The Japanese prince of Pop, Takashi Murakami, takes over Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris’ hippest gallery, where he has been showing since 1995, this month. His new body of work consists of 17 paintings, including three monumental ones, five sculptures, and two videos. There are circular floral paintings; a series of self-portraits with his famous fictional characters, such as Mr. DOB and Kaikai and Kiki; and metallic sculptures of bears, based on his sometime collaborator, the rapper Kanye West. And if it isn’t enough just to show in Paris, Murakami opens another solo show at New York’s Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea later in the month. (Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, September 15-October 10; Gagosian Gallery, September 17-October 24)
Takashi MURAKAMI
"Kaikai Kiki and Me" 2008
Acrylic on canvas mounted on aluminum frame 59 x 59 x 2 inches
©2008 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
Shot in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s, Irving Penn’s Small Trades series of photographs depicts skilled workers dressed in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their occupations. The full series of 252 black-and-white prints on view in the exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and reproduced in the catalogue cover of a wide range of tradesmen, including milkmen, rag pickers, chimney sweeps, firemen, and seamstresses. Simply photographed in front of a blank canvas with natural light and carefully produced as silver gelatin and platinum prints, this rarely seen work reveals Penn’s immense interest in humanity and the power of his artistic skills. (September 9 – January 10)
Irving Penn (American, born 1917)
Pompier , Par is, Negative: 1950 Pr int: 1951 © 1951, restored 1996 Les Editions Condé Nast S.A.
Medium: Gelatin silver print
33.7 x 24.1 cm (13 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.)
Collection: Partial gift of Irving Penn. The J. Paul Getty Museum
Los Angeles, 2008.1.144
In celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s momentous voyage from the Netherlands to New York, the Met is exhibiting one of Johannes Vermeer’s most popular paintings: The Milkmaid. This extraordinary painting is being displayed with five other rare canvases by the 17th century Dutch master and several other paintings of the period from the museum’s collection that place the work in its historical context. This show marks the first time the beloved painting, which is usually on view in Amsterdam’s venerable Rijksmuseum, has been exhibited in New York since the 1939 World’s Fair. (September 10–November 29)
Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–-1675)
The Milkmaid, ca. 1658
Oil on canvas, 45.5 x 41 cm
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam SK-A-2344
Originally shot for an editorial spread in the French magazine Paradis, the photographs in Juergen Teller’s fifth solo show at Lehmann Maupin in New York reveal an after-hours romp through the Musee du Louvre by two nude women. Of course, being Teller photos, these aren’t just any nude subjects; they feature the actress Charlotte Rampling and the model Raquel Zimmermann, both of which he has photographed for other projects. The naked beauties nonchalantly pose with statues of gods and goddesses in the great halls and humorously lean against the protective railing in front of the Mona Lisa. Like his ad campaign for Marc Jacobs, where celebrities such as Sofia Coppola and Cindy Sherman are candidly shot in unlikely spots, these images show a bit of irony in a quirky way. (September 10 – October 17)
Rambunctious photographer Ryan McGinley explores new depths with a show at London’s Alison Jacques Gallery featuring 24 luscious color images of his gang of naked pals in caves across America. Staying clear of the tourist attractions, McGinley and his crew focused on wild caverns, where investigation was often hazardous and temperatures sometimes freezing. The resulting, highly controlled exposures are nothing less than magical in their display of theatrical lighting, seductive color, compelling nature, and human innocence. Moonmilk, a collectible book of McGinley’s new images, which was published by Morel, accompanies the exhibition. (September 11 – October 8)
For the first time since moving into the new building in 2004, the Museum of Modern Art displays its marvelous collection of Monet paintings of water lilies and the pond at his famous property in Giverny, which are complemented by two paintings from the Met. The Impressionist master spent the last 25 years of his life developing and painting the pond and its surroundings. Now, MoMA brings a group of these masterworks together in its equally magnificent galleries for a nice, extended run. (September 13 – April 12)
Claude Monet, The Japanese Footbridge c. 1920-22
Oil on canvas, 35 1/4 x 45 7/8" (89.5 x 116.3 cm)
Grace Rainey Rogers Fund © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
Following in Jeff Koons’ footsteps, French artist Xavier Veilhan unveils his conceptual art at the Château de Versailles outside of Paris. Unlike the American pop artist, who showed work from several years of production, Veilhan is making new work for the ornate rooms and massive, well-kept grounds of the estate. The whimsical conceptualist has created site-specific spectacles, including a violet horse-drawn carriage, a naked woman on a pedestal, a gigantic sculpture of a Russian cosmonaut, figures of famous contemporary architects perched on pedestals, as well as a modernist mobile, a light machine, and a fountain. The lively mix of installations transforms the historic palace into a 21st century artistic playground. (September 13 – December 13)
