Summer 2004: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between May and August.

Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-70s

Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

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June 13-October 3

Curated by Lynn Zelevansky

Minimalism is big this year. Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art has rolled out "A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968," while the Guggenheim Museum in New York is offering "Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present." With this pair of surveys, what more could one want?

Enter "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-70s," at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Where the former two shows focus on the heyday of American Minimalism, the LACMA exhibition is composed of an international selection of artists and reaches back to 1944 to explore the roots of minimal geometries in the work of such artists as Max Bill from Switzerland, Gyula Kosice from Argentina, and Carmelo Arden Quin from Uruguay. In fact, well over half the artists hail from Europe and South America. Bill is a key figure in this transcontinental narrative: His airless interpretation of Mondrian exerted a significant influence in South America in the '50s (thanks partly to his inclusion in the 1951 Sao Paulo biennial), as well as in Europe, spawning an array of movements and countermovements.

Comprising some 130 artists, "Beyond Geometry" will show no more than a few works by each of them, even though almost all worked in series. But what the show lacks in depth, it makes up for in breadth. The exhibition title, which really means geometry and beyond (including kinetic, Op, body, Conceptual, performance, and installation art), seems to welcome every spot and stripe. The challenge, then, is organizing such diversity.

Lynn Zelevansky, LACMA's curator of modern and contemporary art, nicely addresses this concern in her catalogue essay by pointing out that "geometric art" was never much of a category anyway, since the works placed under that heading often fuse rule and reason with intuition, even irrationality. She points to the measured absurdity of Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages and the dual persona of Theo van Doesburg as Dada provocateur and de Stijl engineer. The wide-ranging van Doesburg is an especially apt figure to invoke: His 1930 definition of Concrete Art called for works "entirely conceived and formulated" in advance, making him an early Conceptualist in addition to his other guises.

Judging from the serious catalogue, the exhibition should work hard to make sense of all the ground it covers. So forget the advance quibbles: Simply to bring to light this international history and the artists who made it, alongside the more familiar North Americans, is a great service. Prepare to have your head spun round and your eyes opened. And remember what Emerson said about that most primary cipher: "The eye is the first circle."

--Harry Cooper

Travels to the Miami Art Museum, Nov. 18-May 1, 2005.

NEW YORK

ED Ruscha

Whitney Museum of American Art 

June 27-September 26

Curated by Margit Rowell; Sylvia Wolf

Concurrent exhibitions treat aspects of Ed Ruscha's work that remain unexamined even after two recent retrospectives. Margit Rowell's "Cotton Puffs, Q-tips[R], Smoke and Mirrors" gathers 204 works on paper in this first large survey of his drawings, from his images of LA's iconic signs and less iconic apartment buildings to his fine-spun word drawings. Downstairs, Sylvia Wolf presents fifty of the artist's vintage prints and studies, including his amateurish snapshots from Conceptual beachheads like Twentysix Gasoline Stations, to establish the discreteness of Ruscha's photographic practice and to complicate his claim that he is "not really a photographer." "Cotton Puffs" travels to MOCA, Los Angeles, Oct. 17-Jan. 17, 2005; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Feb. 13, 2005-May 30, 2005.--Lisa Pasquariello

Tall Buildings

MOMA QNS

July 16-September 27

Curated by Terence Riley and Guy Nordenson

Often existing simply as a rearguard action against the inevitable banality of the merely immense, most office towers constructed over the last quarter century are little more than architectural one-liners. Curators Terence Riley of MOMA's Department of Architecture and Design and Guy Nordenson, a prominent structural engineer, hope to demonstrate that the genre still has legs. This show features photographs, drawings, and models of twenty-five "tall buildings" from around the world and in various stages of completion, including built projects like Norman Foster's Swiss Re building in London (aka the "erotic gherkin") and more imaginative yet unrealized proposals by Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl. But the real attraction will be the scale models--compelling works of sculpture in their own right.--Kevin Pratt

NEW YORK

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China

Asia Society/International Center of Photography

June 11-September 5

Curated by Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips

Contemporary art from China is the latest hot ticket, so it's hard to see how this survey of Chinese photography and video from the past decade can miss. Given that most of its fifty artists are exhibiting in the US for the first time, talent pickers should be out in force. Since Chinese art photography was subject until recently to an officially sanctioned, academic aesthetic rooted in Pictorialism (filtered through the traditions of Chinese painting), the 125 works here, which smack of postmodernist cultural critique, are sure to come as a shock to American eyes. Travels to the Smart Museum of Art and MCA, Chicago, Oct. 2-Jan. 16, 2005; Seattle Art Museum, Feb. 10, 2005-May 15, 2005; and other venues.--Andy Grundberg

