art exhibitions in Japan, is this time named after poet Lu Xun’s 1927 anthology Wild Grasses, which was written amid a period of radical change for China. Viewing his poetry as a metaphor for the ways that delicate ecosystems continue to exist amid upheaval, curators Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu have organized a show about perseverance. Sandra Mujinga, Lieko Shiga, Josh Kline, Pippa Garner, and the late Pople.L are among those lined up to participate.
March 15–June 9
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“Britta Marakatt-Labba. Moving the needle” at Nationalmuseum, Oslo
Image Credit: ©Britta Marakatt-Labba/BONObritta Britta Marakatt-Labba’s Historjá (2003–7), a 75-foot-long fabric piece that told the history of the Sámi, was one of the hits of Documenta 14, the 2017 edition of the famed art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Yet it was but one example of the ways that Marakatt-Labba has forcefully, elegantly, evoked the dispossession of that Indigenous people and the violence done to nature via drawings and sewn works. This show aims to expose her full oeuvre, reaching as far back as the 1980s, when Marakatt-Labba produced embroideries that depicted standoffs between Sámi activists and the police. Naturally, Historjá will make a reappearance here, too.
March 15–August 25
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“Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning” at Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image Credit: Photo Ian Douglas/Courtesy Danspace Project There are arguably few better-known video artists in the world than Joan Jonas, whose tapes from the ’60s and ’70s are considered crucial works about the relationship between one’s body and the environment, often with a feminist undercurrent. Having represented the United States at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Jonas has been written into art history of the past half-century, and her MoMA retrospective will only cement her place within the canon. Included in the exhibition will be a number of her video installations contending with hard-to-pin-down psychological states, natural phenomena, Japanese theatre traditions, and, of course, her beloved pet dogs. Jonas herself will also stage performances during the show’s run.
March 17–July 6
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“Pierre Huyghe. Liminal” at Punta della Dogana, Venice
Image Credit: ©Pierre Huyghe, by SIAE 2023/Photo Ola Rindal/Courtesy of the artist, Kistefos Museum, and Hauser & Wirth, London Pierre Huyghe has made artworks using live bees, AI, and the dirt beneath a former ice skating rink, and is now set to do another flashy, grand project for the Punta della Dogana, one of two private museums in Venice operated by collector François Pinault. The show is being billed as Huyghe’s largest ever and is being teased as something that is neither a survey nor a retrospective, but something else altogether: a project that incorporates preexisting artworks into a larger ecosystem. His focus, as usual, will be the increasingly thin boundary between the human and the inhuman.
March 17–November 24
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“Julie Mehretu: Ensemble” at Palazzo Grassi, Venice
Image Credit: Photo Tom Powel Imaging/Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Private Collection The togetherness referenced in this show’s title is an allusion to the fact that this show is not a solo survey for Julie Mehretu, or at least not in the conventional sense. There will indeed be 60 paintings and prints by Mehretu, an Ethiopian-born artist known for abstracting architectural plans and ready-made images, turning them into tangles of lines and colors that reference diasporas and political strife. But there will also be works by her colleagues, including Paul Pfeiffer, David Hammons, and Huma Bhabha, proving that Mehretu’s art thrives when it isn’t seen in isolation.
March 17, 2024–January 16, 2025
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Whitney Biennial
Image Credit: ©Mary Lovelace O'Neal/Courtesy the artist and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York and San Francisco/Collection of the artist The most important biennial held in the United States is poised to demonstrate its might once more with this year’s edition, the storied show’s 81st. As usual, a pair of curators—Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, in this case—have been appointed to provide a broad picture of American art as it stands right now. Their focus is the notion of reality itself, a notoriously sticky subject in a time when the pressure is on to tell the truth and be authentic. Their 71-person list is dotted with beloved artists, from the esteemed abstractionist Mary Lovelace O’Neal to the up-and-coming sculptor Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio; it was assembled with the help of artists Korakrit Arunanondchai and asinnajaq, musician Taja Cheek, and filmmaker Zackary Drucker.
