The best shows to see wherever you happen to be — from Rashid Johnson in Jerusalem to Yves Saint Laurent in Tokyo
Mary Evans: ‘Gilt’
Until 29 October
Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town
British-Nigerian artist Mary Evans has made her name creating large-scale, site-specific works that explore Black experience, culture and histories such as slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Central to her practice is the life-sized silhouette, often made from brown paper and assembled in narrative form, which she uses to tell stories about the ability to endure in the face of adversity.
This exhibition, whose title is a play on the words ‘gilt’ and ‘guilt’, brings together works that use brown paper and gold life-sized silhouettes to examine different South African histories. Also on display is a new site-specific silhouette commissioned by Zeitz MOCAA, which was informed by a period of research in and exploration of Cape Town.
Mary Evans (b. 1963), installation view of Gilt, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary. Commissioned by Zeitz MOCAA. Photo: © Dillon Marsh
‘Gilt is an important exhibition from an artist whose decades-long practice has been concerned with the imposition of oppressive systems of power on Black bodies,’ says exhibition curator Thato Mogotsi. ‘At the same time, Evans contends with the specificity of Cape Town as a complex site of shared diasporas, migratory experiences and global exchange.’
Lamba Forever Mandrakizay
Until 18 November
Hakanto Contemporary, Madagascar
Launched in February 2020, Hakanto Contemporary is a non-profit gallery in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital city, which is dedicated to creating dialogues between the local and international art scenes. Support for the gallery comes from a fund established by the collector and businessman Hasnaine Yavarhoussen, which was also the main sponsor of Madagascar’s inaugural national pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. This featured the work of the Malagasy artist Joël Andrianomea risoa, who is Hakanto Contemporary’s artistic director.
Kevin Ramorehatra, Untitled, 2023. © Kevin Ramorehatra for Hakanto Contemporary
Hakanto Contemporary’s new show is dedicated to the traditional Malagasy woven textile called a ‘lamba’. Much more than a garment, these brightly patterned rectangles of fabric vary throughout the country depending on location, function, and the age and gender of the wearer. They play an important role in social occasions, including weddings and funerals. The show features the work of 21 artists from across Madagascar, each interpreting the theme of ‘the lamba as a living element’ in their own way.
Yves Saint Laurent, Across the Style
20 September to 11 December
The National Art Centre, Tokyo
Yves Saint Laurent’s bold experimentations with form, line and colour revolutionised women’s fashion in the 1960s. Born in Algeria in 1936, he moved to Paris in his late teens to pursue a career in fashion. After the sudden death of his mentor Christian Dior in 1957, he became the head of the illustrious fashion house at the age of just 21. In 1962, he launched his own label, with which he was involved for 40 years until his retirement in 2002.
Cocktail dress ‘Homage to Piet Mondrian’, Autumn-Winter 1965 haute couture collection, client’s piece, Atelier Blanche, wool jersey. © Yves Saint Laurent / Alexandre Guirkinger
Landing at The National Art Centre, Tokyo this autumn is the first retrospective of the designer’s work ever to be staged in Japan. Conceived in collaboration with the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, it will examine the evolution of Saint Laurent’s design philosophy as well as his wide range of inspirations, from exotic places to artworks by the likes of Picasso, Warhol and Mondrian.
The show brings together more than 110 ensembles, including looks from his debut at Dior and the first collection that appeared under his own brand, as well accessories, drawings and photographs from across his career.
Maria Lassnig: Happy Martian
UCCA Beijing
2 September 2023 to 7 January 2024
Despite a career that spanned 70 years and criss-crossed from Vienna to Paris and New York, recognition evaded the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig for most of her life. It wasn’t until 2013, when Lassnig was 93, that she received a Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale. The following year she opened her first solo museum show in America, at MoMA PS1 — just two months before her death.
Since then, in the space of 10 years, retrospectives of Lassnig’s work have been mounted at Tate Liverpool, the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the National Gallery in Prague, Kunstmuseum Basel, the Albertina in Vienna and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam.
Maria Lassnig (1919-2014), Zwei Arten zu sein (Doppelselbstporträt) (Two Ways of Being (Double Self-Portrait)), 2000. Oil on canvas. 100 × 125 cm. © Maria Lassnig Foundation
Now UCCA Beijing is opening the first ever significant show of Lassnig’s work in China. Organised in conjunction with the Albertina and the Maria Lassnig Foundation — which awards mid-career artists €50,000 and a solo show — the exhibition will focus on her daring self-portraits. These fusions of figuration, abstraction and realism are, as she put it, her attempts at painting how her body felt, not looked.