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Modigliani: Beyond the Myth

Jewish Museum

May 21-September 19

Curated by Mason Klein

Even if he hadn't lived the quintessential vie boheme--partaking of torrid affairs, carousing with fellow avant-gardists, succumbing to tuberculosis at thirtyfive--Amedeo Modigliani would be well remembered for his instantly recognizable portraits of the stylishly gaunt. New Yorkers haven't seen his work en masse since MOMA's 1951 retrospective, so this exhibition of more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, and drawings offers an exceptional chance to take measure "beyond the myth." A forthcoming indie biopic, a lusty tale of "true genius, like van Gogh and Mozart" starring Andy Garcia, should give the demythologization effort some healthy competition. Travels to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Oct. 23-Jan. 23, 2005; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Feb. 26, 2005-May 29, 2005.--Jennifer Liese

Treble

SculptureCenter

May 16-August 1

Curated by Regine Basha

Despite an explosion of interest in the art form over the past few years, New York hasn't hosted a major sound-art exhibition since P.S. I's "Volume: Bed of Sound" extravaganza in 2000. "Treble," organized by Regine Basha, a curator at Arthouse in Austin, Texas, brings sound-art practice up-to-date, featuring nineteen works by an intriguing selection of international artists--from pioneer Max Neuhaus and reigning audio stars Steve Roden and Stephen Vitiello to lesser-known sonic explorers such as Grady Gerbracht, Brad Tucker, and Andrea Ray--working in a variety of media: architectural installation, sculpture, video, and, interestingly, drawing. Although arranged independently from New Sound, New York, "Treble" caps off this annual citywide festival running at various venues through May 16.--Christoph Cox

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BOSTON

Kai Althoff

Institute of Contemporary Art

May 26-September 6

Curated by Nicholas Baume

Tormented, sweet, angry, expressionistic, nostalgic, utterly contemporary--Kai Althoff's eclectic artwork is all that and more. The Cologne-based artist is known on American shores mostly for watercolors and oils that evoke nineteenth-century German history, folklore, and Biedermeier genre scenes or, in darker moments, the baleful narratives of George Grosz. But Althoff's first survey at a US museum includes over 140 works in a range of media from the past twenty-five years: paintings, photography, works on paper, installations, and videos, as well as audio presentation of his musical output. The artist-as-polymath also collaborated on the design for the catalogue, which includes essays by Clarissa Dalrymple and Diedrich Diederichsen. Travels to the MCA, Chicago, Sept. 23-Jan. 16, 2005.--Meghan Dailey

NORTH ADAMS, MA

The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere

Mass MOCA

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May 29-March 2005

Curated by Nato Thompson

During the '90s, artists' participatory strategies were notoriously shy when it came to political engagement; today, a socially reoriented position is on the rise and gaining institutional recognition. This exhibition presents twenty-eight artists and collaborative groups whose work represents an attempt to reinvent the neo-avant-garde experience of the '60s and the critical practices of the '80s within today's cultural and political context. Exploring the connections among art, globalization, and political struggle, the show establishes a possible genealogy for the work presented (from Lucy Orta to the Reverend Billy to Dre Wapenaar) while acknowledging the continuing expansion of contemporary art's methods and audiences.--Carlos Basualdo

WILLIAMSTOWN, MA

Ezra Stoller

Williams College Museum of Art 

June 19-December 19

Curated by Deborah Rothschild

Rem Koolhaas once said that when he first came to New York, there was no building he was more excited to visit, and none that disappointed him more, than the Seagram Building. Perhaps Ezra Stoller bears some of the blame. It was he, after all, who created the dramatic photographs that presented Mies van der Rohe's Manhattan masterpiece to the world. In one of his most famous shots, Stoller focuses not on the elegant black tower but on the open plaza in front. Creating this void at street's edge was Mies's most radical idea for the project, and Stoller nailed it. Now, senior curator Deborah Rothschild gathers over fifty black-and-white prints, spanning 1958 to 1977, of the photographer's famous American architectural subjects--from Wright's Fallingwater to Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal.--Daniel Herman