Opens March 20
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“Meeting with a Masterpiece: The Virgin by Chancellor Rolin” at Musée du Louvre, Paris
Image Credit: ©Musée du Louvre, dist. RMN - Grand Palais/Photo Angèle Dequier Jan van Eyck’s ca. 1435 painting The Virgin by Chancellor Rolin remains provocative for the way it situates an age-old subject—a Madonna and child—within a clearly contemporary world. And, while this painting has been seen widely, it turns out it can still be viewed anew—the Louvre, which owns it, just restored the work, revealing its original colors for the first time in years. To toast the painting’s refurbishment, the Louvre is assembling rarely traveled van Eycks that will elucidate the many ways this Flemish painter rendered his subjects with painstaking naturalism, an unusual quality for his day.
March 20–June 17
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“Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at Noguchi Museum, New York
Image Credit: ©Family of Toshiko Takaezu/Photo Nicholas Knight/Courtesy Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/Private Collection The gorgeous, elegant ceramic forms Toshiko Takaezu crafted sometimes contain a secret: hidden within are objects that produce pleasing sounds, if their holders are shaken gently. But their containers have largely remained motionless, lending them a stilled, muted quality. Their intrigue will be evident in this long-overdue retrospective for Takaezu, an artist born in Hawai‘i to Japanese parents. The show seeks to expose unseen parts of Takaezu’s art, including her little-known paintings, and will also play up the importance of sound to her art, with a dedicated concert program designed by Leilehua Lanzilotti, who also curated the exhibition with art historian Glenn Adamson and the Noguchi Museum’s Kate Wiener.
March 20–July 28
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“Rosana Paulino: Amefricana” at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
Image Credit: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Bueno Aires The title of this survey for Rosana Paulino, a giant of the Brazilian art scene, is a reference to a concept thought up by Lélia González, an intellectual who postulated that those in power in Brazil sought to ignore Black and Indigenous citizens because they dont see them as Latin enough. Similar themes have guided Paulino’s practice, which view the experiences of Africans as being integral to Brazilian history. Centered around five large-scale installations dealing with the subject, this exhibition is Paulino’s first comprehensive survey outside her home country.
March 22–June 10
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“Francis Bacon: The Beauty of Meat” at Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Image Credit: Photo Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images That Francis Bacon was gay is no secret—Mark Swan and Annalyn Swan’s recent biography of the British painter focuses in detail on his relations with men. But when it comes to major exhibitions of Bacon’s art in mainstream museums, his sexual identity is typically downplayed in favor of broader emphases on his turbulent psychological state. That will not be the case in this exhibition, mounted as part of a year’s worth of programming at MASP dedicated to under-recognized queer histories. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, who is also organizing the Venice Biennale, the show is about the relationship between the male body and Bacon’s paintings of meat and carnage.
March 22–July 28
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"Damien Hirst: To Live Forever (A While)" at Museo Jumex, Mexico City
Image Credit: ©Damien Hirst and Science Ltd/Photo Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd/DACS/Artimage, 2023 The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a famed sculpture of a full-size shark suspended in a pool of formaldehyde, remains Damien Hirst’s calling card. But the title of this 60-work Hirst survey suggests that not all of his work is actually about mortality (or some subversion of it), and the offerings on hand, from his “Spin Paintings” to wall-mounted sculptures resembling medicine cabinets, imply that there is still more to learn about an artist whose output remains most closely associated with the excesses of the market.
March 23–August 25
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“Hu Yun: Mount Analogue” at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist The young Chinese artist Hu Yun has made a habit of studying historical happenings in depth, then creating installations that attest to the movements of people and ideas across time. This show, his first museum survey, is an excavation of the past in more senses than one. It will specifically take up the ghosts of the very building that houses the Rockbund Art Museum, which once belonged to the Royal Asiatic Society Museum, a natural history institution that counted among the first of its kind in China. The two-floor installation that Hu has devised will look at some of the destructive qualities inherent in that institution, which the artist has labeled an “expansive knowledge apparatus.”
