Winter preview 2005: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between January and April.

John Baldessari

Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, and Kunsthaus Graz

March 4-July 3

Curated by Rainer Fuchs (Vienna) and Peter Pakesh and Adam Budak (Graz)

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A photo and a word. A four-by-five-foot stretched canvas with a deadpan black-and-white photograph printed on its acrylic surface, showing a lanky westerner standing in front of a palm tree that seems to be growing out of his head, confronted by the single word WRONG neatly lettered below. Critics have come to see this 1967-68 work as John Baldessari's signature piece and taken it as a laconic gag, one of a series of droll Conceptualist challenges aimed at the compositional standards of conventional photography. This casts Baldessari as a kind of Will Rogers of Conceptual art, and what kind of Conceptualism is that? California Conceptualism, for most of us, who saw it further develop with William Wegman's loyal Weimaraners, Robert Cumming's nutty installations, Eleanor Antin's "100 BOOTS" 1971-73, and Lowell Darling's political campaigns. Cartoon Conceptualism, for Joseph Kosuth, who preferred the turgid theorizing of Art & Language and his own pedantic prose.

But if Wrong is Baldessari's signature piece, is it as simple as an arrow directed at a meaning? Another work from around the same time (1967-68) casts doubt on this--a text piece that has lettered on its otherwise blank white ground

A WORK WITH ONLY ONE PROPERTY.

a claim that becomes absurd once you ask yourself what this one property could be, which might be that it's manifestly false, and then retreat to wonder if, in fact, the text presents a claim at all or merely an invitation to try to imagine a work possessing one property only--and its difficulties. The bluntness of this text's assertion, if it is an assertion, and its dubiousness connect it directly to Wrong, about which we can reasonably ask, "What's WRONG?" and answer, "You think you're looking at a photograph, but it's a painting." Or, "You think you're looking at a painting, but it's a painting." Or, "You think you're looking at a provincial artist in a drab little city cracking a joke at his situation." And you're RIGHT. But you're also WRONG, because he was employing a cutting-edge art-world strategy for attacking received meaning. So the artist's ploy of being WRONG for making a photograph and WRONG for making a painting was precisely RIGHT for making the kind of critical art that Conceptual art was claiming to be. It seems like we're dealing with another form of the Cretan Paradox--in which Epimenides tells you, "All Cretans are liars"; if he's telling the truth he's lying, and if he's lying he's telling the truth. So Wrong may truly be a signature piece, in that all of Baldessari's incursions into video, photography, and painting have been very obviously WRONG, because he stumbles as precisely as a silent-era film comedian into the orderly discourses surrounding the genres, leaving the kind of cheerful mess that is usually RIGHT.

How RIGHT? Viewers of the forthcoming Austrian retrospective of Baldessari's work, the first since the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's 1990 survey, will find out. Mounted at two museums in two cities, the exhibition brings together some two hundred works in all media. In Vienna, MUMOK will show work made between 1962 and 1983; the Graz Kunsthaus picks up from there and brings us up to the present. So viewers in Germany and Austria should have ample opportunity to consider the meanings provoked by this California master of paradox. With luck, viewers in the United States will also have a chance to consider this retrospective at a later date.--David Antin

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NEW YORK

Thomas Demand

Museum of Modern Art

March 4-May 30

Curated by Roxana Marcoci

Nothing is immediate in the work of Thomas Demand, the German artist who trained as a sculptor but is known today as a photographer. While the end result of his process may always be a photograph, Demand's laborintensive practice is nevertheless rooted in the sculptural. Rather than documenting the world as he finds it, Demand constructs and then photographs a life-size paper model based on a previous image--typically of a politically or historically charged site, like Jackson Pollock's studio. Although perfectly crafted, these models allow for a Brechtian moment disclosing that they are artifacts (pencil marks here, wrinkled paper there). The nearly thirty works on view from the past decade mark Demand's largest US survey to date and may cultivate his reputation as a sculptor.--Daniel Birnbaum

Daniel Buren

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

March 25-June 8

Curated by Lisa Dennison, Susan Cross, and Alison Gingeras

In 1971, Buren's contribution to the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition was removed without his consent before the show's opening. Now the French Conceptualist who taught us to be leery of museum display returns to the Gugg for a one-man event. On view are new site-specific works--a structure (one corner of an imagined cube) that rises in the rotunda up to the sixth ramp and installations in the windows of two galleries--and roughly fifteen paintings from the early '60s. These projects promise to make plain the continuing relevance of Buren's investigations into the ideological workings of artworld institutions. A catalogue on the artist's past and current endeavors includes essays by the curators and Bernard Blistene.--Lisa Pasquariello

