SEPTEMBER
Museums:
“Iran Modern”
Asia Society, Sept. 6–Jan. 5.
Works by Iranian artists from the fifties up to 1979: evidence that modernism took hold in more places than we tend to realize.
“Radical Presence”
Grey Art Gallery, Sept. 10–Dec. 7; the Studio Museum in Harlem, Nov. 14–Mar. 9.
Documents the complex history of black performance art.
“TJ Wilcox: In the Air”
Whitney Museum, Sept. 19–Feb. 9.
Wilcox turns the 360-degree vista from his Union Square penthouse into a panoramic six-part film that chronicles a clear day in the city.
“Descartes’ Daughter”
Swiss Institute, Sept. 19–Nov. 3.
Inspired by the story that René Descartes constructed an animatronic likeness of his 5-year-old daughter after she died, this group show takes a coolheaded look at the mind-body divide. Look for poltergeists, doppelgängers, and Virgin Mary apparitions.
“Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself”
MoMA, Sept. 21–Jan. 20.
Cerebral, weighty work made with a light touch, funneling Rockburne’s polymathic interests—astronomy, Quattrocento masters, the Golden Mean—into abstractions.
“Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sept. 25–Jan. 12.
When you think about it, Balthus (1908–2001) was a lot like the Internet: partial to pictures of cats and underage neighbor girls.
“Tiepolo, Guardi, and Their World: Eighteenth-Century Venetian Drawings”
Morgan Library and Museum, Sept. 27–Jan. 5.
Nearly 100 luminous drawings from the Morgan’s collection by eighteenth-century masters.
Galleries:
Sol LeWitt
Paula Cooper, Sept. 3–Oct. 10.
The wall drawings that the critic Peter Schjeldahl once called “incredibly potent inventions, like the lever and the wheel.”
“Parasitic Gaps”
Team Gallery, Sept. 5–Oct. 6.
Trust Team Gallery to make text in visual art seem fresh again, via the heady works of up-and-comers like Margaret Lee and Georgia Sagri.
Liu Xiaodong
Mary Boone, Sept. 5–Oct. 26.
Painted, pointed diptychs of scenes from Israel and Palestine.
Matthew Day Jackson
Hauser & Wirth, Sept. 6–Oct. 19.
A custom-designed vehicle invented by Jackson’s uncle and built by his cousin, a champion race-car driver.
Carol Bove
Maccarone, Sept. 7–Oct. 19.
This critical favorite brings in the outdoor concrete-and-metal sculptures she made for Documenta 13, alongside new, gnomic pieces that pay homage to beat poet Lionel Ziprin.
Aaron Spangler
Horton Gallery, Sept. 7–Oct. 20.
The Minnesotan’s carved blocks of basswood, covered in black gesso and graphite, channel folk art, high art, and American subcultures real and imagined.
David Gilbert
Klaus von Nichtssagend, Sept. 8–Oct. 20.
Photographs that find their strength in the constructed scenes they depict: messy assemblages that whimsically suggest flora and fauna.
Jean Dubuffet
Pace Gallery, Sept. 10–Oct. 26.
With “outsider” artists taking center stage at this year’s Venice Biennale, what better time to revisit the work of the French visionary who coined the term “Art Brut”?
Ashley Bickerton
Lehmann Maupin, Sept. 11–Oct. 26.
Weirder than ever, his ebullient portraits always make us see ourselves as the depraved anthropologists we are.
Waltercio Caldas
Gering & Lopez, Sept. 12–Oct. 26.
Little-known in the U.S. but big in Brazil, this long-established artist creates mysterious systems of objects that straddle the line between two dimensions and three.
Edmund de Waal
Gagosian, Sept. 12–Oct. 19.
Making, looking, collecting—all instincts that appear in his installations of clustered porcelain vessels and in The Hare With Amber Eyes, his award-winning best seller about a family and its heirlooms.
Aldo Tambellini
James Cohan, Sept. 12–Oct. 19.
New-media pioneer whose paeans to the color black will be rediscovered via the paintings and photographs at Cohan. His hand-painted films will also screen at MoMA in October.
A. K. Burns
Callicoon Fine Arts, Sept. 15–Oct. 27.
Co-founder of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and co-star of an art-porn flick, Burns pairs labor and gender politics in her second show at Callicoon.
OCTOBER
Museums:
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures”
New Museum, Oct. 2–Jan. 12.
In 1971, Burden upped the ante of endurance art when he had his assistant shoot him through the arm. He’ll take over five floors and the façade of the New Museum, giving his big sculptural work the space it needs.