RIDGEFIELD, CT

Into My World: Recent British Sculpture

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

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June 13-September 1

Curated by Stephen Hepworth and Jessica Hough

Most of the London art world is hesitant to generalize about post-YBA art. Stephen Hepworth isn't: As curator at London's Jerwood Gallery in the late '90s and a gun for hire since, Hepworth has regularly come up with new rubrics (e.g., "Dumbpop"). Few stick, but the shows are unarguably helpful in identifying emerging key players. "Alternate realities" seems to apply here: Collating nineteen works by nine artists, all of whom, to some degree, create their own worlds--whether literally (Mike Nelson's grandiose, multicelled installations) or in model form (Mariele Neudecker's vitrined, fog-swept landscape miniatures)--Hepworth and Aldrich curator Jessica Hough have scooped up a number of the UK's brightest hopes.--Martin Herbert

PHILADELPHIA

The Big Nothing

Institute of Contemporary Art

May 1-August 1

Curated by Ingrid Schaffner, Bennett Simpson, and Tanya Leighton

One of Nietzsche's most famous apothegms goes something like this: Don't stare too long into the abyss or the abyss might stare back into you. The curators of "The Big Nothing" remain unfazed, and their show expands to thirty-six venues in the City of Brotherly Love, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with its legendary Duchamp collection. Focusing on the "driving ideas of modern and contemporary art, nothingness and negation," the exhibition features such vacuous classics as Artschwager, Warhol, and Klein, as well as a hollow-eyed cadre of contemporaries, like Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler, and William Pope.L. The catalogue contains essays by curators Ingrid Schaffner, Tanya Leighton, and Bennett Simpson. Smells like l'air de Paris.--David Rimanelli

WASHINGTON, DC

Sally Mann

Corcoran Gallery of Art 

June 12-September 7

Curated by Philip Brookman

In her often haunting photographic series "What Remains," Sally Mann conflates the Romantic appreciation of disintegration's inherent beauty, the photograph's compulsive preservation of the past, and a southern narrative that evokes both. Through her eyes, the landscape becomes an unrelenting burial site that composts considerable psychic weight. Organized by senior curator of photography and media arts Philip Brookman and accompanied by a substantial monograph, this exhibition features more than ninety gestural and glossy wet-collodion prints that reward the viewer with their depth and resonance. Of particular interest is a group of close-up portraits that transforms the Mann children into shrouds. What remains is a tradition of loss.--Stephen Frailey

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CHICAGO

Roni Horn

Art Institute of Chicago 

May 25-September 5

Curated by James Rondeau 

For Roni Horn's show, over eighty photographs of the eponymous river in her ongoing Some Thames are installed in a lateral sequence coursing through the Art Institute's public spaces (collection and exhibition galleries) and private recesses (the library and administrative offices). On view in its entirety for the first time in the US, the series is accompanied by Saying Water, Horn's slide show and performance comprising visual and historical anecdotes relating to the Thames. Here, the dark surface opacity of Some Thames's mutable, oily material is penetrated by the haunting narratives of suicide and drowning that lurked too long beneath the surface. To get lost in the formal inquiry of Horn's subtle enunciations is to risk getting caught in her undertow.--Suzanne Hudson

Dan Peterman 

Museum of Contemporary Art

June 26-September 12

Curated by Lynne Warren

"Environmental" is the lazy way of describing Dan Peterman's work. While his art is about resource recovery--he incorporates recycled materials into his projects--it's also alchemical, sociological, and activist. Formally indebted to Smithson and Judd, Peterman's pioneering work still holds underground standing in his home city of Chicago, but his first major survey in the US should change that. Seventeen works made since 1985 constitute the show's bulk, while an archive features site-specific and nonextant projects. Peterman has also created four new installations, including a truck retrofitted with recycled scientific equipment. Most in keeping with Peterman's ethos is a group of waste receptacles altered to accommodate social uses and created in collaboration with the Chicago Park District.--Annette Ferrara

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HOUSTON

Olafur Eliasson

Menil Collection

May 26-September 5

Curated by Matthew Drutt

Olafur Eliasson's radiant Weather Project, which transformed Tate Modern's Turbine Hall last year, rightly landed on more than one of Artforum's "Best of 2003" lists and prompted Daniel Birnbaum to declare the rebirth of the sublime. Meteorological elements--light, heat, moisture--have long been Eliasson's tools and inspiration. From his emergence in the late '80s to his inclusion in the 2003 Venice Biennale, the artist has introduced everything from rainbows to lava into the insulated space of the gallery. The first museum survey of his photographic work displays serial images of glaciers, rivers, and islands originally produced as studies for some thirty-one installations from the past decade. The catalogue features an interview with the artist and essays by, among others, Menil curator Matthew Drutt.--Michael Wilson