Vincent Germond
Famous for her sensuous images of magnified flowers and animal bones, Georgia O’Keeffe also made abstractions throughout her career. This exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which is the first to focus solely on her abstract works, reexamines her place in American modernism. The colorful survey includes more than 130 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures by O’Keeffe, as well as a selection of portraits of the artist by her husband and gallerist, Alfred Steiglitz. The landmark exhibition, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by the organizers and selections from recently unsealed Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence, travels in 2010 to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. (September 17 – January 17)
Georgia O’Keeffe
Series I—No. 3, 1918
Oil on board, 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm)
Milwaukee Art Museum
Gift of Jane Bradley Pettit Foundation and The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation M1997.192 © Milwaukee Art Museum, Photo by Larry Sanders
If the old Yankee Stadium was truly the house that Ruth built, then Vasily Kandinsky can surely take some credit for New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The Guggenheim started out exhibiting non-objective art and their large collection of works by the abstractionist was always at the heart of its mission. Nearly 100 of Kandinsky’s paintings and 60 works on paper will be on view, while two experimental performance works—one featuring artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and actress Isabella Rossellini and the other one head-lined by choreographer Karole Armitage—supplement this comprehensive survey. (September 18 – January 13)
Mexican-born, Berlin-based artist Damián Ortega started his career as a political cartoonist but soon switched to art as a more tactile way to express his uncanny ideas. For his first American survey show, the ICA Boston presents some 18 of his large-scale sculpture, photography and video from 1996 to 2007, including the seminal Cosmic Thing, a deconstructed Volkswagen Beetle that hangs suspended from the gallery’s ceiling. The exhibition, which was organized by Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan, also features some of Ortega’s witty comments on Mexican life, such as a construction module made from tortilla chips and a Tired Pick Axe, stuck in a sidewalk. Meanwhile, New York’s Gladstone Gallery offers viewers a chance to see the artist’s new work in a solo show that runs from September 17-October 31. (ICA, September 18 – January 18)
Cosmic Thing, 2002, Disassembled 1989
Volkswagen Beetle
265 x 276 x 296 in The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
South African-born, Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz loves popular culture—so much so that she deconstructs well-known films and puts the songs of Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Bob Marley to new use. Her survey show at Toronto’s Power Plant [LINK: http://www.thepowerplant.org/upcoming.html ] includes several of her best known works, including Him + Her, which remixes footage from 23 Jack Nicholson films and 28 Meryl Streep films to make a compelling study of male and female archetypes in Hollywood cinema. A second show of Breitz’ video work, which features two earlier video installations, is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from October 1 to December 20. (The Power Plant, September 19 – November 22)
Jens Ziehe, Berlin
Largely underestimated, Warhol’s last decade was one the most productive and experimental phases of his entire artistic career. He collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring; he started making works by hand again; and he created some of the largest series and biggest works that he had ever made. This exhibition at the Milwaukee Museum of Art brings together 50 important works, including abstractions, collaborations, black‐and‐white ads, self‐portraits, camouflage patterns, oxidation paintings, and the monumental Last Supper series. In 2010, the show travels to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. (September 26 – January 3)
Lent by Bischofberger Collection, Zurich
A standout in the Venice Biennale, Liam Gillick brings the final part of a four-part museum show that has adopted a different form at every venue to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. A conceptual artist who moves freely from one form to another, Gillick is best known for his platform sculptures that complicate social interaction and his minimal text pieces that explore communication. A week after this show opens, the museum presents another Gillick production: Liam Gillick Curates the MCA Collection, where he makes selections and arrangements that further explore his creative vision. (October 10 – January 10)
Conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari has been making text and image paintings and photomontages since the 1960s. Utilizing found film stills in his work, he became an important influence to the “Pictures Generation” of artists, such as Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Barbara Kruger. His retrospective, which kicks off at Tate Modern in London and travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010, features more than 130 works in a variety of media.(October 13 – January10)
Two Figures (red) and Two Figures (green) in Different Environments (Food), 1990
Vinyl Paint, Acrylic, Colour Photographs
85.75 x 106.75 in
© John Baldessari Courtesy of Baldessari Studio
