Fall Preview: Museum Shows and Biennials Around the World

Fall is upon us again, which means it’s time to look forward to the season’s museum shows and biennials. Among the season’s most high-profile events is Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an ambitious grouping of more than 70 museum shows (in addition to some gallery exhibitions) in Los Angeles related to Latinx and Latin American art. A Martín Ramirez retrospective and a survey of radical Latin American women artists working between 1960 and 1985 are among the biggest shows at PST. Elsewhere in the world, the Istanbul Biennial will open in the midst of a tense political climate, retrospectives for Tarsila do Amaral and Laura Owens will aim to insert new figures into art history, and a survey at the New Museum will explore our shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality.

National September October November

International September October November

NATIONAL

September

“Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The Utopian Projects”
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
September 7–March 4

With a focus on maquettes that double as “whimsical models” (some of them for projects as yet unrealized), this survey will peer into the world of close-collaborating couple Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and their work together from 1985 to the present day. Representations of historical and continuous works—including the fantastical shack-like installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1985) and The Ship of Tolerance, an ongoing project for which ramshackle sailboats are built with the assistance of schoolchildren—the exhibition promises to mix purposeful imagination with a palpable sense of play. —Andy Battaglia

“Martín Ramirez: His Life in Pictures, Another Interpretation”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
September 9–December 31

For its opening exhibition, the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles—formerly the Santa Monica Museum of Art—will present a show of works by Mexican-born artist Martín Ramirez (1895–1963). Ramirez, one of the great self-taught geniuses of the 20th century, came to the US during the Depression looking for work. In 1932, after exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia, he was hospitalized and spent the remainder of his life in a series of California mental institutions. During this time, he produced a monumental body of drawings, most executed in melted crayon on sheets constructed from scraps of paper stuck together with potato starch or bread and saliva. Featuring Madonnas, caballeros on horseback, trains, and cars in highly stylized architectural or natural environments, these works integrate Ramirez’s memories of rural Mexico with his experience of industrialized America. The show also constitutes the museum’s contribution to this year’s iteration of the Getty-sponsored art initiative Pacific Standard Time, this year devoted to Latin American and Latino art. Featuring as its centerpiece a 17-foot long mural by Ramirez recounting his journey from Mexico to the States, the exhibition will focus on the artist’s identity as a Mexican-American, as well as on the timely issues of immigration and incarceration. —Anne Doran

“Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950-1980”
Met Breuer, New York
September 13–January 14

In the midst of what some observers might deem less than entirely reasonable times, this survey show has set its sights on a 30-year period when “military conflict proliferated and social and political unrest flared.” If that occasions a sense of familiarity in the present, all the better to consider different ways that artists have enlisted “absurdity, disorder, nonsense, disorientation, and repetition” in the service of work meant to act as a catalyst or a balm—or both (or neither). The list of 60-plus artists includes Lee Lozano, Tony Conrad, Bruce Nauman, Ana Mendieta, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, Howardena Pindell, and more. —A.B.

“Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985”
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
September 15–December 31

Co-curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta bring together more than 260 works in a wide variety of mediums by 116 Latin American and Latina/Chicana women, as part of the Getty’s far-reaching exhibition initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. Represented here are Lygia Pape, Ana Mendieta, Marta Minujín, Judith F. Baca, Zilia Sánchez, Yolanda López, Marisol, Patssi Valdez, and Isabel Castro. The exhibition will also chart the rise of feminist art in Latin America, with such works as Leticia Parente’s videos, which re-created and rethought images of violence against women’s bodies. —Maximilíano Durón

“Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros”
Getty Center, Los Angeles
September 16—February 11

While the vast majority of the 70-plus exhibitions that make up PST: LA/LA are built around years of intense research, “Making Art Concrete” is most likely the only exhibition that relies on a combination of scientific analysis and art-historical research. Forty-seven Brazilian and Argentine Concrete artworks will be on view here, along with research on the materials and processes that the artists used to create their hard-edged canvases. Six institutions in the United States and Latin America worked together to interpret these artworks by relying not only on formal and socio-political considerations but also the details of “the deliberate and specific material and technical choices made by artists . . . with historical specificity,” as co-curator Aleca Le Blanc notes in a catalogue essay. Included in the exhibition is work by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Willys de Castro, Raúl Lozza, and Tomás Maldonado, among others. —M.D.

“Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas”
Getty Center, Los Angeles
September 16–February 17

“Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas,” one of two shows in PST: LA/LA that looks at Latin America’s pre-Colombian history and artistic output, will bring together over 300 objects, most of which are made from gold and silver. (Objects made from shell and jade will also be on view.) The show—which the curators note looks at a time “long before modern national boundaries affected the flow of knowledge and invention”—explores the development of metal production in the Andes—an industry that soon spread northward into Central America and Mexico, where it would reach a new height in the courts of the Aztec Empire, particularly at its capital at Tenochtitlan. Next year, the exhibition, which focuses in particular on the use of metal objects in ritual worship, will travel next year to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. —M.D.

“Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
September 16–March 4

The charm, power, and creepiness of Iraqi-American Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz’s mosaic sculptures, composed mostly of crushed Arabic commercial packaging, will be on view here in Rakowitz’s first museum survey. This aesthetically and politically complex show includes early tabletop works, a new piece, and large installations, such as Enemy Kitchen (2003–ongoing), a food truck serving up Iraqi dishes whose recipes the artist and his mother culled from community workshops. From such fraught hospitality the show ambitiously and uncomfortably moves to the less ambiguous The invisible enemy should not exist (2007–ongoing), a witty, disturbing project to fabricate in advertising garb every single item looted from the Iraqi National Museum. —Barbara A. MacAdam

“Walter De Maria: Truck Trilogy”
Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York
September 22–ongoing

In the context of a 40th-anniversary year for landmark art by Walter De Maria—The Lightning Field, The New York Earth Room, and The Vertical Earth Kilometer were all completed in 1977—the Dia Art Foundation will show a new work that the artist began in 2011 but never finished before his death in 2013. The Truck Trilogy is just that: three trucks, each a vintage Chevrolet pickup outfitted with highly polished stainless-steel rods in circular, square, and triangular shapes. They commune in ways with De Maria’s The Bel Air Trilogy (2000-2011), for which he amended three gleaming red cars from 1955. Beyond that, the new series stands to add to a sense of enigma and mystique around an artist whose mysteriousness shows no signs of abating. —A.B.

“Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon”
New Museum, New York
September 27–January 21

From “Bad Girls” to “Homo Video,” the New Museum has a history of game-changing exhibitions about gender and sexuality, and with “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” curator Johanna Burton, working with Natalie Bell and Sara O’Keeffe, aims to make another contribution to that already-rich legacy. This expansive survey draws on a host of theories, from the original gender-as-a-construction discussions from the 1980s to newer considerations of gender as a spectrum, not a binary. While the tactics that artists use to challenge gender are central to the exhibition’s curatorial organization, considerations of gender’s intersection with race, class, sexuality, and disability will also be key. The work on view will span various mediums and generations. Among the artists included are Mickalene Thomas, Vaginal Davis, Gregg Bordowitz, A. K. Burns and A. L. Steiner, Sondra Perry, Tuesday Smillie, and Diamond Stingily, who will contribute a newly commissioned braided sculpture that will pierce through several of the museum’s levels, extending from the fourth floor to the lobby. —M.D

October

“Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
October 4–January 1

What stuff! Mark Dion’s cabinets and bins and bottles filled with the carefully archived fruits of garbage and scientific inquiry constitute this major 30-year survey. The show includes 20 major artworks, such as The N.Y. State Bureau of Tropical Conservation (1992) and Toys ’R’ U.S. (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth), 1994, along with a new interactive sculpture, a salon titled The Time Chamber, and a 20-foot-long cage filled with birds and ornithological gear. —B.A.M.

“Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil”
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
October 8–January 7

Tarsila do Amaral’s most famous work, Abaporu (1929), features a bulbous, naked man who, for some reason unknown to the viewer, looms as large as a towering cactus. The work’s title refers to the Tupi word for “the man that eats people,” and the painting may as well act as a mission statement for Tarsila (she went by her first name), whose brightly colored canvases drew on European avant-garde movements like Surrealism and dramatically revised them using a visual language that was entirely her own. (Having studied in France during the early ’20s, Tarsila’s influences included everything from Fernand Léger to the sunny hues of the Brazilian countryside.) This 120-work retrospective is the first in North America for the underrated Brazilian artist; it will travel to the Museum of Modern Art in New York this coming February. —Alex Greenberger

“Mona Hatoum: Terra Infirma”
Menil Collection, Houston
October 13–February 25

“Often the work is about conflict and contradiction—and that conflict or contradiction can be within the actual object,” Mona Hatoum told TateShots in 2011. Curator Michelle White has gathered many of Hatoum’s major pieces for the Lebanese-Palestinian artist’s first major solo show in the United States in 20 years. Works like Homebound (2000), an installation that includes steel, barbed wire, and blades and suggests a cross between a kitchen and a war zone, add to Hatoum’s continuing narrative on the subject of world conflict. Among the works on view in this show will be La Grande Broyeuse (Mouli-Julienne x17), 1999, in which a kitchen tool used for cutting vegetables is enlarged to the size of a tank. —C.T.

