2023 Must-See Exhibitions
Maria Berrio, Calvalry, 2022. Collage with Japanese paper and watercolor paint on canvas. On view as part of the exhibition, The Children’s Crusade at ICA Boston, opening February 16.
As you may know, I am a huge proponent of seeing as much art as possible. Seeing art has many scientifically proven benefits including lowering stress and increasing blood flow to the brain. With that in mind, here are some exciting museum shows to see in the early months of 2023:
BAY AREA:
Frank Bowling: The New York Years, opens on May 20 at SFMoMA and captures the significance of the formative decade when Bowling, who was born in British Guiana (now Guyana), moved from London to New York and came into contact with a vibrant and tumultuous art scene, with abstract painting on the rise.
Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929–1941, at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, looks at the work of noted photographers like Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Helen Levitt at a time when they were using this medium to spark the imagination.
A visit to the Lincoln Park in San Francisco, will give you a double blockbuster with Kehinde Wiley and John Singer Sargent, at the de Young and Legion respectively.
BOSTON:
María Berrío creates large-scale works, collaging layers of paper, watercolors and sequins to create fairy-tale like scenes that upon closer look comment on political issues such as global migration and family separation. Her work will be on view at ICA Boston starting February 16.
Opening April 6, also at ICA Boston, the first comprehensive survey of the richly layered work of Simone Leigh who recently represented the United States at the Venice Bienale in 2022.
DALLAS:
Open now through July 16th, Movement: The Legacy of Kineticism, explores the power of kineticism in art, and demonstrates how artists working today have been influenced by the long legacy of dynamic abstraction.
Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper, open now through August 27, at the Nasher, focuses on the artist’s studio practice over the course of his more than six-decade career, surveying the more intimately and modestly scaled sculptures in parallel with his energetic and rarely seen drawings. The artist, currently 89 years old, has long been lauded as one of the most significant sculptors of the past 60 years, and is renowned for monumental, abstract, steel constructions that grace urban plazas, bucolic sculpture parks, and public spaces throughout the world.
MIAMI:
Claire Tabouret: Au Bois d’Amour, opens May 5 at ICA Miami and features new works by the French artist who is known for her moody, figurative paintings. (To take a peek inside the artist’s gorgeous LA-home, check out this piece in Architectural Digest).
Leandro Erlich: Liminal at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is the first monographic survey exhibition of the artist’s work in North America and is not to be missed. The exhibition features different encounters that resemble the everyday but cause the viewers to doubt their reality and perception.
NEW YORK:
Sarah Sze: Timelapse which opens March 31 at the Guggenheim will take place both inside the museum and on the museum’s facade; this is no surprise since she is known for challenging boundaries in architecture, painting and installation. I was lucky to meet Sze when I worked at Stanford; she is brilliant and lovely. (At the same time, the Guggenheim will present a groundbreaking retrospective focused on Gego, who fled Nazi persecution in 1939 and later went to Venezuela to make groundbreaking abstract work for 4 decades. It will be a prime occasion for a global audience to appreciate and understand the work of this important, but perhaps lesser-known, Latin American female artist.)
Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, the first exhibition to investigate the artist’s works on paper made in series, at MoMA, opens April 9. Reuniting works on paper that are often seen individually, along with key paintings, this exhibition offers a rare glimpse of the artist’s working methods and invites us to take time to a deeper look at an extraordinary series of works in charcoal, pencil, watercolor, and pastel..
Opening March 3, The New Museum will present a major solo exhibition of the work of Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972, Nairobi), which will bring together over one hundred works from across her twenty-five-year career.
Opening April 19, the Whitney will show Josh Kline, who is renowned for his immersive installations that use video, sculpture, photography and design to interrogate how technology is changing what it means to be human in the 21st century.
The Costume Institute’s spring 2023 exhibition, opening May 5, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, will spotlight the German-born designer’s unique working methodology and feature sketches as well as unique designs for Balmain, Patou, Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his eponymous label, Karl Lagerfeld.
LONDON:
Opening February 9, Whitechapel Gallery presents, Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70, a major exhibition of 150 paintings from an overlooked generation of 81 international women artists.
National Gallery will present After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, which explores a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries; opens March 25.
An unlikely pairing, but sure to make for an interesting presentation is Hilma Af Klint and Piet Mondrian at the Tate Modern, opens April 20.
LOS ANGELES:
Art and technology, one of my favorite subjects, comes together in, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, at LACMA.
The Broad will present the first-ever museum exhibition in Los Angeles of Keith Haring’s expansive body of work and will feature over 120 artworks and archival materials. Known for his use of vibrant color, energetic linework and iconic characters like the barking dog and the radiant baby, Haring’s work continues to dissolve barriers between art and life and spread joy.
PARIS:
Basquiat x Warhol. Painting 4 Hands at Fondation Louis Vuitton opens on April 5. Between 1984 and 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol created around 160 paintings together in tandem, “à quatre mains”, including some of the largest works produced during their respective careers. Keith Haring (1958-1990), who witnessed their friendship and collaboration production, would go on to speak of a “conversation occurring through painting, instead of words,” and of two minds merging to create a “third distinctive and unique mind.” “Basquiat x Warhol. Painting 4 Hands” will be the most important exhibition ever dedicated to this extraordinary body of work
The exhibition Manet / Degas, presented at the Musée d'Orsay, brings together in a unique way masterpieces by two key figures of 19th century painting. It explores the ways in which Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas are similar and different in their art, their themes, their aesthetic tastes, but also their family circles, their mutual friends and their professional acquaintances in the art world.
TEL AVIV:
The exhibition My Name is Maryan offers viewers an opportunity to reencounter the astounding body of work by the artist Maryan S. Maryan (Pinkas Bursztyn, 1927-1977), following his life and career through Poland, Auschwitz, Jerusalem, Paris and New York.
The exhibition Alber Elbaz: The Dream Factory is the most extensive exhibition about Alber Elbaz to date. It is a moving and exciting tribute that celebrates his life and work; open through February 25.