News

Opening this Week

Taryn Simon
The Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Collection

September 23, 2021–January 9, 2022
New York Public Library
www.nypl.org

A project nine years in the making, The Color of a Flea’s Eye foregrounds the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, whose storied images have been available, for more than a century, for the public to sift through in search of visual references of every conceivable kind. Intrigued by the Picture Collection since childhood, in 2012 Taryn Simon embarked on a study of its underlying patterns, codes, and orders. Her photography of its contents reveals it to be an inadvertent recorder of changing social mores, disclosing latent fault lines of power, race, and gender.

Closing this Week

Dream Monuments
Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s

Through September 19, 2021
Menil Collection, Houston
www.menil.org

This exhibition presents drawings that challenge the conventional idea of the monument as a permanent, grand, or commemorative form. The provisional character of drawing helped artists envision forms in improbable scales and for impossible conditions, radically transforming the monument to reflect a new set of sensibilities. Scaled to the size of the page but enormous in ambition, these works rethink history while rendering environments as at turns absurd, surreal, or subjective. Work by Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer is included.

Closing this Week

Wonderland

Through September 19, 2021
Albertina Modern, Vienna
www.albertina.at

Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this exhibition features more than a hundred contemporary artworks from the Albertina’s collection organized into seven different “chapters” conceived as independent yet loosely connected “worlds.”  Work by Georg Baselitz, Katharina Grosse, Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Albert Oehlen, Andy Warhol, and Franz West is included.

Closing this Week

Road Rage

Through September 20, 2021
The Church, Sag Harbor, New York
www.sagharborchurch.org

Road Rage brings together works by twenty-four artists who use the car as subject or material. Dating from the 1960s to the present, the paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, and animated film on display consider automobiles as tools of travel, consumption, and commerce, and as icons of wealth, class, leisure, power, destruction, and pollution. Work by Gregory Crewdson and Richard Prince is included.

Just Opened

Titus Kaphar in
The Black Index

Through December 11, 2021
Art Galleries at Black Studies, University of Texas at Austin
www.galleriesatut.org

The artists featured in The Black Index build upon the tradition of Black self-representation as an antidote to colonialist images. Using drawing, performance, printmaking, sculpture, and digital technology to transform the recorded image, they question our reliance on photography as a privileged source for documentary objectivity and understanding. Their works offer an alternative practice—a Black index—that serves as a finding aid for information about Black subjects, but also challenges viewers’ desire for classification. Work by Titus Kaphar is included. This exhibition originated at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, University of California, Irvine.

Just Opened

Chaïm Soutine/Willem de Kooning, la peinture incarnée

Through January 10, 2022
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
www.musee-orangerie.fr

Chaïm Soutine/Willem de Kooning, la peinture incarnée explores affinities between the work of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). The exhibition, which places nearly forty-five works by the two artists in visual dialogue, considers how Soutine’s paintings, with their built-up surfaces and energetic brushwork, informed de Kooning’s art, shaping his figurative/abstract works in the late 1940s and beyond. This exhibition has traveled from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where it had the title Soutine/de Kooning: Conversations in Paint.

Just Opened

Helen Frankenthaler
Radical Beauty

Through April 18, 2022
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

Radical Beauty presents Helen Frankenthaler’s groundbreaking woodcuts, which appear painterly and spontaneous with expanses of color and fluid forms. The exhibition reveals Frankenthaler as a trailblazer of the mid-century printmaking renaissance among American abstract artists, endlessly pushing the possibilities of the medium through experimentation. Highlights of the exhibition include East and Beyond (1973), created by printing onto multiple blocks to avoid negative space, and Cameo (1980), in which Frankenthaler introduced a new layered approach to color using her “guzzying” technique, where she worked surfaces with sandpaper and dental tools to achieve different effects.

Just Opened

Y.Z. Kami in
Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians

Through January 16, 2022
Asia Society, New York
asiasociety.org

Drawn from the Mohammed Afkhami Collection, Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians presents works by more than twenty artists from Iran and its diaspora. Revising traditional aesthetics and probing subjects such as gender identity, war, peace, religion, and spirituality, the works, which date from 1998 to the present, are realized in a variety of mediums, from painting and sculpture to photography and video installation. Through open critique or subterfuge, humor, spirituality, and poetry, the artists overcome the restrictions and pressures that have affected Iranians in the past quarter century. This exhibition originated at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. Work by Y.Z. Kami is included.

Just Opened

Sterling Ruby in
Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams

Through February 20, 2022
Brooklyn Museum, New York
www.brooklynmuseum.org

This exhibition traces the groundbreaking history and legacy of the House of Dior, bringing to life Dior’s many sources of inspiration, from the splendor of flowers and other natural forms to classical and contemporary art. With objects drawn primarily from the Dior archives, it includes over two hundred haute couture garments as well as photographs, archival videos, sketches, vintage perfume elements, accessories, and works from the museum’s collection. Work by Sterling Ruby is included.

Just Opened

Sarah Sze in
On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale

Through January 9, 2022
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
artgallery.yale.edu

On the Basis of Art celebrates the achievements of women artists who have graduated from Yale University. Presented on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the University, who came to study at the Yale School of the Fine Arts when it opened in 1869—the exhibition features works drawn entirely from the Yale University Art Gallery’s collection. The exhibition title refers to a phrase in Title IX, the landmark 1972 US federal law declaring that no one in an education program receiving federal financial assistance could be discriminated against “on the basis of sex.” Work by Sarah Sze is included.

Just Opened

Andy Warhol
Photo Factory

Through January 31, 2022
Fotografiska, New York
www.fotografiska.com

Photo Factory presents some of Andy Warhol’s earliest photographic works, offering a glimpse into his experimentation with the medium and how it served as a catalyst for his early silkscreen paintings, commissioned portraits, and commercial work. The exhibition features Polaroids of celebrities, artists, and friends; lesser-seen unique gelatin silver prints; Polaroid collages; 16mm film Screen Tests from the mid-1960s; and stitched photographs from Warhol’s final exhibition in 1987.

On View

Katharina Grosse in
Helsinki Biennial: On the Shores of the Same Sea

Through September 26, 2021
Various sites on Vallisaari Island and on mainland Helsinki
helsinkibiennaali.fi

The inaugural Helsinki Biennial brings contemporary art to the unique surroundings of Vallisaari Island, a short ferry ride from mainland Helsinki. Artworks are installed along a three-kilometer-long trail and inside the island’s historical buildings, as well as on the mainland. Exploring themes of interconnectedness and mutual dependence, the biennial includes work by forty artists and collectives from Finland and around the world, including Katharina Grosse, who converted Vallisaari’s old derelict school building and its surroundings into a painting.