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Larry Clark

International Center of Photography

March 11-June 5

Curated by Brian Wallis

At this point in his career, Larry Clark has two overlapping constituencies. First come the ardent devotees of his early photographs of adolescent drug abuse and raw sex, especially those in the books Tulsa (1971) and Teenage Lust (1983), and, to a lesser extent, of his photo-and-text collages. The second (often no less groupielike) goes for Clark's film work, starting with the infamous Kids (1995), followed by the heroin fantasia Another Day in Paradise (1998) and the fan-fucking-tastic Bully (2001). The latest, Ken Park (2002), remains unreleased in the US and the UK (where Clark punched his UK distributor, who then refused to handle the film). This show of some two hundred photographs, videos, and collages from 1963 to 2002, with screenings of three of the films, should make everyone happy.--David Rimanelli

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Brooklyn Museum

March 11-June 5

Curated by Fred Hoffman, Kellie Jones, Marc Mayer, and Franklin Sirmans

According to Mayer, leader of this show's four-person curatorial team, Basquiat was "the last great modernist painter." How so? Because, "if we think of him as a painter of the School of Paris, he was essentially a figurative and even narrative painter--but there's an extraordinary, breathless, endless reservoir of references in his work, as if he wanted his paintings to represent all of human history." If this sounds a little like saying that a camel is a giraffe, but has humps--be patient. A Basquiat retrospective (of some ninety works) with a real art-historical ax to grind is something we need to see. Travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, July 15-Oct. 9; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Nov. 18-Feb. 12, 2006.--David Frankel

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Tim Hawkinson

Whitney Museum of American Art

February 11-May 29

Curated by Lawrence Rinder

In 1995, curious crowds lined the block to see Tim Hawkinson's first New York solo show at Ace Gallery, and chances are the LA artist's loopy, tinkerer-in-the-basement aesthetic will generate similar enthusiasm for his first major museum survey. Hawkinson's carnivalesque approach and carnal subject matter are evidenced in the sixty works on view. Spanning nearly two decades, the diverse selection includes self-portraits cast from inflated latex balloons, tiny sculptures made from ground fingernails, and enormous wind instruments that mimic internal organs. Ancillary to the body theme is the pesky issue of mortality, clearly a consuming topic for Hawkinson (judging from the large number of functioning clocks in his oeuvre). Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 26-Sept. 25.--Claire Barliant

Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subcultures

Japan Society and Public Art Fund

April 8-July 25

Curated by Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami's global empire keeps expanding, whether he's marketing riffs on Louis Vuitton or kiddie-party decorations for Grand Central Terminal. The next takeover promises to rival even Christo dimensions: transporting the high-tech universe of otaku--that infinite profusion of comics, video games, toys, and websites--to Manhattan, where a visiting delegation of Murakami's compatriots will present some two hundred works, immersing us in an ethos of game arcades and shop-window displays. These installations will turn up everywhere, from subway cars and Union Square's subway station to Japan Society's midtown facade (not to mention the show behind it). Watch out, Toys "R"Us!--Robert Rosenblum

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Max Ernst

Metropolitan Museum of Art

April 7-July 10

Curated by Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald

Among the tales told of Max Ernst's stay in New York during World War II is that here he began to place canvases on the ground, allowing paint to drip from a can that swung on a string above the canvas's surface. Accurate or not--you guess the implications--the story is a tribute to a towering figure whose path through Dada and Surrealism abounds with technical innovation, from collage and frottage to grattage and decalcomania. Some 180 works made between 1913 and 1973 by this purveyor of the primal scene and shattered psyche (themes for both yesterday's tragedies and today's) are included in the late artist's return to Gotham--his first US retrospective in thirty years and one whose significance, with Ernst scholar Werner Spies involved, cannot be underestimated.--Tim Griffin

Petah Coyne

SculptureCenter

January 16-April 10

Curated by Douglas Dreishpoon

Returning to the SculptureCenter, host of her breakthrough debut in 1987, the queen of mixed media brings nearly two decades of prolific creation full circle. Laboriously constructed from hair, wax, chicken wire, silk, hay, tar, ribbon, and myriad other materials, her trademark hanging, spreading, or climbing tangles, lumps, and clumps--simultaneously repulsive and gorgeous--stage encounters with delicacy and ponderousness, purity and dreck. With fourteen large-scale sculptures and eight dreamlike black-and-white photographs on view, this nineteen-year survey promises the quintessential Coyne experience. Travels to the Chicago Cultural Center, May 14-Aug. 21; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Sept. 17-Dec. 4; and other venues.--Nell McClister