LOS ANGELES

Edmund Teske

J. Paul Getty Museum

June 15-September 26

Curated by Julian Cox

One of the great oddballs of American photography, Edmund Teske (1911-96) remains best known for complex, mostly abstract darkroom concoctions that owe a large debt to the Surrealist faith in happy accident. Streaked and stained to the point of muddiness, these prints nevertheless helped to inspire a wave of process-oriented photography on the West Coast in the '70s. Now the Getty is looking at the whole of Teske's career: These 115 images, taken over a forty-year period, reveal that his chops extended to social documentation, nudes, portraiture, and architectural views. Roughly seventy-five of these are being shown for the first time. Whether they call for a reconsideration of Teske's place in the margins of twentieth-century photography is a question this show should answer.--AG

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SAN FRANCISCO

Larry Sultan

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 

May 8-August 1

Curated by Sandra S. Phillips

Is there realism in porn films? While the sets of these movies are part of their artifice, the shoots often occur in rented suburban homes. Larry Sultan's recent photographic series "The Valley" makes these locations his subject, and the trappings of middle-class life are everywhere evident: manicured lawns, family photos, dolls in a little girl's room, and, for Southern California, the requisite pool. But instead of splashing kids, Sultan's large-scale color photographs show us lights, cameras, performers, and crew. Senior curator of photography Sandra S. Phillips has chosen fifty-three of these behind-the-scenes peeks, which are revealing of both American domesticity and how the adult-film industry mirrors a site viewers either recognize or desire--where fantasy and the everyday are entwined.--Bob Nickas

SEATTLE

Santiago Calatrava

Henry Art Gallery

July 16-October 10

Curated by Jordan Howland and Kirsten Kiser

Santiago Calatrava's design for the new PATH train station at Ground Zero brings a welcome sense of lightness to a district saddled with monumentalizing a tragedy. In a signature Calatrava gesture, the station's expressive structure extends beyond the building envelope, fanning across the sky like reeds in the breeze. This implication of gentle motion will be actualized every September 11, when the glass roof opens to offer an unimpeded view of sky. Such evocative marriages of skeletonic morphology and transportation infrastructure form the core of Calatrava's oeuvre. This midcareer survey assembles over sixty artifacts from his twenty-year practice, including models, watercolors, photographs, video walk-throughs, and a catalogue that reproduces his design sketches.--DH

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LONDON

Edward Hopper

Tate Modern

May 27-September 5

Curated by Sheena Wagstaff

British audiences haven't seen much Edward Hopper since the Whitney's 1980 retrospective traveled to London's Hayward Gallery, so this show is the first to test the American artist's dour probity against the freewheeling post-YBA climate. Tate Modern curator Sheena Wagstaff aims to present a straightforward look at Hopper's achievement: roughly eighty oils, watercolors, prints, and preparatory drawings, from his early plein air sketches of Paris to the increasingly frugal mindscapes of his last years. Running concurrently with a survey of Hopper fan Luc Tuymans, the show features a film program selected by Todd Haynes and a catalogue with essays by Wagstaff, Brian O'Doherty, and others. Travels to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Oct. 9-Jan. 9, 2005.--Alexi Worth

LONDON

Luc Tuymans

Tate Modern

June 23-September 26

Curated by Emma Dexter

Luc Tuymans has been everyone's favorite candidate for serious European painter for several years now. Far away from the American brand of ostentatious figuration, Tuymans draws on Raoul de Keyser for minimalist eccentricity and Richter for a mournful commentary on painting itself. Tate senior curator Emma Dexter brings together eighty works from the past twenty years for the artist's first major exhibition in the UK. Tuymans's seemingly impersonal combination of weighty topics (ranging from the Congo to the Holocaust); the faint affect of found photographs (on which his work is often based); and lovely, offhand handling produces an indelible sadness--a history of absence, lost changes, and missing links. Travels to Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Oct. 16-Jan. 23, 2005.--Katy Siegel

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Art of the Garden

Tate Britain

June 3-August 30

Curated by Nicholas Alfrey, Stephen Daniels, Mary Horlock, Martin Postle, and Ben Tufnell

Without Gertrude Jekyll and Sissinghurst, Britain would not be Britain. Celebrating the bicentenary of the Royal Horticultural Society, Tate Britain offers an eccentric bounty of garden-inspired art ranging from trysting places and melancholic inscriptions to bursts of poppies that might have taught Victorians how painting, like flower arrangement, should be about beauty. This anthology of roughly 125 works promises to be neither conservative nor predictable. If Constable and Turner, Spencer and Nash are here, so is Beatrix Potter. And to shake up the garden-club members, flowers and rocks will be brought up-to-date by young photographers as well as by such alchemists as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Marc Quinn.--Robert Rosenblum