March 23–August 25
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“Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dreams” at Baltimore Museum of Art
Image Credit: ©Joyce J. Scott/Photo Mitro Hood/Courtesy Goya Contemporary/Collection of Paul Daniel and Linda DePalma Many of Joyce J. Scott’s sculptures are intricate and gorgeous, yet they also contain tough material about the painful histories of racism woven into them—literally. A good number of her pieces enlist beading, glasswork, and sewing, raising craft techniques to the status of what has commonly been regarded as “high” art. One of the most important artists to emerge from Baltimore’s art scene in the past half-century, Scott is finally getting a retrospective in her hometown museum, where she will exhibit lesser-known pieces, such as ephemera related to performances staged during the 1970s, as well as a newly commissioned installation.
March 24–July 14
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“Paris 1874. The Impressionist Moment” at Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Image Credit: National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. As far as exhibitions mounted to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, none will be bigger than this show, which explores how the movement came together in the first place. Most often, Impressionism is thought to have emerged as a reaction to the academic Salon culture of the 19th-century French art scene. But this show suggests that when painters like Claude Monet and Edgar Degas began painting outside their studios, breaking a taboo for the time, they were also pushed to do so by a political climate that demanded an entirely new understanding of artmaking altogether. The exhibition is almost certain to bring in droves of people in Paris, just as it will in Washington, D.C., where the exhibition travels in September.
March 26–July 14
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“Brancusi” at Centre Pompidou, Paris
Image Credit: ©Succession Brancusi, All rights reserved/ADAGP, Paris 2024/Photo Adam Rzepka - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP/Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou is uniquely equipped to stage a bang-up Constantin Brancusi retrospective, since the museum’s sprawling grounds include a structure that recreates the Romanian-born modernist’s studio in all its glory. This spring, that atelier will act as an appetizer to this epically scaled show, which assembles nearly 200 of Brancusi’s sculptures, which are prized for distilling well-trodden art-historical subjects to their most basic elements—a bird in flight, for example, represented only as a curved golden arc set atop a pedestal. Alongside the sculptures, there will be films, archival materials (including Brancusi’s tools), photographs, furniture, and more related to his art.
March 27–July 1
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Nari Ward at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
Image Credit: Photo Fanis Vlastaras and Rebecca Constantopoulou/Courtesy the artist/Private Collection When it comes to this Jamaican-born, New York–based artist, the focus is almost always how he makes haunting use of found materials—a disused hearse, tossed-out strollers, shoelaces, all employed to imbue old objects with new life. But for this retrospective, the focus will be how Ward’s sculptural installations contain performance-oriented elements that are not always immediately obvious. Central to the exhibition, which will feature new works, will be a grouping of installations that Ward initially produced between 1996 and 2000 for Ralph Lemon’s Geography Trilogy, a group of dance pieces that explore how memories are communicated through movement.
March 28–July 28
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Pino Pascali at Fondazione Prada, Milan
Image Credit: Photo Claudio Abate “I do not believe you make shows in galleries, you make the gallery, you create the space,” artist Pino Pascali once said. Accordingly, this 50-work show is an untraditional retrospective for a sculptor who worked in an untraditional way. Rather than chronologically presenting Pascali’s sculptures, which, like others associated with the Arte Povera movement of 1960s Italy, merge manmade and natural materials, the exhibition will slice his practice in different ways. One will explore how Pascali, who died at age 32 in a motorcycle accident, approached his exhibitions, viewing them as environments in their own right that he could manipulate accordingly.
