By Noor Chadha and Lacy Davisson Doyle
Here is a preview of the outstanding exhibitions on view in New York City this fall:
Best of NYC Museum Exhibitions
Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness
Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd Street, New York
July 27 – November 2, 2014
Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness—the first retrospective ever mounted of Christopher Williams (American, b. 1956)—spans the impressive 35-year career of one of the most influential cinephilic artists working in photography. Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid to late 1970s under the first wave of West Coast Conceptual artists, including John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Michael Asher, only to become his generation’s leading Conceptualist and art professor; he is currently professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Deeply invested in the histories of photography and film, architecture and design, Williams has produced a concise oeuvre that furthers a critique of late capitalist society in which images typically function as agents of spectacle.
Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot
Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Avenue, New York
September 5, 2014 – January 4, 2015
Nam June Paik (1932–2006) was a visionary artist, thinker, and innovator. Considered the “father of video art,” his groundbreaking use of video technology blurred past distinctions between science, fine art, and popular culture to create a new visual language. Paik’s interest in exploring the human condition through the lens of technology and science has created a far-reaching legacy that may be seen in broad recognition of new media art and the growing numbers of subsequent generations of artists who now use various forms of technology in their work.
Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950’s – 60’s
Guggenheim, 1075 Fifth Avenue, New York
October 10, 2014 – January 7, 2015
ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950’s–60’s, is the first large-scale historical survey in the United States dedicated to the German artists’ group Zero (1957–66) founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene and joined in 1961 by Günther Uecker, and ZERO, an international network of like-minded artists from Europe, Japan, and North and South America—including Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Piero Manzoni, Almir Mavignier, Jan Schoonhoven, and Jesús Rafael Soto—who shared the group’s aspiration to transform and redefine art in the aftermath of World War II. Featuring more than 40 artists from 10 countries, the exhibition explores the experimental practices developed by this extensive ZERO network of artists, whose work anticipated aspects of Land art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art.
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs
Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd Street, New York
October 12, 2014 – February 8, 2015
In the late 1940s, Henri Matisse turned almost exclusively to cut paper as his primary medium, and scissors as his chief implement, introducing a radically new operation that came to be called a cut-out. Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs is a groundbreaking reassessment of this important body of work. The largest and most extensive presentation of the cut-outs ever mounted, the exhibition includes approximately 100 cut-outs—borrowed from public and private collections around the globe—along with a selection of related drawings, prints, illustrated books, stained glass, and textiles. The last time New York audiences were treated to an in-depth look at the cut-outs was in 1961.
Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York
October 20, 2014–February 16, 2015
Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at The Met will be the most important exhibition of the essential Cubists—Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso—in more than 30 years. The exhibition will trace the invention and development of Cubism using iconic examples from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, with its unparalleled holdings in this foundational modernist movement. The exhibition will mark the first time that the Collection, which Mr. Lauder pledged to the Museum in April 2013, is shown in its entirety, including the most recent addition, Léger’s The Village. The exhibition will present 79 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture: 17 by Braque, 14 by Gris, 15 by Léger, and 33 by Picasso. Rich in modernist pictures by Picasso and Braque, the exhibition will also include an unprecedented number of papiers collé by Juan Gris and a stunning array of Léger’s most famous series, his Contrasts of Forms.
Bob and Roberta Smith: Art Amnesty
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY
October 26, 2014 – March 8, 2015
Beginning October 2, Bob and Roberta Smith are offering an opportunity for artists to dispose of their artwork in dumpsters located in the museums courtyard, and to retire from making art. Those who wish to exhibit their work one final time before it is destroyed may bring their art to the 2nd Floor Main Galleries, where museum staff will install it for public view.
As part of the Art Amnesty, the Smiths will also make available apledge form at the museum that can be signed by any artist or member of the public: I PROMISE NEVER TO MAKE ART AGAIN. Those who commit themselves will receive an official I AM NO LONGER AN ARTIST badge designed by Bob and Roberta Smith, and shall be invited to create one final drawing for inclusion in the Art Amnesty gallery exhibition, using materials provided onsite.