One of the most notable works in the Making Worlds exhibition in the Venice Biennale is Paul Chan’s animated film Sade for Sade’s Sake at New York’s Greene Naftali Gallery. The 5 hour and 45 minute video installation, which is projected in three adjoining sections on a brick wall in the Arsenale, poetically interprets the Marquis de Sade’s infamous novel The 120 Days of Sodom. Shadow figures walk and crawl, plead with one another, act out religious rituals, get physically abused, and become disembodied, while geometric shapes bounce over and around them. Chan’s film, which addresses the political strife and lack of humanity still prevalent in many parts of the world, makes its New York premiere in this solo show. (October 22 – December 5)
Sade for Sade's sake, 2009
Installation View, Making Worlds, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009
digital video projection
5 hours, 45 minutes looped Luca Campigotto; Image Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York
A figurative painter that blurs the boundaries between representation and abstraction, Susan Rothenberg is one of the most respected artists of her generation. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s show features 25 paintings from the past 30 years shows the depth of her interests, from the horse paintings of the 1970s to the recent canvases of fragmented body parts. Selected by the artist and exhibition curator Michael Auping, the work displays primal subjects rendered in an expressionistic way. After Fort Worth, the exhibition travels to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and the Miami Art Museum. (October 18–January 3)
A leading player in the French contemporary art scene for the past 30 years, Sophie Calle documents social relationships using a predetermined set of rules. Working in the style of a novelist or diarist, she constructs scenarios and then follows the action with her pen and camera in hand. Talking to Strangers (at Whitechapel in London) focuses on 12 important works from the late-1970s to the present, including the acclaimed 2007 installation Prenez Soin De Vous (Take Care of Yourself), which shows 107 professional women poetically interpreting an email breakup message from her partner. (October 16 – January 3)
R. Crumb, the father of the underground comic movement, tackles his most ambitious project to date with his adaptation of the first book of the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis. The 207 black-and-white drawings on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles include every word from all 50 chapters and will be released as a book, published by W.H. Norton, in late October. In recent years, the aging creator of Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat has become a darling of the art world. He knows how to construct amusing narratives, but by telling the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, and Sodom and Gomorrah in his twisted and comical style—with longhaired prophets and big-bottomed femme fatales—he may have ironically hit on something that will last through eternity. (October 24 – February 7)
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, 2009
Chapter 1. Ink and correction fluid on paper
14 3⁄4 x 11 1⁄2 in. (37.5 x 29.2 cm) Courtesy the artist; Paul Morris; and David Zwirner, New York
An artist who knows no boundaries, Urs Fischer takes over the entire exhibition space at New York’s New Museum for what organizing curator Massimiliano Gioni cleverly calls an “introspective” rather than a survey show. The Swiss-born, New York-based artist is revered for digging up Gavin Brown’s enterprise’s gallery floor, carving out massive sections of the Whitney Museum’s walls during the 2006 Biennial, and photographing a group show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in order to make wall paper for the next hanging. Other than a sculpture of a tongue sticking out of a wall, little is known about what this enfant terrible will show here—but that by itself is an invitation to enchantment.(October 28 – January 24)
Courtesy the artist / Gavin Brown's enterprise
The subject of recent survey shows in Paris and Philadelphia, Alexander Calder is a modernist master who never ceases to amaze contemporary audiences. The Seattle Art Museum mounts a show that covers the artist’s work in a variety of media over a 50-year period, from the 1920s to the 1970s. The exhibition, which is drawn mainly from the Seattle area collection of Jon and Mary Shirley, features mobiles, stabiles, works on paper, and jewelry by the artist, as well as Herbert Matter’s film and a selection of his photographs showing the artist at work in his studio. (October 15 – April 11)
Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong, 1948
Brass, sheet metal, wire, and paint
Alexander Calder
American, 1898-1976
Jon and Mary Shirley
Olafur Eliasson creates temporary art installations that demand to be experienced rather than just seen. His monumental project, The New York City Waterfalls, was visited by millions of viewers in the New York Harbor's East River last summer and soon his traveling exhibition, Take Your Time, will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. This comprehensive show features a number of his phenomenal works, including environments, sculptures, and photographs that recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Scandinavia. Light, water, ice, fog, arctic moss, and lava rock are used to explore new perceptions of everyday life. (December 10 – April 11)
Olafur Eliasson, 360° room for all colours, 2002
Stainless steel, projection foil, fluorescent lights, wood, and control unit
126 x 321 x 321 inches
Installation view at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany, 2004
Private collection, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
© 2007 Olafur Eliasson Alexander Krauss