Cathy Wilkes
MoMA PS1, New York
October 22–March 11

Theatrical, near-surreal, and touchingly personal, Irish artist Cathy Wilkes’s installations are about people, objects, and materials. Having won the Maria Lassnig Foundation’s first Maria Lassnig Prize, the Wilkes will now have her first solo museum show in New York. Organized by Peter Eleey with Margaret Aldredge Diamond, the exhibition will address child-rearing, marriage, and death. The show will include the Glasgow-based artist’s painstakingly crafted abstract paintings and figurative sculptures. —B.A.M.

Heimo Zobernig
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 27–December 31

Heimo Zobernig represented Austria at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, but his contribution to the pavilion was actually more of a subtraction. By installing a black monolith that, in the eye of the viewer, removed the Austrian pavilion’s defining features, Zobernig sought to get rid of, as the catalog put it, the “environment based on nation-state representativity” that exists at the Giardini. Which is to say, it’s not entirely clear what Zobernig is going to present when his show “Chess Painting” opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We do know that it’s his first American solo museum show in over two decades, it spins off from the work he showed last year at the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, and it, as the materials put it, “seeks to reorient the role of the artist, the institution, the audience, and the artwork itself.” —Nate Freeman

November

“Dara Friedman: Perfect Stranger”
Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami
November 3–March 4

The German-born artist Dara Friedman, who’s 50 next year, is a video-art giant, but has somehow not yet had a major retrospective—until now, thanks to one of her hometown museums. (She also lives part time in Bad Kreuznach, Germany.) The exhibition offers up classics like her brutal Bim Bam (1999), in which she stars, slamming doors, and Dancer (2011), her bewitching short film of people dancing along city streets, surveying her remarkable range, which moves effortlessly from the exacting to the tender and from the wry to the gorgeously earnest, always wonderfully, ingeniously out of step with any prevailing trend. —Andrew Russeth

Laura Owens
Whitney Museum, New York
November 10–February 4

It’s hard to imagine why Laura Owens’s playful canvases ever eluded critics, but they did. In the 1990s, her paintings—sometimes screenprinted, and often featuring what appear to be cut-up ads, rendered with an Op-like technique—didn’t have much of a following. How times have changed. Now it’s hard to find artists who aren’t inspired by her work, which these days explores the transition between analog and digital printing formats. The Whitney Museum will offer New York audiences their first major chance to see the Los Angeles–based artist’s work with this long-overdue 60-work survey. —A.G.

“Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
November 13–February 12

Drawing on loans from 54 public and private collections in the United States and Europe, this exhibition will bring together an unprecedented assortment of work by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). Focused specifically on Michelangelo’s work as a draftsman and designer, the show will include around 150 of his drawings, among them a complete series he did for his friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, as well as three marble sculptures, some of his earliest paintings, and a wooden architectural model he made for a proposed chapel vault. —Robin Scher

“Al Taylor: What Are You Looking At?”
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
November 17–March 18

Throughout his career, the late American artist Al Taylor reveled in the absurdity of his materials and ideas. His materials were diverse, from delicate bent wires to broomsticks and hula hoops, and they suggested little more than nothing—that is, the nature of the objects themselves and how they communicate with one another in space or on paper. This show includes more than 150 of his sculptures, drawings, and prints. The show, Taylor’s first full-career museum survey, will fill the High Museum of Art’s entire Renzo Piano–designed building. —B.A.M.

“Prospect.4”
Various venues, New Orleans
November 18–February 25

The fourth edition of the New Orleans triennial is called “The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp” and overseen by Trevor Schoonmaker, chief curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University—focuses on the history of New Orleans, bringing in flavors from the “Global South”: Central and Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Highlights include a new installation from Derrick Adams; collages by hometown hero Louis Armstrong at the New Orleans Jazz Museum; and a highly anticipated public work by Kara Walker, a collaboration with musician Jason Moran that includes a riverboat calliope, the classic New Orleans waterborne steam-powered organ. As the city enters its tricentennial year, that sounds like the right way to say happy birthday. —N.F.