March 28–September 23
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“André Masson: There Is No Finished World” at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France
Image Credit: ©2023 ADAGP, Paris/Photo ©Georges Meguerditchian - Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI /Dist. RMN-GP/Centre Pompidou, Paris Before André Breton wrote his “Surrealist Manifesto” in 1924, André Masson made the first of his automatic drawings in 1923. Automatism, as Masson devised it, was a kind of mark-making dictated by the subconscious, without any predetermined composition in mind. But Masson was more than automatism, and this retrospective seeks out to prove it. Among the lesser-known parts his oeuvre surveyed will be the works made when he visited Martinique in 1940, luring some of the lush flora seen there into his drawings from around the same time.
March 29–September 2
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Kathe Köllwitz at Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image Credit: ©2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; The Museum of Modern Art, New York Kathe Köllwitz is a hero for many artists active today for the way she dealt head-on with social issues of her day, working in a manner that was blindly direct—even by the standards of the current moment. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Köllwitz crafted paintings, drawings, and prints that responded to a war-torn, chaotic Germany, often directing her attention specifically to plight of women and workers. Crucially, she worked in a figurative mode, even as others around her turned to abstraction, and for that reason, these pieces are just as piercing now as they were then. Many of them have not been seen frequently in New York, making this retrospective an important one for audiences in the city.
March 31–July 20
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“Patrick Martinez: Histories” at Dallas Contemporary
Image Credit: Photo Yubo Dong (Of Studio) Recently, a suite of neon sculptures by Patrick Martinez graced the lobby of the Whitney Museum, where their phrases urging protest in the face of injustice glowed with a certain intensity. Those sculptures looked like the signs used to advertise stores on city streets, and that is in some ways the point. Martinez, a rising talent based in Los Angeles, has formed an oeuvre from bringing the urban landscape into art spaces, crafting paintings that look like graffiti or walls plastered with posters, all while also paying homage to Latinx culture in the city he calls home. In so doing, he implies that there can be no division between art and daily life, a proposition that will resound among the new and recent works surveyed here.
April 3–September 1
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Firelei Báez at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Image Credit: ©Firelei Báez/Photo Adam Reich/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth/Collection of Carol Sutton Lewis and William M. Lewis, Jr. In 2021, Firelei Báez filled the ICA Boston’s Watershed space with what appeared to be the ruins of a sunken castle, covering the gallery’s windows with blue tarp. This faux underwater archaeological site was, in fact, a reference to the Sans-Souci Palace, where Haitian royalty lived after the island country gained independence from its French colonizers. That work was example of how Báez has animated the seemingly dead past, paying homage to her own Haitian and Dominican heritage in the process. Her first North American survey will include paintings and sculptures, plus a return to watery subject matter in the form of a newly commissioned mural that will consider Boston’s own maritime history.
April 4–September 2
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“Nicholas Mangan: A World Undone” at Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney
Image Credit: ©Nicholas Mangan/Photo Andrew Curtis/Courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery For the past three years, Australian artist Nicholas Mangan has been exploring the damage being done at a concerning pace to the Great Barrier Reef, whose coral is quickly receding due to climate change. For a series known as “Core-Corelations,” Mangan has crafted tombs of a sort for dead coral; the boxes are found ones form of polystyrene, a common material used in packing that is notoriously tough to degrade. Works from that series will figure in this survey, which also includes more videos and sculptures dealing with impending environmental doom.
April 5–June 30
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“Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami)” at Brooklyn Museum, New York
Image Credit: Brooklyn Museum Among the Brooklyn Museum’s crown jewels is its complete set of Utagawa Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo” (1856–59), a group of woodblock prints depicting the Japanese city across the seasons: snowy bridges, the bay at sunset, trees in bloom. But for 24 years, it has been impossible to see all of the Brooklyn Museum’s prints—until now. This show brings together the complete set, complementing it with a contemporary flourish in the form of works by Takashi Murakami, who is known for his extravagant paintings and sculptures that bring traditional Japanese imagery into a new age.