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PHILADELPHIA

Barry Le Va

Institute of Contemporary Art

January 15-April 3

Curated by Ingrid Schaffner

With his 1960s floor distributions, Barry Le Va secured a place in the discourse on dematerialization and process art. While he shared (anti-) formal concerns with his more celebrated post-Minimal colleagues Robert Morris and Richard Serra, Le Va implemented a priori systems to create structured compositions. This retrospective--Le Va's first major US exhibition in over fifteen years--surveys the artist's oeuvre since the '60s by assembling ten sculptural installations, including one sound work and one new piece, as well as more than a hundred works on paper. Lesser-known photographic and book works also enliven the show. An illustrated monograph features essays by Schaffner, philosopher Paul Virilio, and art historians Pamela M. Lee and Rhea Anastas.--Emily Taub

PITTSBURGH

Michael Maltzan

Carnegie Museum of Art

February 12-June 12

Curated by Raymund Ryan

The qualities of movement, light, and surface essential to Michael Maltzan's work inspired Carnegie curator Raymund Ryan to organize the first exhibition dedicated to the California-based architect. Educated at Harvard Design School, Maltzan belongs to a generation of architects who relocated to LA from the East Coast. While his work is more restrained and less technologically and mathematically driven than that of his peers, his contextual and phenomenological approach--resulting in topological extrusions--is no less pertinent to contemporary discourse. Here, four spaces will hold more than two hundred sectional drawings, DVDs, and process and large-scale models (including those for MOMA QNS and the Fresno Metropolitan Museum) from the past decade.--Tina di Carlo

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BALTIMORE

SlideShow

Baltlmore Museum of Art

February 27-May 15

Curated by Darsie Alexander

Art has long deployed the slide, not only for Wolfflinian compare-and-contrast art history lessons and workaday documentation, but also as a medium in and of itself. Yet just last year, Kodak discontinued its Ektagraphic slide projector, forecasting its obsolescence in the face of digital technology. The BMA, however, is putting on its own slide show, in which nineteen artists from the last forty years commemorate the seemingly unassuming slide in all its vicissitudes. Projects by artists as disparate as Nan Goldin, Ana Mendieta, and Marcel Broodthaers are gathered together, while catalogue essays by Alexander, Charles Harrison, and Robert Storr help to further illumine the works. Travels to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, July 2-Sept. 11; Brooklyn Museum, New York, Oct. 7-Jan. 8, 2006.--Johanna Burton

WASHINGTON, DC

Andre Kertesz

National Gallery of Art

February 6-May 15

Curated by Sarah Greenough

Andre Kertesz (1894-1985), the Hungarian-born photographer who made his best work in Paris in the '20s and '30s and had a resurgence in New York in the '70s, was the master of a unique kind of lyrical Surrealism. His famous Melancholic Tulip, 1939, and Satiric Dancer, 1926, exemplify his knack for intensifying everyday subject matter, as do his autobiographical color Polaroids taken shortly before his death. Kertesz's work has not been shown much since a fullbore exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago twenty years ago, so this retrospective of more than one hundred prints from 1912 to 1984 (with an emphasis on the autobiographical) will be a welcome sight. Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, June 12-Sept. 5.--Andy Grundberg

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MIAMI

Anne Chu

Museum of Contemporary Art

April 9-July 3

Curated by Bonnie Clearwater

Anne Chu's work trucks in archetypes and symbols--the Knight, Bear, and Courtly Lady--but her often life-size sculptures always retain a tantalizing spark of ambiguity that forestalls easy conclusions: Are her spooky marionettelike figures derived from Tang dynasty China or from medieval Europe? Do they bode ill or well? Are they even human? MOCA's exhibition of thirty-five sculptures and thirty works on paper from 1998 to the present is the most in-depth presentation to date of Chu's work. Deftly carved in wood, cast in paper, wrought in gorgeous fabrics and other materials, her hybrid forms are easily among the most engaging figurative sculptures around. But please don't call them puppets.--Meghan Dailey

CHICAGO

Universal Experience: Art. Life, and the Tourist's Eye

Museum of Contemporary Art

February 12-June 5

Curated by Francesco Bonami

"So sorry to hear that you are still not over us. Come back to Vietnam for closure!" It's estimated that, by 2010, the number of people who travel internationally will reach one billion, but, as Dinh Q. Le's sardonic poster implies, the relationship between traveler and destination remains unsettled. This show aims to illuminate our mediated interaction with the wider world, exploring the complexities of the tourist attraction. Bonami, who contributes to the accompanying catalogue-cum-guidebook, leads us through the work of some seventy disparate artists, from Kyoichi Tsuzuki's photographs of Japanese roadside follies to Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's sculpture Short Cut, 2003, a dramatic illustration of the urge to explore.--Michael Wilson