Tamara de Lempicka 

Royal Academy of Arts 

May 15-August 30

Curated by Evelyn Benesch, Ingried Brugger, Simonetta Fraquelli, and Norman Rosenthal

Putting her art at the disposal of the moneyed European, and, later, American, class to which she belonged, Russian-born painter Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) created some of the most iconic paintings of the Art Deco period. This first major UK exhibition of her work gathers fifty-five portraits, still lifes, and nudes mainly from the interwar era and features a comprehensive catalogue with essays by, among others, Alain Blondel, author of Lempicka's catalogue raisonne. The artist's bohemian life is easily read in her sleek, often androgynous portraits, and women--reclining, heavy-lidded nudes a la Ingres; glassy-eyed flappers draped in starched yet shapely raiment--have never looked so perfectly dominating. Travels to Kunstforum, Vienna, Sept. 16-Jan. 2, 2005.--Nicole Rudick

Gabriel Orozco

Serpentine Gallery

July 1-August 30

Curated by Rochelle Steiner

More than a regular on the international group-show circuit, Gabriel Orozco practically invented today's genre of globe-trotting artist. But Orozco's at-home-everywhere-and-nowhere persona is less a stylish pose than an extension of his artistic project: a fusion of post-Minimalism's concern for site-specificity and Conceptual art's reliance on the portable photographic document. Orozco's most recent stops include Venice and Dublin, and summer finds the Mexican artist in London for his first major exhibition in Britain since 1996. The Serpentine Gallery, Orozco's host of the moment, is creating a "complete environment" comprising roughly sixty new and existing sculptures, drawings, and photographs, chosen by chief curator Rochelle Steiner in close collaboration with the peripatetic artist.--Margaret Sundell

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Helen Chadwick

Barbican Art Gallery

May 1-August 1

Curated by Mark Sladen

With Helen Chadwick's death in 1996 at the age of forty-two, the art world lost yet another major young female artist. For Chadwick, pleasure, visual and otherwise, had parity with politics, and she is remembered as much for her vibrant, sassy feminism as for her roving experimentation across sculpture, installation, and photography. This seventy-work retrospective places the artist's last pieces alongside reprises of two major London solo shows, in 1986 and 1994, to trace her journey from an allegorical, decorative postmodernism to exuberantly scatalogical yet sensual sculpture. Travels to the Manchester City Art Museum, Sept. 18-Nov. 21; Kunstmuseet Trapholt, Kolding, Denmark, Jan. 2005-Mar. 2005; Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, June 2005-Aug. 2005.--Kate Bush

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GATESHEAD, ENGLAND

Susan Hiller

BALTIC

May 1-July 18

Curated by James Lingwood

Since turning from anthropology to art in the late '60s, Susan Hiller has employed disparate media to explore the margins of consciousness, particularly the implications of extrasensory perception. Her influence is visible in the work of artists like Douglas Gordon and Ann Hamilton, making this survey especially timely. The exhibition of twenty works from 1969 to the present includes mesmerizing video installations such as Belshazaar's Feast, 1983-84, one of the first artist's films broadcast on British television; recent investigations into paranormal powers like Wild Talents and Witness; and Hiller's new audio piece Clinic. The accompanying catalogue is the largest study of the artist's work to date. Travels to the Museu Serralves, Porto, Oct. 16-Jan. 9, 2005; Kunsthalle Basel, Jan. 30, 2005-Mar. 2005.--Bettina Funcke

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DUBLIN

Marc Quinn

Irish Museum of Modern Art 

July 1-September 12

Curated by Rachael Thomas

Best known for casting his head from his own frozen blood--and more recently achieving notoriety for a sculpture of his newborn son's head made from liquidized placenta--British artist Marc Quinn employs a gutsy aesthetic to probe identity, mortality, and science's impact on the two. His first solo show in Ireland, however, doesn't require any refrigeration units: Although sculpted in various chopped meats, the forty-one new sculptures here are cast in black bronze. Abstracting human form yet echoing classical statuary, these works inaugurate a journey from seduction to shock and back again. Meanwhile, catalogue essays by curator Rachael Thomas, psychotherapist Susie Orbach, and psychoanalyst Darian Leader promise to get under Quinn's own skin.--MH