Letters of Light
13 September 2023 to 14 January 2024
Louvre Abu Dhabi
Drawn from the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée du Louvre and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Letters of Light examines the histories of the holy books of the three Abrahamic religions: the Qur’an, the Old and New Testaments, and the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh).
A page from the ’Blue Qur’an’, North Africa, circa 900 A.D. Gold on dyed parchment. Louvre Abu Dhabi
Organised in five parts, it focuses on the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the dissemination of their sacred writings across different languages and cultures. Shown alongside a selection of the most beautiful sacred books ever made will be artefacts and paintings, including Giovanni Bellini’s Virgin and Child from 1480-85.
Dan Flavin/Donald Judd: Doha
25 October 2023 to 24 February 2024
QM Gallery — Al Riwaq, Doha
Donald Judd and Dan Flavin first met in an art gallery in Brooklyn in 1962. The two titans of American Minimalism remained confidants and sometime collaborators for the rest of their lives. ‘The two became Flavin and Judd for a while,’ said their mutual friend, the artist John Wesley. ‘The two names were together.’
Dan Flavin (1933-1996), Untitled, 1970. Blue and red fluorescent light. Modular units, each made of two 8 ft (244 cm) vertical fixtures and two 8 ft (244 cm) horizontal fixtures: length variable. © 2023 Stephen Flavin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner
The first major museum presentation to consider their artistic dialogue in nearly two decades will focus on their shared engagement with material, colour and form. Curated by Michael Govan and Jennifer King and organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in collaboration with Qatar Museums, it features works spanning the 1960s to the 1990s, with important loans from private collections, the Dan Flavin Estate and the Judd Foundation.
The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors of Oceania from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
24 October 2023 to 25 January 2024
National Museum of Qatar, Doha
Currently, the Met Museum’s gallery of Oceanic art — housed in its Michael C. Rockefeller Wing — is closed for a major renovation. Instead of storing the collection until the works finish in 2025, the Met is loaning around 130 of the most important pieces from the 2,800 it houses to the National Museum of Qatar. It will be the first time many of these objects have left the building in nearly a century.
Breastplate (Tema, Tambe or Tepatu), Santa Cruz Islands, Solomon Islands, late 19th/early 20th century. Tridacna shell, turtle shell, trade cloth, fibre. 7½ in (19.1 cm) diam. The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979
The show, which is divided into themes of ‘Voyaging’, ‘Ancestors’ and ‘Time’, explores the vast array of cultures and traditions that make up Oceania, an area that covers about a fifth of the Earth’s surface.
One highlight is a breastplate from Nendö in the Solomon Islands. Around a century old, it is carved from turtle shell and the shell of a giant clam, and takes the shape of a stylised frigate bird and leaping dolphins. Such breastplates were once worn by warriors, and today are an important part of the island’s ceremonial rituals.
Madame Song: Pioneering Art and Fashion in China
29 July 2023 to 14 April 2024
M+, Hong Kong
According to Suhanya Raffel, the director of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, which opened to great fanfare in 2021, ‘Everyone interested in the roots of contemporary Chinese visual culture needs to know Song Huai-Kuei.’
Also known as ‘Madame Song’, she was an artist, actor, socialite and entrepreneur who helped introduce European (in particular French) art, fashion and fine dining to China following the Cultural Revolution. This was largely thanks to her close relationship with the designer Pierre Cardin, whom she befriended while in Paris with her husband, the Bulgarian tapestry artist Marin Varbanov.
Song Huai-Kuei in a Pierre Cardin evening dress at Maxim’s Beijing, 1985. Photo: © Yonfan
Using 320 objects, including outfits, artworks, photographs, films and installations, Madame Song: Pioneering Art and Fashion in China will tell her remarkable story. It’s accompanied by a biography, Madame Song: A Life in Art and Fashion, which is published in conjunction with Thames & Hudson.
The museum’s cinema, meanwhile, will run a programme of films relating to the exhibition. Among them is The Last Emperor (1987), which was the first Western movie ever to be filmed inside Beijing’s Forbidden City. The director, Bernardo Bertolucci, met Song while dining every night at Cardin’s Art Nouveau restaurant in Beijing, eventually casting her in his film as the last emperor’s mother.
Emily Kam Kngwarray
2 December 2023 to 28 April 2024
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only began painting in 1988, when she was in her late seventies. Over the next eight years she painted more than 3,000 canvases, averaging one painting a day. Her kaleidoscopic compositions, featuring stripes, blocky grids or layers of repeated dots across striations of colour, soon garnered critical attention, prompting global interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous art.