Stephen Shore
Museum of Modern Art, New York
November 19–May 28

Stephen Shore has come a long way since 1971, when he became the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That show, which featured many of Shore’s signature color photographs of Americana, was almost universally panned. These days, however, it’s hard to imagine photo history without Shore’s photographs. Picking up where Walker Evans left off, Shore has been photographing cars, drive-ins, and advertisements, exploring how the American landscape, once idyllic and desired, has been altered by industry and capitalism. Fifty-one years after a solo exhibition show at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1976, Shore will have his largest New York survey to date. —A.G.

“Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
November 19–March 18

One of the last PST: LA/LA shows to open this fall, “Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici” looks at Mexico in the 18th century, then still called New Spain, and the rich artistic production produced across four generations of artists, often in the form of family workshops. In the 16th century, as part of its conquest of the much of the American continent, the Spanish crown brought over European artists to decorate the newly built churches and buildings in Mexico. By the 18th century, however, several generations of American-born painters had come and gone, and artists had developed a rigorous training system, a set of iconographies, and a body of work that were exported to Europe and South America. “Painted in Mexico,” a phrase that derives from one way artists in the region signed their canvases, brings together over 100 paintings, many restored for the purposes of this exhibition, from landscapes and religious works to portraits and the infamous casta paintings, which categorized New Spanish citizens by race and blood. —M.D.

INTERNATIONAL

September

Louise Nevelson
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
September 9–January 14

Among the most original women artists of the 20th century, Louise Nevelson united strength and sensitivity in her wood constructions. Straddling the design and art worlds, Nevelson’s monochromatic sculptures are essentially collages composed of wood scraps and painted objects all united by a uniform coating of black or white paint. Architectonic and monumental, the sculptures reflected the modern world Nevelson saw change before her eyes. “I make collages,” she once said. “I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.” Nevelson’s collages will be showcased in this exhibition, the first major survey of her work in the Nordic region. —B.A.M.

Rachel Whiteread
Tate Britain, London
September 12–January 21

Rachel Whiteread made history in 1993 when she became the first woman to win the coveted Turner Prize. The piece for which she won cemented her place in the British art pantheon: the controversial temporary artwork, House, was a concrete cast of the interior of a house on Wennington Green in a working-class neighborhood in London’s East End. A collaboration with the Artangel organization for public art, it was on view for only four months before its demolition. At last, Whiteread is getting the retrospective she has long deserved. —C.T.

“Willem de Rooij: Whiteout”
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
September 14–December 17

Through photography, film, sculpture and installation, Dutch artist Willem de Rooij confronts questions related to the ways we create and consume images. In his film I’m Coming Home in Forty Days (1997), for example, de Rooij and fellow filmmaker Jeroen de Rijke (1970–2006) circumnavigated an iceberg in the bay of Ilulissat, Greenland, as a way to document the passing of time, calling attention to both the way the film was created and the way viewers see it. This fall, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art will show this film and other collaborations between the two artists alongside notable works de Rooij has made over the past two decades. —R.S.

“Alexander Kluge: Pluriverse”
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
September 15–January 7

Over the years, Alexander Kluge has been a subtle force in the German film and art worlds, producing influential essays about biopolitics, the connection between emotion and reason, and economics. Yet his art remains little known to many outside Germany, and this exhibition, which will travel in 2018 to the 21er Haus in Vienna, aims to rectify that. To celebrate the German author and filmmaker’s 85th birthday, the Museum Folkwang presents this comprehensive exhibition, which features more than five decades of Kluge’s video works. The show also features new work, including Pluriversum, a five-channel video installation about film history. —J.C.

Istanbul Biennial
Various venues, Istanbul
September 16–November 12

What makes a good neighbor? The answer can be a complicated one, especially in Turkey, a country riddled with political strife, and home to the upcoming Istanbul Biennial. Curated by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, the exhibition will explore the political factors that go into alliances and friendships. Among its 55 artists are Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Aude Pariset, Dayanita Singh, and Fred Wilson. —A.G.

Carlos Motta
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
September 16–January 7

From Protestants fleeing religious persecution in Catholic countries in the 18th century to Belgians escaping from the Germans in 1914, the Netherlands has a long history as a haven for refugees. Colombian artist Carlos Motta’s newly commissioned video The Crossing looks at how that history is continued today, with refugees emigrating from areas of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa to the Netherlands. The video focuses specifically on 11 LGBTQI subjects who came from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, and Pakistan. They address the viewer straight-on and discuss their experiences before, after, and during their journey to the European country, often touching on the oppressive homophobia and transphobia they faced, both in their native countries and in the Dutch refugee camps. Accompanying the exhibition are two large glass cabinets showing some 20 objects that document the Netherlands’s migrant history in the 18th and 20th centuries, as well as the country’s role in the colonialism. –M.D.