MARSEILLE

Carsten Holler

Musee d'Art Contemporain

July 4-October 17

Curated by Nathalie Ergino

Given that Robert Smithson believed "time becomes a place minus motion" in some sculpture, perhaps one could say of Carsten Holler's work that place becomes motion minus time. At least that's the mind bender suggested by his first retrospective, for which the artist lays out twelve sculptural installations in the first half of the museum galleries--then perfectly reflects that organization in the latter half by placing duplicates of the works in reverse order. Holler was inspired by the crystalline symmetry of the museum itself, but the idea seems appropriate enough for a science-minded artist whose phenomenological preoccupations always force the audience to recalibrate its senses. Retrospective as lifelong mirror stage: You might keep moving, but you'll end up right where you started.--Tim Griffin

PARIS

Chantal Akerman

Centre Georges Pompidou 

May 1-June 7

Curated by Dominique Paini

From her early, rarely seen 1968 short Saute ma ville to her recent feature Demain on demenage, Chantal Akerman has made some of the most questioning, trenchant, and elegant film work of our time. By screening each of her forty films--fictive and documentary shorts and features shot both for cinema and for television--twice and in some cases three times and by publishing, in conjunction with Cahiers du cinema, a catalogue on her oeuvre, the Pompidou is giving Belgium's best-known filmmaker the recognition (and retrospective) she has long deserved. Akerman introduces many of the screenings herself, two of her installations are on view at the museum, and there is even a concert by cellist and Akerman collaborator Sonia Wieder-Atherton. C'est genius.--Bruce Hainley

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BARCELONA

Art and Utopia: Action Restricted

Museu d'Art Contemporani

June 2-September 12

Curated by Jean-Francois Chevrier

"The hidden meaning stirs, and lays out a choir of pages," Mallarme writes of literature in the 1895 essay from which this show takes its subtitle. One can only imagine the analogies good and bad to be found in an epic ensemble of seven hundred nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, sculptures, books, films, and sound works by writers and artists ranging from Apollinaire and Mayakovski to Trisha Brown and Jeff Wall, from Antonin Artaud to Helio Oiticica. Regardless, Jean-Francois Chevrier's addition to the recent curatorial chorus of utopian meditations is nothing if not appealing in its suggestion that poetry's psychic space is of public consequence. Travels to the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, dates TBA.--TG

The Beauty of Failure/The Failure of Beauty

Fundacio Joan Miro

May 28-October 24

Curated by Harald Szeemann

Harald Szeemann's latest curatorial endeavor aims to examine those pesky wrinkles inevitably woven into any "utopian" fabric. His exhibition constellates a far-ranging group of artists from the nineteenth century to the present--including Henry Fuseli, Margarethe Fellerer, Bruce Nauman, and Thomas Hirschhorn--whose diverse practices and media reveal the fault line between solipsistic, phantasmic utopia and an overpopulated, politically volatile planet. Szeemann (who, along with Ralf Beil, Roger Fornoff, and others, contributes to the show's trilingual catalogue) makes pit stops along the trail of great dreams to revisit such crumbling monuments as the total work of art while pointing to what he sees as today's anti-utopic urge.--Johanna Burton

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MALAGA

Jake and Dinos Chapman 

Centro de Arte Contemporaneo

May 1-July 25

Curated by Fernando Frances

Jake and Dinos Chapman have long enjoyed fiddling with the corpus of Francisco de Goya--no prizes, then, for guessing what dominates their first solo exhibition in Spain. Besides the brothers' reinterpretation of the Spaniard's nightmarish print cycle "Disasters of War," the show includes Sex I, a life-size polychrome bronze whose subject comes straight from Goya's prints. Potentially most contentious, however, is a new series: a thoroughly defaced set of eighty original Goya etchings. A similar showing in Oxford last year was accompanied by a "protestor" dousing Jake Chapman with paint; the reaction in Malaga will determine if these expert troublemakers have finally gone one taboo too far. In the catalogue, critic Matthew Collings makes a case for the defense.--MH

SIENA

Group Zero

Palazzo delle Papesse

May 29-September 19

Curated by Marco Meneguzzo and Stephan von Wiese

Just as a generation of artists in the States revolted against the expressionist ethos of action painting, in Europe art informel and tachisme engendered a host of countermovements in the late '50s. Such painterly purpose at least was the explicit target of Group Zero, the Dusseldorf-based association of artists whose core membership included Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, and Gunther Uecker. Founded in 1957, the group would, over the next decade, produce manifestos, the magazine Zero, and, of course, a steady stream of experiments in technologically juiced kinetic and environmental art. The exhibition gathers roughly ninety works to examine more closely their efforts, as well as kindred spirits in France (e.g., Klein, Soto) and Italy (Manzoni, Colombo, etc.).--Eric Banks

