From the enormous hyper-realistic sculptures of the Australian Ron Mueck to the story of friendship and confrontation between two giants of impressionism (Manet and Degas); from a fascinating contemporary look at the African continent to Van Gogh’s cypresses or an immersion in the world of divos… The holidays and museums begin, as well as being a great option to shelter from the summer heat, they usually reserve for these months some of its most attractive exhibitions. If you plan to travel in the coming weeks around Europe and beyond, these are some proposals.
At the Cartier Foundation in Paris, a baby just out of its mother’s womb lies on a mat. He has one eye completely closed, the umbilical cord still attached, his skin wrinkled and spattered with blood. The sculpture measures five meters and is the work of Australian Ron Mueck, who despite the epic scale manages to make his works intensely intimate, slightly haunting and convincingly human. In his third visit to the glass-enclosed space on Boulevard Raspail, Mueck also presents Mass, an installation made up of a hundred gigantic skulls, or a naked man who seems to be drifting inside a boat without oars. (Until the 5th of November).
“I wouldn’t go to bed with him because he’s so filthy I can’t imagine anyone could,” Andy Warhol wrote about Jean-Michel Basquiat in one of the last entries in his Diaries shortly before he died in 1987. The relationships to turbulent times between the two artists, who were not lovers but painted 160 works with four hands, shared studios and occasional trips, is the subject of one of the Louis Vuitton Foundation’s exhibitions of the year in the Bois de Boulogne (until August 28) . Long before them, Manet and Degas, two opposite characters, maintained a relationship of rivalry and disagreements that happily culminated in Degas searching for the fragments of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, which Monet’s heirs had sold piecemeal, to reunite them into a single piece. canvas. It will be on the bill until July 23 and in September it will travel to the New York Metropolitan.
Diva comes from a goddess and there are glamorous, extravagant and powerful ones like Cher, Madonna or Beyoncé, but also mavericks who reached the top taking charge of their destinies, breaking conventions and altering the world around them, in the case of Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin or Billie Eilish. All of them have their great moment in DIVA, the new exhibition of the Victoria
A vision of contemporary Africa through photography, film and music, by artists from different generations. Tate Modern’s summer exhibition, A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography (July 6-January 4, 2024) explores new narratives around themes such as identity, urbanism and the climate emergency. Following the river, at the Tate Britain, Isaac Julien displays a dazzling career in large film installations, in which he has addressed everything from police brutality and black life and culture in London or the hard times of AIDS to the wild architecture of the Italian modernist Lina Bo Bardi) and confirms him as one of the great creators of our time (until August 20).
There is no shortage of options, from the new blockbuster at the British Museum dedicated to luxury and power in the ancient world (until August 13) or the exhibition at the National Gallery , which places Barcelona among the European cities where modern art was forged and in which glittering stars such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin or Munch come face to face with Casas and Rusiñol (until August 13).
In June 1982, Jean-Michel Basquiat was invited to Modena to create eight large paintings for a one-off show that never took place. The Italian Emilio Mazzoli arranged everything so that the artist, then 21 years old, had everything ready in a week. He worked on discarded canvases by another artist in a warehouse that he later declared seemed to him “a factory, a sick factory. He hated it”. Now, more than 40 years later, the works that are part of private collections are brought together for the first time at the Beyeler Foundation (until August 27). Without leaving the magnificent space designed by Renzo Piano, a great retrospective of the Colombian Doris Salcedo, the first woman to receive the Velázquez Prize (until September 17).
Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of the great exponents of the Italian ‘arte povera’, is the protagonist of a great anthology of his work in the Bramante cloister (Infinite, contemporary art without limit, until October 15). The artist, who at 89 is still active, brings together works from the sixties to the present, including such emblematic pieces as the visionary Venus de los rags (1967), a critique of the consumer system and the culture of waste , which time has made more urgent and necessary.
The city of canals is immersed in the Architecture Biennale, which under the title The Laboratory of the Future, focuses on urgent issues such as decolonization, decarbonization and the environmental battle. But beyond the Arsenale, the samples multiply. It is worth making a stop in the two spaces of the French luxury magnate François Pinault: Punta della Dogana, where until November 23 he presents Icônes , an exhibition that explores the relationship between contemporary art and spirituality, and Palazzo Grassi, where for For the first time you can see the recently acquired photographs that belonged to the Condé Nast group (Berenice Abbott, Cecil Beaton, Lee Miller, André Kertész, Horst P. Horst, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn…)
Germany’s most important living painter, Gerhard Richter, 91, shows at the Neue Nationalgalerie four large canvases from the Birkenau series, inspired by photographs taken secretly by Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, who risked their lives doing it. The cycle, which the artist promised never to sell, is part of the long-term loan of 100 works that will form part of the future Museum der Moderne.
Best known for his sunflowers and swirling skies, Van Gogh also filled his paintings with cypress trees, especially the last two years of his life, showing through them both his creative process and the evolution of his state of mind. They can be seen at the Metropolitan, until August 27.
At the Brooklyn Museum, one of the most controversial and media-produced exhibitions of the year Picasso, praised and vilified by critics in equal measure: Es Pablo-matic: Picasso according to Hannah Gadsby, an exhibition that focuses on his supposed misogyny, confronting the treatment of women in their work with that of 30 contemporary creators (until September 24).
Beyond suspicion, San Francisco-based Puerto Rican Pepón Osorio displays his powerful and immersive theatrical installations at the New Museum. From the recreation of an apartment cordoned off with yellow police tape where a crime has taken place to the atmosphere of a barbershop where every little object looks like a celebration of masculinity. The retrospective is titled My heart that beats / My beating heart and it will be on display until September 17.