This comprehensive exhibition will bring together important works from across her artistic practice, from early vibrant batiks to later monumental canvases. It will also include sculpture, works on paper and an audio-visual project created in collaboration with the artist’s desert community in Utopia, in central Australia.
Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerre people, No title, 1991. National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1991. © Emily Kame Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency
Although Kngwarray’s work has often been compared stylistically to that of American abstract painters including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, its conceptual and aesthetic meaning will only ever be truly understood by those from her own culture.
As an Anmatyerre elder, Kngwarray was a custodian of women’s ‘Dreaming’ sites (sacred locations) in Alhalkere country in the Utopia region of the Northern Territory. Inspired by the body markings used in the Anmatyerre women’s ceremony called ‘Awelye’, her work celebrates her role and life experiences as well as the stories, rituals and spiritual and artistic traditions of the Anmatyerre people.
Rashid Johnson: Broken Crowd
8 August to 2 December
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Alongside its celebrated archaeological collection — including the 233,000-year-old Venus of Berekhat Ram, which is believed to be the oldest piece of representational art in existence — Jerusalem’s Israel Museum also hosts some of the region’s best modern and contemporary art. Recent shows have been dedicated to the likes of Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Eva Hesse, Paul Klee and Doug Aitken.
In August the museum is unveiling an exhibition of work by the American mixed-media artist Rashid Johnson, who is best known for using art to address themes of race and discrimination, and to tell his experience of growing up as a Black man in modern America.
Rashid Johnson (b. 1977), Untitled Broken Crowd, 2019. Ceramic tile, mirror tile, branded red oak flooring, bronze, spray enamel, oil stick, black soap, wax. 240 × 326.3 × 7.6 cm. © Rashid Johnson. Photo: courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, by Martin Parsekian
Included in the show are Johnson’s 2011 painting Cosmic Slop ‘Grease’, which contains liquefied black soap normally used to treat sensitive skin in West Africa, as well as his 2019 film The Hikers, in which two Black dancers wearing African masks meet and reveal themselves to one another over the course of seven minutes.
Visible/Invisible
Until 1 December 2025
MAP — Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru (Bangalore)
The first public museum established in India in more than a decade opened this year to great acclaim. It houses more than 60,000 South Asian works of art, curated with a drive to democratise culture and make it more accessible to diverse audiences.
ênh nhiệt liệt. Nơi đây lưu giữ hơn 60.000 tác phẩm nghệ thuật Nam Á, được tuyển chọn với nỗ lực dân chủ hóa văn hóa và làm cho nó dễ tiếp cận hơn với nhiều đối tượng khác nhau.
Gauri Gill (b. 1970), Rampyari (Balika Mela series), Bikaner, Rajasthan, 2003-10. Archival pigment print, courtesy of MAP Museum of Art and Photography
Uknown artist, Woman Holding a Flower. Kolkata, West Bengal. Early 20th century. Oil on canvas, courtesy of MAP Museum of Art and Photography
Helping achieve that goal is the museum’s current exhibition, Visible/Invisible. It contains around 130 works that span the past millennium of human creativity, including sculptures, paintings, textiles and photography, and examines how women’s lives have been represented throughout the Indian subcontinent by mostly male image-makers. The works on show are divided into four themes: ‘goddess and mortal’, ‘sexuality and desire’, ‘power and violence’ and ‘struggle and resistance’.
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of research papers, lectures and discussions on the same themes, which the museum hopes will engage multiple viewpoints and challenge the current gender status quo in Indian institutions.
Chang Ucchin
14 September to 25 December
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea — MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul
Despite remaining relatively little-known outside his native Korea, the painter Chang Ucchin is considered a pioneer of the country’s modern art movement. His work — mostly naive-style depictions of people, trees, moons and magpies — was the result of a progressive arts education in Tokyo and a fascination with Korean folk art and crafts, which Chang developed while working at the National Museum of Korea. In 2014, the Chang Ucchin Museum of Art opened in the city of Yangju, housing more than 350 of his works.
Chang Ucchin (1917-1990), Self-portrait, 1951. Oil on paper. 14.8 × 10.8 cm. Private Collection
This September, the Deoksugung site of Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea — also called the MMCA — is hosting a retrospective of Chang’s work. It promises to include a range of his pictures in oils, ink wash, pencil and pen, both from the museum’s own holdings and on loan from private collections.
The aim, says the MMCA, is to ‘shed new light on the nature of his art and the significance of his uniquely Korean compositions in the history of Korean art’.
Source: Christie’s