Those who have been the victims of gifts of art are also invited to dispose of these unwanted aesthetic presents at the museum. And as the Smiths note, “Many successful artists have recently voiced embarrassment that their work commands high prices. Artists may also use the opportunity of the Art Amnesty to expel certain works of art from the art market and demote them to objects unburdened by grand expectations and dashed dreams.” The Smiths will be the first to contribute to the Art Amnesty, discarding a batch of work previously exhibited in New York.
El Greco in New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York
November 4, 2014–February 1, 2015
To commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of El Greco, the Metropolitan Museum and the Hispanic Society of America are pooling their collections of the work of this great painter to provide a panorama of his art unrivaled outside the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The Frick Collection will display its paintings contemporaneously. This is a unique opportunity to see this artist’s work, which exerted such a strong impact on modern painting and especially appealed to New York collectors.
Upper East Side Galleries
Wayne Thiebaud
Aquavella Galleries, 18 E. 79th Street, New York
October 1 – November 21, 2014
The exhibition includes a total of 49 works – 35 paintings and 14 works on paper. Many of the works included are being shown to the public for the first time, and several are compositions the artist has been working on for over thirty years. Celebrated for his works that highlight the commonplace, the 93-year-old Thiebaud continues to shed painterly light on the people, places and things that surround him on a daily basis.
Downtown Galleries
Roxy Paine: Denuded Lens
Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street, New York
September 4 – October 18, 2014
Since the early 1990s, Roxy Paine has explored the collision of organic and mechanistic systems, bridging these disparate realms in serial projects whose idiosyncratic formal means arrive at related investigatory ends.
At the center of this exhibition is Checkpoint, the most recent iteration of his latest series, the large-scale Dioramas. A room-sized vision of a generic airport security stop, Checkpoint presents a locale whose practical banality rests uneasily alongside the looming suggestion of larger social anxieties. At once familiar and foreign, Checkpoint offers the opportunity to visually and cerebrally examine a liminal place that is usually only experienced through a rushed physical encounter.
Tomma Abts
David Zwirner Gallery, 519 West 19th Street, New York
September 10 – October 25, 2014
On view at 519 West 19th Street in New York, the exhibition will coincide with Tomma Abts: Mainly Drawings, the inaugural exhibition at the new Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, designed by architect Shigeru Ban. One of today’s most significant abstract painters, Abts has continuously explored the activity of painting. Starting each of her works without a preconceived idea, knowing only the size of the canvas and her materials, she gradually arrives at the composition over varying periods of time. Guided by intuition, the paintings’ evolution is evidenced by ridges and uneven texture, with earlier layers subtly visible beneath the final coating.
Jenny Holzer: Dust Paintings
Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, New York
September 11 – October 25, 2014
Jenny Holzer has used government documents as a source for her work since 2004. Language has been Holzer’s primary medium since the late 1970s. Placed on electronic signs or stone benches, Holzer’s text investigates how ideas are transformed from argument or opinion into fact. Turning to government documents in 2004, months after the invasion of Iraq by the United States and the United Kingdom, Holzer tried to reconstruct the path to war from the language of its architects and executors. The documents painted most recently trace the political fallout and human wreckage in the global war on terror. Holzer’s new works, hand-rendered, return flesh to events.
Orly Genger and James Siena: New works on paper
Sargent’s Daughters, 179 East Broadway, New York
September 19 – October 26, 2014
The exhibition presents new works on paper by both artists and is presented in collaboration with Pace Gallery.
In this entirely new body of work, exhibited here for the first time, Siena forgoes his usual free-hand approach and instead turns to his extensive collection of manual typewriters to create his compositions. Siena speaks of his drawings as two-dimensional machines, and in using an actual machine to create this newbody of work he cedes a certain amount of control to the device. Order and constraint are also present in Orly Genger’s meticulous drawings of abstracted superhero limbs that jumble and pile together to form a universal whole. Atmospheric perspective is the starting point for the drawings, in which freely drawn gestural lines recede and intensify to create depth on the flat surface.