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COLUMBUS, OHIO

Landscape Confection

Wexner Center Galleries at the Belmont Building

January 29-May 1

Curated by Helen Molesworth

The Wexner has aptly billed "Landscape Confection" as "whimsical and vividly colorful," but with artists like Kori Newkirk, Michael Raedecker, and Lisa Sanditz in the mix, the show also promises some slightly unsettling moments. About fifty works by thirteen artists--including Pia Fries's bright, topographical abstractions and Rowena Dring's stitched-by-numbers "paintings"--relate, in varying degrees of representation, to the landscape. All evidence the allure and durability of this ancient subject. The catalogue features an essay by Molesworth and entries by Wexner associate curator Claudine Ise. Travels to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, July 23-Sept. 11; Orange County Museum of Art, Feb. 5, 2006-May 7, 2006.--MD

MINNEAPOLIS

Shadowland: An Exhibition as a Film

Walker Art Center

April 17-September 11

Curated by Douglas Fogle and Philippe Vergne

"Shadowland" aims to show how still and moving images have affected art-making and viewing over the past thirty years--a tall curatorial order, to which Vergne and Fogle take an open-ended approach. Their concept of the exhibition as a "movie without a camera" makes the viewer a flaneur-protagonist, ambling among forty-three works by some thirty contributors, including cinematic mavericks (Chantal Akerman), Picture Theory progenitors (Richard Prince), agitators at video's spatiotemporal limits (Doug Aitken), and just plain agitators (the Chapman brothers). Whether or not clear propositions emerge, the show should demonstrate that spectators themselves are the ultimate machines of the visible.--Elizabeth Schambelan

HOUSTON

Double Consciousness: Black Conseptual Art Since 1970

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

January 22-April 17

Curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois described the African-American experience as one of "double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." A century later, his term continues to resonate, and CA curator Valerie Cassel Oliver has appropriated its connotations of invisibility and displacement as means to reevaluate conceptual strategies taken up by African-American artists over the past three decades. This exhibition of some thirty artists--Renee Green, Senga Nengudi, Adrian Piper, and Nari Ward among them--explores the ways Conceptualism has been recast to reflect and subvert deep-set social inequities.--JB

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LONG BEACH, CA

Candida Hofer

California State University Art Museum

January 25-April 17

Curated by Constance W. Glenn

Around 1980, people started to disappear from Candida Hofer's photographs. If you look at her images long enough, writes poet Michael Kruger, you can imagine a world without humans. Best known for her interiors, from the Palacio Real Madrid to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Hofer has traveled the world in search of architectures of extraordinary tranquility and silence. Her dedication to absence is perhaps the best indication of her training in Bernd and Hilla Becher's photography program in the '70s. Compared to classmates Gursky, Ruff, and Struth, she has gained relatively little attention in the US. That may change with this fifty-work career survey. Travels to the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, CA, Oct. 15-Jan. 8, 2006; and other venues.--DB

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LOS ANGELES

THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles

UCLA Hammer Museum

February 6-June 5

Curated by James Elaine, Aimee Chang, and Christopher Miles

As LA MOCA steadily pursues its excavation of mid-twentieth-century art, the job of examining the emerging generation has fallen to the Hammer Museum. The institution's third recent survey to focus on young artists, "THING" is both medium and location specific. Sculpture in LA is more a combinatory matrix than a discrete medium, and this is no doubt what the curators had in mind when they grouped Rodney McMillian's funk assemblage with the hallucinatory realism of Matt Johnson, and Taft Green's abstractions of exchange systems with Mindy Shapero's meditations on the ineffable. Three curators, twenty artists, forty-five sculptures, and a fully illustrated catalogue--this show should run the gamut.--Jan Tumlir

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Robert Rauschenberg

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

March 10-June 12

Curated by Carter Foster

Rauschenberg is the most populist of the Pop artists, the one most interested in bringing all aspects of life and politics into his art. He is also the most experimental, always messing around with innovative ways to adhere images to various surfaces. Printmaking has long been an important arena for his experiments and also a means of turning out relatively low-cost objects for the public. At the extreme end of such production comes the mass-edition yet technically complex poster. This exhibition, organized by prints and drawings curator Carter Foster, brings together more than one hundred posters from the '60s to the present. While there won't be a catalogue, the artist is making a special poster for the show.--Thomas Lawson

The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Through April 3

Curated by Wendy Kaplan

Exploding the notion of a singular Arts and Crafts ethos, this exhibition is the first to demonstrate how the movement was customized for a variety of regional agendas. The show features more than three hundred objects and two re-created interiors and includes an impressive array of furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, and prints. While good design today seems only a trip to Target away, the integration of art and life promised by the Arts and Crafts movement has exceeded our grasp. And while this show may reconsider the material culture of an earlier era, the questions it raises are entirely contemporary. Travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Oct. 16-Jan. 8, 2006.--David Spalding