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NAPLES

Pino Pascali

Castel Sant'Elmo

May 6-July 18

Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, Angela Tecce, and Livia Velani

The sculpture of Pino Pascali (1935-68) marks the moment of transition in Italy from Pop poetics to the investigations of anti-form materials and processes that characterized arte povera. The artist's ironic spirit and varied aesthetic approaches are evident throughout his career, from the machine guns and life-size howitzers made from salvaged carburetors, camping gear, and other detritus to his last pieces constructed from natural materials such as straw and wood or from artificial textiles like plush fabrics. Centered on a group of works donated to the Italian state by the artist's family, this exhibition examines not just these objects but also Pascali's videos, film work, photography, and drawings.--Giorgio Verzotti

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

LAUSANNE

Albert Oehlen

Musee Cantonal des Beaux-Arts

June 18-September 5

Curated by Ralf Beil

Only the most dedicated gallerygoers may have been able to follow the twists and turns of Albert Oehlen's oeuvre. With a tilt against a "signature style" that's virtually a signature in itself, the Cologne artist began his career with epater canvases of historically freighted interiors; now he's perhaps as well known for his computer-generated paintings as for his collaborations with Kippenberger in the '80s. Fittingly subtitled "Oeuvres" to signal the multiplicity of Oehlen's production, this exhibition finally allows for a complete overview of the artist's work, with some sixty paintings and three roomsized installations. Don't expect the show necessarily to cohere--Oehlen wouldn't have it any other way. Travels to Domus Artium 2000, Salamanca, Dec. 9-Jan. 30, 2005; Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Apr. 2005-June 2005.--EB

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BERN 

Balthasar Burkhard

Kunstmuseum Bern

June 11-October 24

Curated by Matthias Frehner and Anette Schaffer

Balthasar Burkhard is one of Switzerland's best-kept secrets, the creator of black-and-white landscape photographs ranging from mountain panoramas to forests reflected in rivers. Although characterized by an attention to detail and technical perfection, Burkhard's work moves beyond the depiction of reality to both analyze the possibilities of photography and bring the grandeur of the visible world into the private sphere of the viewer. Various aspects of the artist's oeuvre have recently been the subject of surveys, but this is his first retrospective. The curators thematically arrange well over one hundred photographs taken since the late '60s, including works not previously exhibited.--Felicity Lunn

BASEL

Louise Lawler

Museum fur Gegenwartskunst Basel

May 15-August 29

Curated by Philipp Kaiser

Renowned for her photographs of the arrangements of paintings and other artworks, Louise Lawler can always be counted on for witty juxtapositions and unexpectedly lovely, even poignant images created within the context of the institutional discourse on art. For the artist's first retrospective, chief curator Philipp Kaiser has brought together some fifty prints from the past twenty-four years. New pictures are also in the offing, photographed in the host museum, at the Kunstmuseum Basel, and at the Art Basel fair. The catalogue, designed by Lawler, includes essays by Kaiser, Isabelle Graw, Christian Kravagna, Birgit Pelzer, and Artforum editor at large Jack Bankowsky. Is a picture no substitute for anything?--DR

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Piotr Uklanski

Kunsthalle Basel

June 17-August 29

Curated by Anke Kempkes and Adam Szymczyk

Readers who have propped up the bar at Passerby, Gavin Brown's hip New York lounge, are familiar with Piotr Uklanski's Dance Floor, 1996, a heady blend of Minimalist aesthetics and maximalist good times that illuminates the space from underneath. Dividing his time among New York, Warsaw, and Paris, the Polish-born artist consistently interrogates the boundary between art and entertainment while experimenting across sculpture, photography, collage, performance, and film. Best known for his controversial series of images culled from American and European movies showing famous actors dressed in Nazi military uniforms, Uklanski is also capable of subtler provocations, as this sprawling survey amply demonstrates.--MW

Calder--Miro

Fondation Beyeler

May 2-September 5

Curated by Elisabeth Hutton Turner and Oliver Wick

Two of the twentieth century's great lyrical poets of form in space, American Alexander Calder and Spaniard Joan Miro shared more than aesthetic sensibility--they also had a friendship spanning some fifty years. Though each would follow his own highly distinctive path--for Calder, groundbreaking sculptural ideas expressed through signature mobiles and stabiles; for Miro, elegantly idiosyncratic, often whimsical paintings and murals--the years following their first meeting, in 1928, saw the pair engage with many of the same formal and theoretical issues. This show features nearly 130 works, including their 1947 collaboration for Cincinnati's Terrace Plaza Hotel. Travels to the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, Oct. 9-Jan. 23, 2005.--Jeffrey Kastner