Moscow Biennale
Various venues, Moscow
September 19–January 18

The seventh Moscow Biennale is set to be the most prominent edition to date—for the first time, programming will run for a full four months, allowing for more Muscovites to take in work by artists from across that vast country, and the world. Entitled, “Clouds⇄Forests,” the biennale is curated by Yuko Hasegawa—who is artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo—and overseen by a council that includes the heads of Moscow’s leading cultural institutions, which sifted through applications from 600 of their countrymen looking to participate. And when the show opens in September, there will indeed be several Russian artists represented among the 52 total, along with some international superstars such as Olafur Eliasson, Ryan Trecartin, as well as two artists who, famously, were once married: Bjork and Matthew Barney. —N.F.

Lyon Biennale
Various venues, Lyon, France
September 20–January 8

The Lyon Biennale is known for its young, hip groupings of artists, making this year’s edition something of an anomaly. Guest curated by the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s Emma Lavigne, the biennial’s 14th edition skews older and historical, even though its subject is, as Lavigne notes in a statement, “the instability of the present time.” Lavigne will use large bodies of water as a metaphor here; she’s aptly titled the biennial “Floating Worlds.” Expect a mix of work by dead artists (Hans Arp, Lucio Fontana, and Lygia Pape, to name a few) alongside high-tech pieces by today’s pioneers, among them the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the Los Angeles–based video maven Diana Thater. —A.G.

“Thomas Ruff: Photographs 1979–2017”
Whitechapel Gallery, London
September 27–January 18

This major survey showcases nearly four decades of work from Thomas Ruff, who is known for his photographs about photography. The German photographer first became famous for his “Portraits,” a series of large-scale images of German youths. Over the course of his career, Ruff moved on to found photos—his “nudes” series makes use of pornographic images sourced from the internet, while his “press++” series of photographs cribs from newspaper archives. More recently, Ruff has made use of 3-D imaging software to create abstractions. —John Chiaverina

“Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You”
Serpentine Galleries, London
September 29–November 19

Torbjørn Rødland specializes in can’t-look-away-from-it tableaux—his photographs have included, over the years, an outdated cellphone displaying a picture of Anne Frank, a curator with a pencil stuck through his nose, and a carefully manicured food that drips with plasma. The Norwegian artist’s disgusting subject matter is played off against his photographs’ alluring look, which is always slick and softly focused. Hypnotic and technically adept, Rødland’s work about desire and image production will be on view this fall at the Serpentine Galleries, where Rødland will have his first solo exhibition in England. —A.G.

“Shahryar Nashat: The Cold Horizontals”
Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
September 29–January 7

“The Cold Horizontals” is Shahyar Nashat’s largest institutional solo show to date, and will feature a newly commissioned film and sculptures. In typical form for the Berlin-based artist, whose work often deals with acting and identity, the sculptures will mix fragments of autobiography, body parts, and technology. The sculptures, with their unfamiliar shapes and their barely decipherable video images, are posed in precarious balance. —B.A.M.

October

Paul Klee
Foundation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland
October 1–January 8

The Swiss-German artist Paul Klee is perhaps best known for his surreal combinations of unlike signs and symbols. What he is certainly not known for, at least for most viewers, is his abstract paintings, which are the focus of this exhibition. The Fondation Beyeler’s survey will include around 100 works spanning the totality of the artist’s storied career, and feature rarely exhibited abstract pieces alongside more well-known works. —J.C.

“André Derain 1904–1914: La Décennie Radicale”
Centre Pompidou, Paris
October 4–January 29

André Derain was indefatigable, leapfrogging from one style to the next in the decade surveyed by this ambitious show, when he was working through Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism, and quite a bit more along the way. Not all have found his efforts to be convincing. “He is an artistic adventurer, the Christopher Columbus of modern art—but it is others who profit from the new continents,” Gertrude Stein once said. But this exhibition is an occasion for new judgments, via a bounty of paintings, plus sculptures, photographs, woodcuts, sketches, works on paper, and Maori and African pieces that fired the Frenchman’s passions. —A.R.