SAN FRANCISCO

John Szarkowski

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

February 5-May 15

Curated by Sandra S. Phillips

John Szarkowski, who eloquently and often maddeningly set the tone for art photography at SF MOMA from his nearly thirty-year perch in the museum's photography department, was a picture maker before he became a curator and has become one again since his retirement in 1991. His images from the '40s and '50s dote rigorously on Louis Sullivan buildings and vernacular architectural subjects; the recent ones are more rural, landscape oriented, and reflective. How these poles make sense as a career--and how Szarkowski's photographs might have shaped his curatorial work, and vice versa--is the crux of this seventy-five-print exhibition. Travels to the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, June 11-Sept. 5; Milwaukee Art Museum, Sept. 30-Jan. 1, 2006; and other venues.--AG

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RIO DE JANEIRO

Nelson Felix

Paco Imperial

March 16-May 22

Curated by Gloria Ferreira

Since the early '80s, Nelson Felix has been making sculptures and installations replete with formal intelligence, conceptual concerns, bodily references, and oblique narratives--they're typically Brazilian, at its very best. For this show, Felix has taken up the challenge of completing what he regards as three (until now) "incomplete trilogies" related to "bodily voids," time, and the form and concept of the cross. The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the artist, includes some fourteen large-scale works encompassing installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography from 1986 to the present. A catalogue features six years of interviews between Felix and Ferreira. Travels to the Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo, June 12-Aug. 16--Adriano Pedrosa

LONDON

Anthony Caro

Tate Britain

January 26-April 17

Curated by Paul Moorhouse

Marking Anthony Caro's eightieth year, this retrospective charts the sculptor's career across fifty works, beginning with early figurative pieces, made in the shadow of Henry Moore, and his celebrated aluminum-and-painted-steel sculptures of the '60s. The latter works represent Caro's contribution to the debate over the viability of late-modernist painting and sculpture and remain the basis of his considerable reputation. Seeing this work alongside recent pieces--abstracted table sculptures that reveal their inspiration in seventeenth-century painting, object-environment hybrids he awkwardly refers to as "sculpitecture," and sculptures that reference classical Greek style--should provide a welcome opportunity to judge Caro's subsequent contribution to sculptural practice.--Michael Archer

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Tomoko Takahashi

Serpentine Gallery

February 22-April 10

Curated by Rochelle Steiner

Does Tomoko Takahashi think she can play games with us? Apparently so: Her teeming, sprawling, 3-D improvisations--epic accumulations of everyday stuff--are irresistible invitations to engage in a kind of pingpong of the imagination. After much scrabbling at car-boot sales and London's recycling depots, Takahashi will monopolize the Serpentine with a commissioned installation comprising thousands of games, toys, and found objects. Events are planned: Artist Leafcutter John will convert sounds made from items in the show into a musical piece; on the front lawn, Takahashi and Simon Faithfull will reprise it, 1999, an after-dark game of tag that's open to all; and on the final day, visitors can walk off with whatever object they fancy. Serpentine chief curator Steiner referees.--Rachel Withers

The Triumph of Painting

Saatchi Gallery

January 26-May 31

Curated by Charles Saatchi

While ostensibly celebrating the Saatchi Gallery's twentieth anniversary, this exhibition (actually made up of three parts over the course of a year) looks more like an aggressive defense of the beleaguered adman's taste. It opens with a cherry-picking of his collection--forty-eight canvases by Kippenberger, Dumas, Tuymans, and three others--to make the case that Saatchi always knew what was best in painting. Thus awed, we're set up to predict a lasting future for the younger artists whose work he will display in subsequent months. Sceptics may wonder what proportion of Saatchi's acquisitions these historical hits represent, but his rampant and scattershot purchasing here reveals an upside: Whatever medium takes precedence next, Saatchi will most likely be able to say he was there first, too.--Martin Herbert

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LIVERPOOL

Richard Wentworth

Tate Liverpool

January 21-April 24

Curated by Simon Groom

This show marks Richard Wentworth's most comprehensive exhibition to date, giving viewers the chance to see forty works from the past thirty years, as well as three or four new sculptures. Yet it seems wrong to call it a retrospective. Wentworth's sculptural instinct has always favored the antimonumental: Through low-tech, intimate, and often humorous manipulations of everyday things (books, plates, buckets), he reveals these objects as instances of condensed thought. Similarly startling examples of this economy of means and gesture are recorded in a group of prints from "Making Do and Getting By," Wentworth's ongoing photographic sequence begun in the '70s. The catalogue contains essays by Groom, curator Roger Malbert, and writer Michael Bracewell.--MA

PARIS

Dionysiac: Art in Flux

Centre Pompidou

February 16-May 9

Curated by Christine Macel

The French have an unmatched record when it comes to wine and women (if not, perhaps, also to song), so this uninhibited celebration of devil-maycare excess and subversive laughter is opening in exactly the right place. With work by fourteen international artists including Thomas Hirschhorn, Fabrice Hyber, Keith Tyson, Paul McCarthy, and ubiquitous prankster Maurizio Cattelan, the show aims to evoke the hedonistic spirit of the ancient Greek deity by way of mostly brand-new installations, films, performance, and a sound room. Oh, and a conference. In addition to contributions by the artists, the catalogue, conceived by Macel with Christophe Brunquell, features essays by Jean-Pierre Criqui and Barbara Stiegler, as well as by the curator herself.--MW