April 5–August 4
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“Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive” at Haus der Kunst, Munich
Image Credit: Photo Stephen Weiss/Courtesy the artist While many male artists in New York during the 1970s were making muscular, grand installations from industrial materials, Liliane Lijn, working in the United Kingdom, struck out in a different mode, creating abstract glass sculptures that were meant to represent goddesses. Her goal, she said, was to “reinvest the feminine with spiritual power.” By this point, Lijn had made motorized sculptures that turned on their own accord, going against the notion that works in that medium ought to remain static; she would go on to produce more multimedia pieces that continued to explore the very nature of light itself. Always a rulebreaker, Lijn will at long last get a big retrospective.
April 5–September 22
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“Creative Growth: The House That Art Built” at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Image Credit: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Quietly, the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, has been helping to shape the American art scene, providing people with developmental disabilities a shot at an artist career. The center made possible the work of Judith Scott and Dan Miller, both of whom have been roundly praised, and in a sign of its impact, SFMOMA acquired dozens of works from Creative Growth to mark the organization’s 50th anniversary. This show brings together more than 80 of those works, plus a newly commissioned William Scott painting that will include “map-like renderings of San Francisco and portraits of the people who populate his life and dreams,” per the museum.
April 6–October 6
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“Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes” at Denver Art Museum
Image Credit: ©Sandra Vásquez de la Horra/Courtesy the artist/Photo Cordia Schlegelmilch Hot off appearing in the 2022 Venice Biennale, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is getting her first US survey with this exhibition featuring some 193 of her drawings, sculptures, and photographs. Born in Chile and based in Germany, Vásquez de la Horra often blends Latin American mythology and European artistic tradition, typically creating images of women engaged in a dreamy communion with the natural environment. More often than not, the people she represents hover between this world and another imagined one, with traits that cause them to appear more like fantastical beings.
April 7–July 21
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“I Am Copying Nobody: The Art and Political Cartoons of Akinola Lasekan” at Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia
Image Credit: Photo Alexander's Photography/Hampton University Museum This Nigerian artist, a figure associated with the growth of a modernist art scene in the country, is little-known in the US, though this exhibition seems poised to change that. The drawings, paintings, and political cartoons here attest to how Lasekan harnessed Western modes of art-making to speak to a Nigerian audience, depicting the people around him and critiquing those in power in the process. The Chrysler show is staged in partnership with the Hampton University Museum in Virginia and is focused specifically on works previously owned by the Harmon Foundation, a now-defunct organization that supported Black artists during the mid-20th century, at a time when they did not receive as much attention from the nation’s biggest museums.
April 13–August 11
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“Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge” at Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Image Credit: ©Jean Clement Eugene Mar Cocteau, by SIAE 2024/Private Collection Many modernists were at odds with the multihyphenate Jean Cocteau, even as he sought their approval: Pablo Picasso worked with him on a number of theatrical productions, but dodged his attempts at closer friendship frequently; André Breton famously despised Cocteau, despite the latter having been classified as a Surrealist himself. Consider this retrospective Cocteau’s belated retribution, then. With paintings, films, books, photographs, jewelry, drawings, and more, this show asserts Cocteau as an integral figure of modernism, with plenty to say about changing sexual mores and subconscious desires.
April 13–September 16
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“Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Image Credit: ©Linda Lomahaftewa/Photo Jason S. Ordaz/Courtesy Logan Slock and Ana Kuny While a spate of recent surveys have focused on Indigenous artists active right now, this show reaches back further, zeroing in on a postwar movement called the Indian Space Painters. These artists looked to the gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists and found that it actually had a lot to do with Native American styles of centuries past. White painters had previously sourced inspiration from Haida and Tlingit art for their abstractions; the Indian Space Painters cultivated a closer relationship to that material. The show also brings the Indian Space painters into the present, suggesting that their art shares commonalities with that of younger artists such as Dyani White Hawk, whose beaded abstractions merge European modernism and Indigenous craftwork.
