By Noor Chadha and Lacy Davisson Doyle
Here is a preview of the outstanding exhibitions on view in New York City this spring:
Best of NYC Museum Exhibitions
Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe
Guggenheim, 1075 Fifth Avenue, New York
February 21 – September 1, 2014
This multidisciplinary exhibition examines the historical sweep of the movement from its inception with F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto in 1909 through its demise at the end of World War II. Presenting over 300 works executed between 1909 and 1944, the chronological exhibition is the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States.
Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris
*NYT Critics pick
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York
January 29 – May 4, 2014
Widely acknowledged as one of the most talented photographers of the nineteenth century, Charles Marville (French, 1813–1879) was commissioned by the city of Paris to document both the picturesque, medieval streets of old Paris and the broad boulevards and grand public structures that Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann built in their place for Emperor Napoleon III. This exhibition presents a selection of around one hundred of his photographs.
William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York
October 22, 2013 – May 11, 2014
A new joint acquisition by the Met and SFMOMA, William Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012) is a thirty-minute meditation on time and space, the complex legacies of colonialism and industry, and the artist’s own intellectual life. At the center of the installation is a moving sculpture—the “breathing machine” or “elephant”—an organ-like automaton with a pumping bellows. Kentridge recalls a passage from the Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854). Dickens describes a factory machine moving “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness”—a metaphor for the often convulsive developments in industry and a reminder of the vain impulse to control time.
The Whitney Biennial
Whitney Museum, 945 Madison Avenue, New York
March 7 – May 25, 2014
The 2014 Whitney Biennial takes on a bold new form as three curators from outside the Museum — Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at MoMA), Anthony Elms (Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia), and Michelle Grabner (artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago)—each oversee one floor, representing a range of geographic vantages and curatorial methodologies.
Gauguin: Metamorphoses
Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd Street, New York
March 8 – June 8, 2014
This exhibition focuses on Paul Gauguin’s rare and extraordinary prints and transfer drawings, and their relationship to his better-known paintings and sculptures. Created in several discreet bursts of activity from 1889 until his death in 1903, these remarkable works on paper reflect Gauguin’s experiments with a range of mediums, from radically “primitive” woodcuts that extend from the sculptural gouging of his carved wood reliefs, to jewel-like watercolor monotypes and large, mysterious transfer drawings.
Jasper Johns: Regrets
Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd Street, New York
March 15 – September 1, 2014
This exhibition premieres Jasper Johns’ most recent body of work inspired by an old photograph of the artist Lucian Freud holding his right hand to his forehead in a gesture of despair. The series reveals the importance of experimentation in Johns’s art, laying bare the cycle of dead ends and fresh starts, the way problems and solutions develop from one work to another, and the incessant interplay of materials, meaning, and representation so characteristic of his work over the last 60 years.
Robert Heinecken: Object Matter
Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd Street, New York
March 15 – September 7, 2014
This is the first retrospective of the groundbreaking work of Robert Heinecken since his death in 2006. Heinecken dedicated his life to making art and teaching, establishing the photography program at UCLA in 1964 and serving as a professor there until 1991. In this environment Heinecken—alongside peers making Pop art and Conceptual art—pushed the boundaries between mediums and between high and popular culture.
Please note there is also a major retrospective of Sigmar Polke’s work on display at MoMA till August 3, 2014. See below for an early works on paper exhibition by Polke at Michael Werner gallery.
Upper East Side Galleries
Sigmar Polke: Early Works on Paper
*NYT Critics Pick
Michael Werner Gallery, 4 E 77th St, New York
13 March – 7 June, 2014
This exhibition features nearly 100 of Polke’s drawings from the 1960s, many of which are being exhibited for the first time. The iconographic and technical range of the drawings is astounding, demonstrating a stylistic diversity unmatched by Polke’s contemporaries. Motifs from many of Polke’s major paintings emerge in these drawings, offering viewers a point of entry into the artist’s conceptual processes and complex oeuvre.
Santiago Calatrava
Marlborough New York, 40 W. 57th Street, New York
Apr 24 2014 – May 31 2014
Santiago Calatrava’s work continues to shape and redefine the boundaries that have historically separated fine arts from architecture and engineering. Calatrava challenges such boundaries through the creation of a broad range of works including ceramics, drawings, paintings, sculpture, architecture and engineering projects that in total expresses a unified esthetic anchored in the artist’s belief that the origins of artistic invention reside in the evolutionary structure of the natural world. Calatrava’s architectural projects include the new World Trade Center Transportation Hub that resembles a bird being released from a child’s hand.
Chelsea Galleries
Oscar Murillo: A Mercantile Novel
David Zwirner Gallery, 519 W 19th St, New York
April 24 – June 14, 2014
In this exhibition Oscar Murillo recreates a candy-making factory inside the gallery in collaboration with Colombina, one of the premier food companies in Colombia. Tens of thousands of candies will be produced and given away for free at the gallery. Gallery visitors and volunteers are invited to take candy and share it throughout the city’s five boroughs. The exhibition’s own website, mercantilenovel.com, will map those who wish to share their candy-sharing journeys and final destinations by allowing participants to post locations, places, comments, photos, and videos via social media (@mercantilenovel on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook).
Robert Mangold
PACE, 510 West 25th Street, New York
April 4 – May 3, 2014
This exhibition continues Mangold’s work with an enclosed void seen in his Ring Paintings, which he exhibited in 2011, and his Frame Paintings of the early 1980s. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes the essay “Squaring the Circle” by Robert Storr, Dean and Professor of Painting/Printmaking, Yale University School of Art. About this new body of work, Storr writes, “This is vigorous, straight-from-the-shoulder art devoid of strain or bombast and imbued with a sureness and grace that are the hallmarks of genuine mastery.”