DANA SCHUTZ, 9 FEBRUARY TO 11 JUNE, LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, HUMLEBÆK, DENMARK
The American artist Dana Schutz (b. 1976) has been called one of the greatest narrative painters of her generation. Her works — large, complex and often grotesque canvases that fluidly blend figuration and abstraction — are an attempt, she says, to represent an abstract idea pictorially. She takes cues ‘often from language, and the way that language can be very open — like a phrase’.
Dana Schutz (b. 1976), Mountain Group, 2018. Oil on canvas, 304.8 × 396.2 cm. Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman. © Dana Schutz
Her show at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 30 minutes from Copenhagen, will contain paintings — including The Interview, which was recently acquired for the museum’s permanent collection — alongside drawings and sculptures that provide an overview of her career since her debut exhibition in 2002. Later in the year, the show will travel to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.
VERMEER, 10 FEBRUARY TO 4 JUNE, RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
To date, the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was held in 1996, at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It included 23 of his estimated 37 autograph paintings. This spring, however, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is going bigger. According to its general director, Taco Dibbits, the forthcoming exhibition Vermeer will contain ‘at least’ 28 of them. It also promises to re-examine the artist’s oeuvre through a new generation of curators interested in his social circles and home life.
Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), The Milkmaid, circa 1660. Oil on canvas. 45.5 × 41 cm. Rijksmuseum. Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
The Rijksmuseum has never held a solo show of the artist’s work, even though it owns four of his finest paintings: The Milkmaid, Woman Reading a Letter, The Love Letter and View of Houses in Delft. New York’s Frick Collection is lending all three of its Vermeer paintings to the exhibition: Girl Interrupted at Her Music, Officer and Laughing Girl and Mistress and Maid. The Mauritshuis has also agreed to loan the artist’s most famous work: Girl with a Pearl Earring.
PETER DOIG, 10 FEBRUARY TO 29 MAY, THE COURTAULD GALLERY, LONDON
In 2002 the Scottish figurative painter Peter Doig (b. 1959) relocated to the Caribbean island of Trinidad. He remained there for the following two decades, while overseas his reputation soared. In 2008, Tate Britain held a retrospective of his work, and in the saleroom his auction record kept climbing in multimillion-dollar increments, peaking in 2021 with the sale of Swamped for more than $39 million. That year, Doig decided to return to the UK.
Peter Doig (b. 1959), Alpinist, 2022. Pigment on linen. 295 × 195 cm. © Peter Doig, All Rights Reserved
For the Courtauld’s first show dedicated to a contemporary artist since the unveiling of its three-year refurbishment in November 2021, Doig is presenting a completely new body of work that was begun in Trinidad and New York and finished in London. According to the artist, these new paintings, illustrations and prints — yet to be seen in public — will explore the people, places and memories he has discovered during periods of transition.
SAYED HAIDER RAZA, 15 FEBRUARY TO 15 MAY, CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS
The Indian painter S.H. Raza (1922-2016) arrived in Paris in 1950, three years after graduating from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai and founding the Progressive Artists’ Group — a cosmopolitan collective of artists working in India who were dedicated to inventing new forms of expression.
Sayed Haider Raza (1922-2016), Punjab, 1969. Acrylic on canvas. Piramal Museum of Art, Mumbai
Raza ended up staying in the French capital for the next six decades, creating large, earth-hued canvases with Abstract Expressionist and Geometric Abstract tendencies. The city embraced his modernism, and he quickly found commercial success there. Until now, however, no museum in Paris has ever held a monograph show of his work.
In February, the Centre Pompidou is putting this right by presenting nearly 100 of Raza’s paintings. The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of lectures on ‘S.H. Raza and his time’, and a screening of Laurent Brégeat’s documentary, S.H. Raza: The Very Essence.
REACHING FOR THE STARS: FROM MAURIZIO CATTELAN TO LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE, 4 MARCH TO 18 JUNE, FONDAZIONE PALAZZO STROZZI, FLORENCE
Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo began collecting art in the early 1990s. By 1995 she had established her eponymous foundation, which helps nurture young artists and now has bases in Cuneo and Turin in Italy, as well as in Madrid. Today it has one of Italy’s foremost collections of contemporary art, and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is a member of the International Councils of both MoMA and Tate.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977), Switcher, 2013. Oil on canvas. 150 × 140 cm. Inv. 2208
Palazzo Strozzi is paying homage to Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s efforts with Reaching for the Stars. Alongside pieces by Maurizio Cattelan and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye will be works by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Cindy Sherman, Rudolf Stingel and Berlinde De Bruyckere, among others.