April 13–September 30
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“Willem de Kooning e l’Italia” at Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice
Image Credit: ©2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/SIAE/Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland Willem de Kooning is typically thought of as being synonymous with the American art scene, in particular the New York School of the postwar era, but this show stakes a claim for Italy as one of his prime inspirations. The Abstract Expressionist stayed in Italy in 1959 and 1969—during the former time, he was put up in painter Afro Basaldella’s Roman studio—and continued to paint, sculpt, and draw all the while, spinning sights seen in the capital city and Spoleto into abstraction. Yet the show includes works made well into the 1980s, the implication being that de Kooning’s Italian sojourns had an impact that lasted for the whole of his career.
April 17–September 15
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“Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes” at Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
Image Credit: Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig A year of Caspar David Friedrich intended to mark the 250th anniversary of the Romantic painter’s birth continues on in Germany with this survey, which includes 60 paintings by the artist. Many of those images situate small figures against vast vistas that engulf them; the mountains, icebergs, and waterfalls represented are by turns beautiful and horrifying in their intensity. In its first eight weeks alone, another Friedrich blockbuster, now on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, was seen by 157,000 people. It’s a fair bet that this show will also be seen in droves.
April 19–August 4
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“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” at Art Institute of Chicago
Image Credit: ©The Estate of Christina Ramberg/Photo Jamie Stukenberg/Collection of Anstiss and Ronald Krueck, Chicago The late, great Chicago artist Christina Ramberg was a true art-historical whatsit, conforming to no specific movement or group while also devising an aesthetic unique to herself. Her figurative paintings from the ’70s are dreamy and bizarre; they feature contorted female bodies, misshapen hands knotted with fabric, and genderless garments that appear to have dissolved into their wearers. To top it off, Ramberg quit painting for quilt-making in the ’80s, moving her practice in an entirely different direction in her career’s final stages. Remarkably, this 100-work retrospective is her first major one in the United States in 30 years.
April 20–August 11
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“Zilia Sánchez: Toplogias / Topologies” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Galerie Lelong & Co. This Cuban-born, Puerto Rico–based artist, now nearing 100, has only garnered more widespread acclaim in recent years for her abstract paintings stretched across wooden constructions. These paintings, which often pay homage to women across time, are beguiling to behold: they are taut, gorgeous, and unlike many other shaped canvases of the past half-century. Her ICA Miami survey includes some of these works, as well as early works made in Havana, where Sánchez aided in creating a turn away from figurative, naturalistic imagery. The show opens on the same day as the Venice Biennale, where Sánchez’s art will also be on view.
April 20–October 13
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Venice Biennale
Image Credit: Photo Maria and Mansour Dib/Courtesy Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation Curator Adriano Pedrosa has been influential for the programming he has devised for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where he has organized lauded shows such as “Afro-Atlantic Histories.” Now, he will bring his trailblazing sensibility to the Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest art festival. With 331 artists included, his exhibition, titled “Foreigners Everywhere” and focused on artists who crossed borders, is set to be sprawling and vast. Notably, it includes not just today’s most important artists, but yesterday’s as well, with an emphasis on figures like Pacita Abad, Bertina Lopes, and Freddy Rodriguez, who hailed from the Global South and found a following outside the countries in which they were born.
April 20–November 24
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“Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei” at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
Image Credit: Photo Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images Within the US, where he is based, Theaster Gates is well-loved for taking up ready-made materials related to the Black experience—a piano, a disused bank, the archives of the magazine Ebony—and imbuing them with new life. A lesser-known part of his practice is his pottery produced in response to his travels in Japan, where has studied the mingei movement, which, in the 20th century, sought to uphold craft objects as being different from, and in some ways equally as important as, pieces that are commonly regarded as artworks. Gates has revived that theory with his own take on it, known as “Afro-Mingei,” which infuses the concept with an emphasis on Black identity. Gates’s sculptures owing their ideas to Japanese culture will form the bulk of this exhibition, which marks his big introduction to the country.