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BARCELONA

Josep Lluis Sert

Fundacio Joan Miro

February 25-June 12

Curated by Jaume Freixa and Josep Maria Rovira

Will this timely retrospective of Catalan modernist Josep Lluis Sert successfully resuscitate the legacy of the neglected and underrated postwar architect, best remembered for designing a studio and foundation for Joan Miro? After all, Sert's low-key buildings lack the robust bravura of those designed by his more celebrated European peers like Marcel Breuer and Eero Saarinen, who also settled in the US and crafted concrete-and-glass institutional buildings during the 1960s and '70s. With drawings, photographs, models, and videos related to ten projects, this show offers an occasion to reappraise Sert's urbane buildings--each derived from a subtle yet sophisticated retooling of the internationalist vocabulary of his mentor, Le Corbusier, and adapted to a particular region or site.--Joel Sanders

BOLOGNA

Josef Albers

Museo Morandi

January 28-April 30

Curated by Peter Weiermair and Giusi Vecchi

Jasper Johns once took a color test designed by Josef Albers and reported back: "Mr. Albers, I took your color test and got all the answers wrong." Albers beamed, "Dot's vunderful. You got 100 percent." One by one, the famous "Homage to the Square" paintings are easily dismissed as Albers-the-artist's brainy illustrations of Albers-the-teacher's color theories. En masse, they confound more than explain. Curators Weiermair and Vecchi assemble thirty-five "Homages" along with some forty other paintings and photo collages for Albers's first monographic show in Italy. Go test yourself.--Christine Mehring

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PRATO 

Robert Morris

Centro per I'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci

February 25-May 29

Curated by Jean-Pierre Criqui

While engaging with multiple movements in multiple mediums, Robert Morris consistently addresses the problematics of perception. For this show, Criqui amasses seventy-five of the artist's "Blind Time Drawings," dating from 1973 to 2000--the first time so many will be exhibited together. Morris executed the drawings with eyes closed, exposing the distance between his intentions and his body's limitations. An exhibition catalogue, on which Morris collaborated, is devoted primarily to the drawings. The show also features two films and nine early sculptures--including Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961, and the large installation Threadwaste with Mirrors, 1968--that further represent Morris's efforts to overcome the privileging of vision.--Emily Taub

ATHENS

Lucas Samaras

National Gallery, Alexandros Soutzos Museum

April 4-June 30

Curated by Katerina Koskina

Just a year back, the Whitney Museum ran a big show--over 350 works--on self-portraiture in the work of Lucas Samaras. That show, partly funded by the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation--its mission "the preservation and promotion of culture and civilization in Greece [and] abroad"--necessarily presented Samaras as an American artist, since American art is the Whitney's mandate. Now the foundation is mounting its own retrospective, of around four hundred works in an array of media, in the artist's native Greece. (He came to the US as a boy.) Even without the Whitney's self-portrait focus, so many of Samaras's works fall into that genre that there will almost certainly be overlap--but here he'll presumably be staged as homecoming king.--DF

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THUN, SWITZERLAND

Pierre Bismuth

Kunstmuseum Thun

April 21-June 21

Curated by Madeleine Schuppli

Pierre Bismuth's first comprehensive solo exhibition traces the Paris-born artist's wide-ranging thoughts through works on paper, installations, videos, and wall drawings. He is particularly interested in globalization and its ability to throw into question linguistic and iconic codes, especially their ability to divide or unite. Among the thirty works on view are his 2002 multilingual version of Disney's Jungle Book, with a Hebrew-speaking Baloo the Bear and an Arab Bagheera the Panther, and his new project IBHAYIBHILE. Taken from the Xhosa word for "bible," this piece collects as many translations of the Good Book as possible, making it a monument against the nationalistic strain of Christian fundamentalism.--Hans Rudolf Reust

Translated from German Iry Sara Ogger.