“Albert Renger-Patzsch: The Perspective of Things”
Jeu de Paume, Paris
October 17–January 21

In early 1920s Germany, Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897–1966) championed a realist approach to photography at odds with the manipulated imagery popularized by his avant-garde colleagues elsewhere in Europe. Renger-Patzsch described this break, which came to be known as New Objectivity, as an attempt “to use photographic means to create a photography that could exist through its own photographic nature.” In tribute to this legacy, the Jeu de Paume has gathered around 190 photographs Renger-Patzsch took throughout his career, making this exhibition the largest retrospective of the artist to date. —R.S.

“ ‘Carte Blanche’ to Camille Henrot”
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
October 18–January 7

“Days are Dogs,” the third in the Palais de Tokyo’s “Carte Blanche” series, has given French, New York–based artist Camille Henrot license to free-associate, and to include other artists and one poet in the process. Inventively based on a rather universal structure—the days of the week—the exhibition, curated by Daria de Beauvais, explores how the days affect the way we organize (or don’t) our lives physically, intellectually, creatively, and emotionally. Who hasn’t experienced Sunday dread? Henrot takes over the museum’s entire exhibition space and divides it thematically into seven parts with sculptures, drawings, and videos. The title, alluding to the dog days of summer, could also be “Content and Its Discontents.” —Barbara A. MacAdam

November

“Hassan Sharif: I Am the Single Work Artist”
Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
November 4–February 3

When Hassan Sharif died last year at age 65, many noted that he was one of the most important artists to come out of the Gulf. Now, Sharif will finally receive a proper retrospective, at the Sharjah Art Foundation. The exhibition is several years in the making, and it brings together the full range of Sharif’s work, from documentation of his early Fluxus-inspired actions (one involved tying rope to a rock and proclaiming it a major victory) to his written manifestoes. Also on view will be works from Sharif’s “Objects” series, for which the Emirati artist strung up various consumer objects—garishly colored flip-flops, groupings of cardboard boxes—using a technique that he called “weaving.” —A.G.

“Leandro Erlich: Seeing and Believing”
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
November 18–April 1

The Argentine artist’s swimming pools and near-surreal hallways—like 3-D Eschers—have engaged, mystified, and even frightened audiences at galleries, museums, and venues such as a portico at the Venice Biennale. The Mori’s display of some 40 installations and videos from 1995 to 2017 is Erlich’s largest show to date. Brace yourself for optical illusions and eerie sound effects that probe the subconscious and the intellect. —B.A.M.

“Extra Bodies: The Use of the ‘Other Body’ in Contemporary Art”
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich
November 18–February 4

Other bodies, same room: here’s an exhibition, curated by Raphael Gygax, that features a many-star cast. A diverse group of artist-performers addresses how the incorporation of multiple players, the equivalent of movie “extras,” demonstrate the ways in which an artwork can be expanded in many dimensions given what these “extra bodies” represent socially, politically, esthetically, and in our imaginations. Works by artists, including Ai Weiwei, Vanessa Beecroft, Guy Ben-Ner, Oscar Bony, Christoph Büchel, among many others, date from the 1960s to the present. —B.A.M.

“James Rosenquist: Painting as Immersion”
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
November 18–March 4

Rather than presenting emblematic, stylized versions of images culled from the mass media as many of his Pop peers did, Rosenquist—who died earlier this year at age 83—rendered them in realistic fashion, cropping and combining them in allusive ways. The narratives implied in his paintings were at times personal; more often, however, as in the case of his famous wraparound antiwar work F-111 (1964–65), they addressed the sociopolitical issues of his time. He once said that, when making his three-part painting of swirling consumer goods The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (1997–1998), he recalled an old Venetian proverb, “The artist swims in the water, the critic stands ashore,” and asked himself, “Am I in there? Or am I standing on the bank watching it? I think I’m in there.” It is this aspect of the artist and his art that the Ludwig show, with an assist from archival material, will emphasize. —A.D.

Amedeo Modigliani
Tate Modern, London
November 23–April 2

With his parade of similar looking portraits, his subjects all sporting long necks, dark almond eyes, and ellipsoid heads, it has long been easy to dismiss Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian painter and occasional sculptor who died of tubercular meningitis at the age of 35 in Paris, the city where he made his name. Plus there’s the fact that he’s beloved of certain plutocrats, as readers of auction news are no doubt aware. This retrospective offers a chance to take a look at the maestro’s work with fresh eyes, with nearly 100 of his paintings—including, naturally, a bounty of his nudes. —A.R.