April 24–September 1
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“Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter, and the Blue Rider” at Tate Modern, London
Image Credit: Lenbachhaus, Munich The Blue Rider of this show’s title refers to the horse-and-rider motif that recurred regularly throughout Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc’s works of the 1910s, which are filled with fabulously colored imagery that looks quite unlike life itself. For Kandinsky, Marc, Gabriele Münter, and others in their circle, that was very much the point—they, along with the other movement known as German Expressionism, wanted to leap into the fray and create a new kind of imagery that bore little relation to reality. How those artists went about achieving their aesthetic goals is the subject of this survey featuring a heaping of works from Munich’s Lenbachhaus museum that rarely travel.
April 25–October 20
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Petrit Halilaj at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Image Credit: Photo Gerardo Landa Rojano Following a grand survey at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Kosovo-born phenom Petrit Halilaj will take over the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mounting a newly commissioned installation. His past pieces—many of them hits with critics when they’ve appeared at international biennials—have taken up his Kosovar heritage and his feelings of displacement abroad, where his home country is not always recognized as a legitimate nation. But his work is never negative and is, if anything, hopeful, enlisting blooming flowers, bird-like creatures, and more in his sculptures and installations. His Met commission is likely to expand on that imagery.
April 30–October 27
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“June Clark: Witness” at the Power Plant, Toronto
Image Credit: Photo Dean Tomlinson/Courtesy the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery Toronto is having something of a June Clark moment, with the Art Gallery of Ontario having opened a small presentation of her work this winter, followed by this show opening in May, which is billed as her first survey in the country she now calls home. Long based in Harlem before departing for Canada in 1968 while New York was roiled by protest, Clark, now in her 80s, has considered how seemingly inanimate objects hold living memories. Early photo-based work will appear in this show alongside more recent installations, assemblages, collages, sculptures, and more.
May 3–August 11
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“Ana Lupas: On This Side of the River Elbe” at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Image Credit: Photo Carlo Favero/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam In 1970, Ana Lupas enlisted a bunch of women living in rural Romania to hang wet linens across lines and allow the sheets to dry. That work, titled Humid Installation, was among Lupas’s first major statements about female forms of labor as seen through the handling of fabrics and clothes. Since then, Lupas has created installations, sculptures, and more that make visible the unseen networks formed among women. Finally, this octogenarian artist is getting a comprehensive survey that aims to uphold her as one of the finest artists to emerge from Eastern Europe in the past half-century.
May 9–September 15
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“LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity” at Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image Credit: ©2023 LaToya Ruby Frazier/Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery The water crisis afflicting the predominantly Black populace of Flint, Michigan, is tough to visualize, but one of the reasons the larger public knows about it at all is through LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, which searingly, tenderly depict the disturbed daily lives of the city’s residents. Working within a tradition seeded by American photojournalists from the first half of the 20th century, Frazier has memorably turned her lens on union members and her own family, and has explored how communities keep each other alive in the face of racism and other forms of prejudice. She views these pictures as monuments to individuals, and for this MoMA survey that revisits those bodies of work, she will also debut a new photographic series paying homage to the labor activist Dolores Huerta.
May 12–September 7
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“Reynaldo Rivera: Fistful of Love/También la Belleza” at MoMA PS1, New York
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist Reynaldo Rivera’s grainy black-and-white photographs of Mexican American culture in Los Angeles contain a blunt force, even when their subjects—nightlife and drunken revelry, predominantly—are seemingly banal. “It’s hard not to cry,” critic Christina Catherine Martinez once wrote of these works. It has been an unlikely journey for Rivera, who, after living itinerantly in California and Mexico as a kid, ended up in LA and taught himself photography. With his institutional bona fides now firmly secured following an appearance in the 2020 edition of the Hammer Museum’s taste-making Made in L.A. biennial, Rivera is now having his first solo museum show, which will include never-before-seen pictures.