VIENNA

Piet Mondrian

Albertina Museum

March 11-June 19

Curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann

Dealing the latest blow to the old idealist account of Mondrian's abstraction, this retrospective of some one hundred paintings and rarely exhibited large-format drawings (all made between 1989 and 1943) foregrounds the mutual imbrication of the two media in the artist's spectacular oeuvre. This issue has been tackled before, most provocatively in a 1994 retrospective cocurated by veteran Mondrian specialist Joop Joosten (author of the present show's catalogue) that devoted a whole section to an elucidation of Mondrian's working process after 1920. What's new at the Albertina--apart from being the first time Vienna will see Mondrian en masse--is a detailed consideration of drawing's fundamental role in the painter's passage to abstraction in the 1910s.--Maria Gough

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Willem de Kooning

Vienna Kunstforum

January 13-March 28

Curated by Ingried Brugger and Florian Steininger

De Kooning would have turned one hundred last year, but it has been twenty years since his work was seen in depth in Europe. Though comprising only fifty-two works, this show surveys de Kooning's entire career, including its final, still-controversial decade. The exhibition's innovation is the inclusion of nine contemporary painters--among them Brice Marden and David Reed--whose work resonates with that of the Dutch Master. There are risks involved. In the '50s, the most dangerous place to be for a young artist with a subtle wrist was anywhere near de Kooning. Meanwhile, one wonders what effect these self-conscious studio practitioners will have on our view of a man who claimed never to "sit in style." Travels to the Kunsthal Rotterdam, Apr. 17-July 3.--Robert Storr

LINZ, AUSTRIA

Leo Schatzi

O.K. Centrum fur Gegenwartskunst

March 18-May 8

Curated by Martin Sturm

Leo Schatzl became the popular favorite at the 2004 Bienal de Sao Paulo with his rotating VW Beetle. As an interdisciplinary conceptual artist, this Austrian Tatlin undermines social systems and suggests, not least by engaging in collective practices, alternatives to the career paths commonly found in the art world. The artist's first large solo show presents playful, subversive investigations that combine technical setups, everyday objects, and experimental parameters involving time, movement, and speed--a car shot off a ramp into wet concrete, for example. Including photographs, installations, and videos made since 1991, the fifteen works on view are timely examinations of wastelands and taboo zones, studies of the untouchables of public space.--Brigitte Huck

Translated from German by Sara Ogger.

BRUSSELS

Rene Magritte and Photography

Palais des Beaux-Arts

February 23-May 15

Curated by Patrick Roegiers

"He is never entirely invisible," wrote Rene Magritte of his pulp-fiction idol Fantomas. And neither was Magritte, despite his popular reputation as a publicity-shunning, Surrealist homebody: A 1938 photograph shows him mugging alongside The Barbarian, his 1928 homage to the antihero of French thrillers. Now, a coproduction with the Magritte Foundation probes the artist's life via thirteen of his films and some 330 photographs from 1898 to 1967 by Magritte and other artists, as well as by family members and anonymous snappers. Magritte the photographic subject (subtly posing, turning his back, hiding behind his paintings) looks set to emerge as a specific, unforeseen object of critical scrutiny in its own right. Travels to the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris, 2006.--RW

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BERLIN

Jackson Pollock

Deutsche Guggenheim

January 29-April 17

Curated by Susan Davidson

First there was Jackson Pollock, brooding and libidinal existential action painter, all grimace and sad cigarettes. Then came Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried's preternaturally modernist Pollock, who rubbed up against the performative Pollock of Allan Kaprow. This incarnation ceded, in turn, to the desublimated Pollock of Rosalind Krauss. Now, with this tightly focused show that brings together over forty "paintings on paper" for the first time since 1980, we'll have Pollock as consummate draftsman. Experimenting with watercolor, gouache, India ink, and crayon, the graphic Pollock examined in this exhibition and its catalogue (with essays by Davidson, David Anfam, and Peggy Ellis) is well worth another look. Travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, June 4-Sept. 18.--Suzanne Hudson

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Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition

Kunst-Werke Berlin

January 29-May 16

Curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin

After several delays and heated debates, "Regarding Terror" is finally set to proceed. Judging from the uproar over the exhibition, West Germany's period of national terrorism--dominated by the media machine of the Red Army Fraction, or Baader-Meinhof gang--remains a sensitive topic, even three decades after the events. Curators Blumenstein and Ensslin (son of RAF member Gudrun Ensslin) selected historical and contemporary works from the past thirty-two years in various media, from Hans-Peter Feldmann's archive of terror victims to Andree Korpys and Markus Loffler's study of interior designs in RAF hideouts. Travels to Neue Galerie Graz, June 24-Aug. 28.--Jennifer Allen

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GRONINGEN, NETHERLANDS

Hussein Chalayan

Groninger Museum

April 10-September 4

Curated by Sue-an van der Zijpp

When a maverick designer straddles the line between art and fashion, he is apprehensively embraced by both industries--and often backed by neither. Unless he's Hussein Chalayan, the Cypriot wunderkind who, since starting his women's line in 1994, has transformed runway shows into Conceptual-art performances and merged torqued dress lines with postmodern readymades. This retrospective surveys his output thus far and includes as many mannequins as it does sculptures, installations, and film works. Chalayan seems inspired less by Gucci sex romps than by politics and architecture. Consider a 2001 show in which models wearing sugar glass shattered their dresses with hammers. Sometimes revolutionary and wearable can spring from the same tailor.--Christopher Bollen