Tony Feher
Bronx Museum, Oct. 6–Feb. 15.
Melding Minimalist and readymade traditions, Feher turns half-filled bottles, cardboard boxes, and berry containers into sweet little sculptures that radiate faith in everyday life’s power.
Mariko Mori
Japan Society, Oct. 11–Jan 12.
Her first major U.S. museum survey in a decade, “Rebirth: Recent Work by Mariko Mori” could be a nod at Mori’s self-reinvention via self-portraiture—or a reference to her space-age podlike forms.
“Mike Kelley”
MoMA PS1, Oct. 13–Feb. 2.
Remembering Kelley, who passed away last year, John Waters called him “the man who made pitiful seem sexy, the man who turned grimy, thrift-shop stuffed animals into heartbreaking, jaw-dropping beauty.”
“Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital”
Museum of Arts and Design, Oct. 16–July 6.
A celebration of the 3-D printer and its relatives: See Marc Newson’s design for a madly expensive Boucheron necklace, Barry X Ball’s neo-traditionalist sculptures, Julian Mayor’s cloned Queen Anne chair, and more.
“Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis”
Frick Collection, Oct. 22–Jan. 19.
The Hague’s great museum is under renovation, and its painting collection is touring the world—fronted by Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, which hasn’t been to New York since 1984.
Christopher Wool
Guggenheim Museum, Oct. 25–Jan. 22.
Stenciled-text paintings and digitally abstracted forms by this influential artist’s-artist.
“The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk”
Brooklyn Museum, Oct. 25–Feb 23.
Sketches, videos, and photographs aplenty—all of it documenting the rise of fashion’s enfant terrible, with a hundred-plus ensembles.
Galleries:
Steve Mumford
Postmasters, Oct. 5–Nov. 9.
This war artist’s ink-and-watercolor drawings of scenes outside Guantánamo will open Postmasters Gallery’s new Tribeca space. A slow medium may be the perfect way to document a never-ending political mess.
Jamisen Ogg
Planthouse, Oct. 23–Nov. 27.
This emerging talent makes labor-of-love pieces that meld elements of carpentry and domesticity: carved cardboard boxes, paper towels bled through with Sharpie ink, etc.
NOVEMBER
Museums:“Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932–1947”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nov. 4–Mar 2.
This mid-century modernist architect took Venetian glass to new levels, making wafer-thin structures and pieces shot through with a thousand gleaming air bubbles.
Agnieszka Kurant and Tue Greenfort
SculptureCenter, Nov. 10–Jan. 27.
Greenfort explores the intersection of art and the environment; Kurant’s made a film starring Charlotte Rampling, Abe Vigoda, and Dick Miller, playing characters cut from Hollywood movies.
“Pedro Reyes: The People’s UN (PUN)”
Queens Museum of Art, Nov. 23–Mar. 1.
For its reopening, the Queens Museum of Art (in whose building the U.N. first met) has invited Reyes to show his populist version of a General Assembly: 193 participants acting out negotiation techniques.
“The Shadows Took Shape”
The Studio Museum in Harlem, Nov. 14–Mar. 9.
Looping in everyone from Sun Ra to Rammellzee, this much-anticipated homage to Afrofuturism imagines a far-out universe bending toward justice.
“Isa Genzken: Retrospective”
MoMA, Nov. 23–Mar. 10.
Whether with her early concrete slabs or her visual odes to Michael Jackson, this German artist has made decades of wily, diverse work about the materials and contrivances of the postindustrial world.
Galleries:
Ad Reinhardt
David Zwirner, Nov. 7–Dec. 18.
A show of his all-black paintings, color-slide presentations, and whimsical cartoons. Curated by Robert Storr.
Ashley Bickerton at Lehmann Maupin, Sept. 11”Oct. 26. Photo: ” Ashley Bickerton/Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong/Courtesy of Ashley Bickerton Studio
Mariko Mori at the Japan Society, Oct. 11”Jan 12. Photo: ” Mariko Mori/Courtesy of the Japan Society
“Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital” at the Museum of Arts and Design, Oct. 16”July 6. Photo: Barry X Ball Studio/Courtesy of the Museum of Art and Design, New York
Aldo Tambellini at James Cohan, Sept. 12”Oct. 19. Photo: ” The Artist/Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York/Shanghai
“Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting From the Mauritshuis” at the Frick Collection, Oct. 22”Jan. 19. Photo: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague/Courtesy of the Frick Collection
“Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum, Oct. 2”Jan. 12. Photo: The Museum of Contemporary Art Collection, Los Angeles, and Courtesy of the New Museum