Spanning painting, sculpture, video and performance, the exhibition explores some of the most important trends in art over the past four decades. It also includes a yet-to-be-unveiled new installation, which will be housed in the palazzo’s magnificent Renaissance courtyard.
AFTER IMPRESSIONISM: INVENTING MODERN ART, 25 MARCH TO 13 AUGUST, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
The National Gallery’s spring blockbuster begins by looking at the revolutionary work made in and around Paris by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne between 1880 and 1906, during the period now known as the Belle Epoque.
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1888. Oil on canvas. 72.20 × 91 cm. Photo: © National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
It then traces how the methods employed by these artists to break free from conventional representation spread across Europe to Vienna, Brussels, Barcelona and Berlin, inspiring Picasso, Klimt, Kokoschka and Mondrian to invent Cubism, Expressionism and Abstraction.
The show will feature more than 100 paintings, with highlights on loan including Munch’s The Death Bed from KODE Bergen Art Museums in Norway, Degas’s Dancers in the Foyer from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Denmark, and Gauguin’s Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) from the National Galleries of Scotland.
MANET/DEGAS, 28 MARCH TO 23 JULY, MUSEÉ D’ORSAY, PARIS
Manet/Degas will examine the work and lives of the two French giants of Impressionism between the 1860s and Manet’s death in 1883. The show’s focus will not, however, be on what they shared — the prostitutes they painted, the bars they frequented and the collectors they wooed — so much as the contrasts between them.
Edouard Manet (1832–1883), Portrait de Mme Manet sur un canapé bleu, 1874. Pastel on brown paper mounted on canvas. 49 × 60 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Jean-Gilles Berizzi
The pair had dissimilar upbringings, different temperaments, opposing views on literature and music, conflicting social lives and divergent ideas of what success looked like. Throughout the exhibition, however, these contrasts are celebrated as ‘marvellous coexistences’ — a term coined by the writer and poet Paul Valéry in his 1937 essay, Degas, Danse, Dessin.
The show concludes with the observation that the pair were in a way reconciled after Manet’s death — when his works became a cornerstone of Degas’s own art collection.
The exhibition will travel on to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, opening in September 2023.
HILMA AF KLINT & PIET MONDRIAN, 20 APRIL TO 3 SEPTEMBER, TATE MODERN, LONDON
The artists Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) might at first seem an unlikely duo to be celebrated in a show together. Af Klint was a Swedish painter and mystic who found inspiration in the esoteric. Mondrian, on the other hand, was a Dutch artist interested in geometry and Minimalism. Mondrian was also a decade younger than Af Klint, and the pair never met.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), The Ten Largest, Group IV, No. 3, Youth, 1907. Courtesy of The Hilma af Klint Foundation
Yet around the turn of the century both of these artists, almost simultaneously, went from being conventional landscapists to contenders for the accolade of being the first person to paint a truly abstract picture.
Tate Modern’s spring show is putting the duo in dialogue for the first time. Featuring more than 250 works, including a range of archival sources, it will examine how both artists were moved to abstraction by religion, nature and the 20th century’s scientific revolution.
YOSHITOMO NARA, 10 MAY TO 1 NOVEMBER, ALBERTINA MODERN, VIENNA
In May, Vienna’s Albertina Modern is celebrating the work of the popular Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara. Best known for his paintings, sculptures and drawings of wide-eyed, cartoon-like children, Nara rose to prominence in the 2000s, around the time he became associated with Takashi Murakami and the avant-garde group of artists known as ‘Superflat’.
Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959), Work for Dream to Dream, 2001. Acrylic and coloured pencil on paper. 40 × 30 cm. © Yoshitomo Nara
Since then, his reputation has soared. In 2021 he was the subject of a solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and his work has become highly sought-after in the saleroom, particularly among Asian collectors. His auction record currently stands at HK$195 million (US$24.9 million).
In 2014, he surprised fans by revealing that punk album covers were a major source of inspiration for him — and the upcoming exhibition promises to examine the full emotional range of his apparently cute characters, from rumination to rebellion.
Source: Christie’s