DUSSELDORF

Darren Almond

K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrheln-Westfalen

February 26-May 29

Curated by Julian Heynen and Stefanie Jansen

As a young trainspotter in Britain, Darren Almond became intimately acquainted with the world of clocks and timetables. Perhaps that's how his obsession with time started. Involving slow-motion and real-time transmissions, many of his works elicit intensified experiences of temporality: the chronology of the body as well as time measured by clocks. In fact, Almond's works make duration viscerally felt, by turns painful and soothing. The largest show of the artist's work in Germany to date, this survey comprises some twenty films, photographs, and sculptures from the past eight years. Also included are Almond's films made during recent trips to Antarctica and the Arctic, those axes of time and space.--DB

Inflamed with Art: Dubuffet and Art Brut

Museum Kunst Palast

February 19-May 29

Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, Lucienne Peiry, Michel Thevoz, and Mattijs Visser

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), who amused himself at times by reading the comedies of Terence in the original Latin, nevertheless asserted that he preferred the inventions of art brut to the "parrot-like processes" of "cultural art"--a torturous but fruitful aporia that occupied him for much of his life. The largest show of art brut to date, this exhibition allows comparisons between 117 of Dubuffet's own artistic productions and those of some fifty brut artists, from the Swiss Aloise to Henry Darger by way of other less famous but equally enigmatic artists. Also included is a selection of works from the collection largely assembled by German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, author in 1922 of Artistry of the Mentally Ill.--Jean-Pierre Criqui

Translated from French by Jeanine Heman.

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BADEN-BADEN

Georg Herold

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

March 5-April 10

Curated by Matthias Winzen

Georg Herold is a determined desublimator, continuously casting doubt on the structures of value and valueproduction both within and outside of the art world. In the late '70s and '80s, he participated, along with Kippenberger, Oehlen, and others, in a post-Beuysian micromovement against an all-too-easy German neoexpressionism. His trademark deployment of poor and "stupid" materials (bricks, wire, underpants) explores the perception of art and the basic rules of social interaction. This twenty-six-year retrospective of seventy sculptures, photographs, objects, and paintings begins as a dadaist detournement of arte povera gestures and develops into a multimedia study of elitism, etiquette, and exclusion. Travels to the Kunstverein Hannover, Apr. 16-May 29; and other venues.--Tom Holert

HAMBURG

Martin Munkacsi

Deichtorhallen Hamburg

April 15-June 26

Curated by F.C. Gundlach, Klaus Honnef, Enno Kaufhold, and Ulrich Ruter

"All great photographs today are snapshots," Martin Munkacsi (1896-1963) announced in 1935, and he had plenty of convincing evidence right at hand. For more than a decade, the self-taught Hungarian photographer had been enlivening newspapers and magazines in Budapest and Berlin with pictures that combined modernist innovation, graphic sophistication, and the punch of a knockout sports photo. When he followed other Jewish exile artists to New York in 1934, Munkacsi brought the same anything-goes exuberance and spontaneity to his work with Harper's Bazaar and Life. With more than 350 photos, many previously unpublished, this retrospective should help explain why both Cartier-Bresson and Avedon cited Munkacsi as a key influence.--Vince Aletti

MOSCOW

First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

Various venues

January 28-February 28

Curated by Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birnbaum, Rosa Martinez, Iara Boubnova, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist

The specter of yet another biennial is haunting Europe. Under a nebulous Hegelio-Adornian banner, "Dialectics of Hope" aspires to "reintegrate contemporary Russian art into the international art world" by joining the biennial parade. The six curators, each with high-profile experience (Manifesta, Sao Paulo, Venice, etc.), introduce some forty artists, including such putatively hope-full international participants as Jeremy Deller and John Bock, to a Moscow audience. The smaller Russian and "nonconformist" Soviet contingent, like the Blue Noses Group, may attract the tourists that the curators are counting on to flock to Moscow in the middle of winter. Talk about hope springing eternal.--Nico Israel

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SYDNEY

Bill Henson

Art Gallery of New South Wales

January 8-April 3

Curated by Judy Annear

Although Bill Henson's photographs transform fragile teenagers and fraying landscapes into fever-pitch museum art, they've never been seen in any depth outside Australia. Solo shows at the Denver Art Museum in 1990, the 1995 Venice Biennale, and LA's Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in 1999 haven't compensated for this art-museum inattention, especially since Henson, a virtuoso technician, sometimes masses his photographs in vast installations that require museum-size spaces. A pity, then, that this retrospective of 350 photographs from the past thirty years won't travel to the US or Europe, though the sumptuous publication, with essays by a raft of writers including novelist David Malouf, certainly will. Travels to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Apr. 23-July 10.

--Charles Green