May 16–September 9
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Ghislaine Leung at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Simian, Copenhagen In her current exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Ghislaine Leung is showing a work called Jobs (2024), which takes the form of a sheet of paper that rattles off all the positions the artist has held, from babysitter to mother. It looks little like an artwork at all, and that, in some ways, is its larger point: to visualize how art exhibitions are the result of many kinds of labor that often go unseen. Though highly conceptual in nature, Leung’s work has received wide acclaim, earning her a Turner Prize nomination last year. As her star ascends, she will create a site-specific project for the Kunsthalle Basel, ensuring that it will be one of the most widely seen shows mounted during Art Basel—even if it does end up containing few Instagram-worthy objects.
May 17–August 11
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“Jenny Holzer: Light Line” at Guggenheim Museum, New York
Image Credit: ©2023 Jenny Holzer/Photo David Heald, ©Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York Among the most famous transformations of the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda was one that Jenny Holzer produced in 1989, in which cryptic phrases in LED lights crawled up the institution’s spiraling ramp. “YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE BY,” one of those phrases read. Thirty-five years on, similar ones will likely appear once more in the Guggenheim, where Holzer is now set to revisit her 1989 installation, this time through the lens of 2024. Naturally, that means she will be using AI, which will help Holzer author her mysterious words.
May 17–September 29
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“Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Production” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Image Credit: Photo Hector Martinez Theorist José Esteban Muñoz once said that artist Vaginal Davis enacts “terrorist drag,” a reference to the ways that her music, performances, and films flout gender norms in ways that can sometimes be unpalatable. Having come up in the punk scene, Davis is now a fixture in the mainstream art world, producing work that considers resistance to racists, misogynists, and homophobes. And in keeping with Davis’s emphasis on art that resists being pinned down, this show is technically spread across multiple Swedish museums in addition to the Moderna Museet, all of which will showcase a different portion of her output.
May 17–October 13
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“OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Image Credit: ©OSGEMEOS/Photo Eduardo Ortega/Collection of Paula Lavigne If you have encountered an OSGEMEOS painting, it has likely been outside—and not inside—a museum; that’s one reason this institutional survey is notable. Another is the show’s size, at 1,000 works, which perhaps the best way to represent just how prolific this Brazilian duo, a pair of twins hailing from São Paulo, has been over the past few decades. Having started as break-dancers, Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo turned to street art in the late ’80s, and have since then been envisioning dreamy worlds unrelated to ours that are populated by their signature jaundiced figures. Will their work avoid getting lost in translation and becoming a victim of a KAWS effect plaguing museums today? The show will prove a crucial test.
May 18–July 6
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“Mary Cassatt at Work” at Philadelphia Museum of Art
Image Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art Think of laborers represented in French art of the Impressionist era, and you may come up with a work like Gustave Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers (1875), in which a group of workers are shown on their hands and knees in a bourgeois apartment. Yet there are forms of labor that look quite unlike that one, and this show pays mind to a vastly different one: motherhood, a frequent subject for the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt. Her tender paintings of matriarchs and their children will appear here alongside pieces depicting women reading and embroidering, marking a major attempt to expand on prior feminist studies of Cassatt.
May 18–September 8
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“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” at the Broad, Los Angeles
Image Credit: ©Mickalene Thomas In Mickalene Thomas’s paintings, Black women stare back proudly and assuredly, ensconced in domestic settings that fracture into mismatched planes. The style is more than simply an allusion to Cubism and other modernist movements—it suggests, and demands, that viewers must see these women from many angles, as though they were too complex to be seen in just one way. Studded with rhinestones and beloved by many, these paintings will figure in an 80-work Thomas survey that aspires to assert her as an essential artist of our current moment. The show was organized by the Broad with the Hayward Gallery, and done in partnership with the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia; it will travel to those venues after its run in Los Angeles.
May 25–September 29