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WEIL AM RHEIN, GERMANY

Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel

Vitra Design Museum 

May 15-January 9, 2005

Curated by Jochen Eisenbrand

"Air travel reminds us who we are," wrote Don DeLillo in The Names. "It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern." Following World War I, most airports were mere sheds held over from military usage, but as the jet set emerged in the '50s, the world's leading designers--Robin Day, Alexander Girard, and Gio Ponti, to name a few--were enlisted to create an aura of efficiency and modernity. This show offers 394 objects (from advertisements and uniforms to cabin interiors and aircraft models) arranged by ticket office, terminal, departure, and arrival like some fantasy airport--except you can keep your shoes on. Travels to the Design Museum, Ghent, Mar. 18-June 24, 2005; Museu de les Arts Decoratives, Barcelona, Oct. 2005-Jan. 2006; and other venues.--Tom Vanderbilt

BONN

Gerhard Richter: Printed!

Kunstmuseum Bonn

June 9-September 5

Curated by Stefan Gronert

An entertaining sideshow of the startlingly popular Gerhard Richter retrospective at MOMA two years ago was the spectacle of the artist deftly switching horses, from cerebral sweetheart of the October circle to Great Painter of the later twentieth century. How interesting, then, to get this show of two hundred of his prints, photo editions, and artist's books, a group of works by nature embedded in multiplicity and mechanical reproduction--principles fundamental to Richter as October darling. Not that he isn't, well, a great painter, but his prints should provide insight into some of the reasons why. Travels to the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Oct. 16-Jan. 2, 2005; Kunsthalle Emden, Germany, Jan. 30, 2005-Apr. 10, 2005; Kunsthalle Tubingen, May 2005-July 2005; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, July 2005-Oct. 2005.--David Frankel

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COLOGNE

Robert Crumb

Museum Ludwig

May 28-September 12

Curated by Alfred M. Fischer

Robert Crumb turned sixty last year, finally getting up around the age of his magus/opportunist Mr. Natural. Crumb's acuteness to '60s counterculture made his name, but, deprived of his primal scene, he hasn't exactly settled into placid old age: Still cartooning when he chooses, he also draws reflexively--he is an artist, after all. Sampling the drawings more than the comics, this show examines Crumb's forty-year career through roughly 250 works. The exhibition's appearance in Cologne may disappoint Americans but should not surprise them, given Germany's long-standing fascination with American culture, as well as the conservatism of many US museums; but Crumb's fondness for northern European masters like Bosch and Brueghel is another excuse. Travels to the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Sept. 17-Dec. 5.--DF

DUSSELDORF

Africa Remix

Museum Kunst Palast 

July 24-November 7

Curated by Simon Njami

The ambitious, multidisciplinary "Africa Remix" samples work made in the past decade by nearly one hundred artists from the continent. This timely arrangement highlights such stars as William Kentridge and Jane Alexander alongside the heterogeneous work of some sixty as yet unknowns. The substantial catalogue features essays by curator Simon Njami, Jean-Hubert Martin, Hudita Mustafa, and others. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether a show so committed to the exigencies of place can transcend its exportation abroad or whether the exhibition will wind up redoubling those imperialist fantasies it so carefully strives to avoid. Travels to the Hayward Gallery, London, Feb. 10, 2005-Apr. 17, 2005; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, May 15, 2005-Aug. 20, 2005; and other venues.--SH

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BERLIN

Robert Mapplethorpe

Deutsche Guggenheim

July 24-October 17

Curated by Germano Celant and Arkady Ippolitov

The photographer whose 1990 retrospective resulted in obscenity charges against Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center was also a flaming neoclassicist. Throughout his career, Robert Mapplethorpe seesawed between the decadent and the decorative. Focusing on the latter, this show examines the artist's debt to the Mannerists, juxtaposing 125 of his photos of classical busts and artfully truncated nudes with Renaissance statuary, woodcuts, and engravings. While Mapplethorpe's early investigations of the homoerotic underground remain an important counterbalance to his later exercises in chilly aestheticism, with this show the scales appear to be tipping. Travels to the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, dates TBA.--Vince Aletti