10 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13

Opening: Geta Brătescu at Hauser & Wirth
“Leaps of Aesop,” a survey exhibition of the 91-year-old Romanian conceptualist pioneer Geta Brătescu, will highlight a diverse range that encompasses drawing, collage, engraving, photography, video, and performance. Working for many years under the oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, Brătescu embraced the idea of the artist as a disruptor. Her work focuses on themes of identity and gender, as well as the relationship between an artist and the objects she produces—a dynamic she explored in her 1979 film The Studio, in which Brătescu enlists a series of materials in what appears to be a bizarre art-making ritual. This is the first-ever solo presentation of the artist’s work in New York, in collaboration with dealer Marian Ivan of Ivan Gallery in Bucharest.
Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 14

Talk: Nicole Eisenman at the New School
Nicole Eisenman is best known for humorous paintings that mash together various art-historical styles and references, but she’s since expanded her practice to include sculpture. Recently her work has been installed in the public realm: Sketch for a Fountain in Munster, which was twice vandalized this year, memorably appeared at Skulptur Projekte Münster earlier this year. (Residents in the town of Münster, Germany, liked the work so much that they’re trying to figure out how to keep it there permanently.) At this talk, hosted by the Public Art Fund, Eisenman will address her sculpture practice as well as the role and challenges of showing work in the public sphere.
The New School, 63 5th Avenue, 6:30 p.m. Tickets $10

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15

Exhibition: Edvard Munch at Met Breuer
This six-decade survey of Edvard Munch’s work spans far beyond The Scream, though it will feature the iconic work’s earliest iteration, Sick Mood at Sunset, Despair. The exhibition’s 43 works include 16 self-portraits and a number of other pieces that have never before been on view in the U.S. Munch’s depictions of human anxiety brought him early fame in Norway and beyond, and he went on to revisit old subjects with heightened intensity over time. Self Portrait: Between the Clock and the Bed, one of his final works (and the one from which the show takes its name), features Munch in his bedroom, his dark eyes blankly staring out at the viewer—as signature a sign of Munch’s agita as any.
Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

Talk: “New Pleasure” at Simon Lee Gallery
“New Pleasure,” a group show up at Simon Lee’s Upper East Side space, is the gallery’s attempt to bottle the spirit of punk rock, and it does so without a sonic component. Instead of music, the overlap of recording studios and artists’ studios in the 1980s is defined by works by artists who had previously toured as musicians, such as Dexter Dalwood and George Condo, as well as well-known punk stars who had second acts as respected artists, such as Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Suicide’s Alan Vega. Also present are artists who took on the music scene as ethos and muse, such as Christopher Wool and Richard Prince. For this talk, the gallery has invited Dalwood and the artist Liz Lamere (Vega’s widow) to discuss the entanglement of contemporary art and short fast rock songs with critic Bob Nickas.
Simon Lee Gallery, 26 E. 64th Street, 6:30 p.m.

Opening: “Talon Rouge” at Proxyco
The 20th-century Mexican poet and art critic José Juan Tablada championed Latin American culture through various pursuits. While living in New York, for instance, he founded the bookstore La Librería de los Latinos and the magazine Mexican Art and Life. Proxyco, the new Lower East gallery dedicated to similar subject matter, traces Tablada’s pervasive cultural influence with its inaugural exhibition. Alongside selections of Tablada’s poetry, the show will include work by Mexico City–based contemporary artists Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Javier Hinojosa, Ivan Krassoievitch, Edgar Orlaineta, Marco Rountree, and Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, as well as pieces by modernists José Clemente Orozco, Miguel Covarrubias, and Marius de Zayas.
Proxyco, 168 Suffolk Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16

Opening: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
Robert Farris Thompson’s 1984 book Flash of the Spirit investigated the influence of West African aesthetic traditions on diasporic communities. With that in mind, New York-based artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones borrowed the book’s title for his first exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery. Born into a Yoruba family and grew up in London,Adeniyi-Jones creates paintings that combine the traditions of English portraiture with abstract motifs and rich colors that reference objects and styles often associated with West African culture. This exhibition will feature a new series of work that centers around a mythological kingdom and its attendant heirs.
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, 327 Broome Street, 6–8 p.m.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17

Exhibition: Auguste Rodin at Brooklyn Museum
To mark the centennial anniversary of Auguste Rodin’s death, many museums around the world have surveyed the French sculptor’s work, which often took the form of salon-style subjects with a radical twist. This week, the Brooklyn Museum will exhibit 58 of Rodin’s bronzes. Displayed chronologically, the works—which were gifted to the museum in 1983—include versions of Rodin’s monumental piece The Gates of Hell (begun in 1880) and Monument to Balzac (1891–98), as well as smaller studies Rodin made of hands. These will be shown beside fragments of ancient sculptures from the museum’s permanent collection.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18

Conference: “Curatorial Activism” at School of Visual Arts
One year after the election of Donald Trump, the M.A. Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts will present this all-day symposium on the role of the curator and institutions in the face of recent global political developments. Organized by program chair Steven Henry Madoff, who will also serve as the editor for a forthcoming publication on the subject issued by Sternberg Press, the international summit features a long list of speakers, among them María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, the director of the Museum of Art at the National University of Colombia, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries.
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Screening: “Shorts by Lauren Greenfield” at Anthology Film Archives
The documentary filmmaker and photographer Lauren Greenfield is best known for her feature documentary The Queen of Versailles, which chronicled one family’s quest to build a Florida mansion modeled after the Palace of Versailles in the midst of an economic recession. The movie is a crucial examination of wealth and pop culture, and many shorts in this program of other Greenfield films share a similar spirt. Best Night Ever takes place at the highest-grossing Las Vegas nightclub, while Bling Dynasty looks at young people with new money in China. The films screen as part of the larger Anthology Film Archives series “Generation Wealth,” which is running concurrently with a Greenfield exhibition of the same name at the International Center of Photography. Stick around for screenings later in the day of American Psycho and Spring Breakers.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, 4:30 p.m. Tickets $7/$9/$11

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19

Exhibition: Stephen Shore at Museum of Modern Art
Stephen Shore was the second living photographer to mount a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1971 at the age of 24. Now he returns to MoMA to show five decades of work. He started taking pictures at the age of six, when he developed family photos with a dark-room kit gifted by his uncle. Since then, his tools have shifted—from consumer-grade to large-format cameras to a more recent interest in digital photography. But the artist’s intimate formal exploration of daily life has been a constant, from the muted Americana of his “Uncommon Places” series to more recent work about Ukrainian Holocaust survivors.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.