Fall Preview: Museum Shows and Biennials Around the World

With fall on the horizon, it is time to preview the season’s major exhibitions and biennials around the world. Below is a guide to the months to come, including shows about museum collections, retrospectives for beloved Dadaists and Neo-Dadaists, and a great deal more.

CONTENTS

National September October November December

International September October November December

NATIONAL

SEPTEMBER

“Doug Aitken: Electric Earth”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
September 10–January 10
In Doug Aitken’s multi-room video installation electric earth (1999), a young man walks around a deserted Los Angeles at night. Along the way the man confronts a series of spectacles—some mundane, others surreal—that leave him harrowed. Though episodic, the installation has an odd narrative made of unlike, constantly shifting pieces. Six of Aitken’s other installations will be shown alongside signs, sculptures, photographic images, drawings, and altered furniture made by the California– and New York–based artist over the past two decades. This show will offer a chaotic, immersive environment that depicts the artist’s preoccupation with change and chance, specifically as they relate to our current information age. —Robin Scher

“Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975″
Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts
September 11–December 11
This show, curated by Katy Siegel and artist Christopher Wool, showcases a group of David Reed’s paintings from the mid-1970s that tell the story of their making. These “brushstroke” works are pictures of brushstrokes that explore the hows and whys of their medium. Relatively small, they are meant to be read closely and viewed at eye level. Reed has called them bedroom paintings, explaining them as “art you live with.” The drippy line creates a sense of continual motion, and that in turn suggests everything from travel to motion pictures to dreaming. —Barbara A. MacAdam

“Take Me (I’m Yours)”
Jewish Museum, New York
September 16–February 5
Would you like to try your hand at being Lawrence Weiner and stencil his messages ad infinitum, or “manage” your pills in the cascading heaps of capsules sent down by Carsten Höller? Or bring home one, or some, of the 400-plus artworks produced by 40 of today’s most renowned contemporary artists? If so, then come to the Jewish Museum this season and take your pick. This unusual exercise in democracy is a reprise of the show first mounted by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Christian Boltanksi in 1995 at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Everything on view here is free (after museum admission, of course), although you can spend some money and participate in a Kickstarter campaign designed to keep the works coming. —Barbara A. MacAdam

“Kelley Walker: Direct Drive”
Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis
September 16–December 31
Using such technologies as 3-D modeling software and laser-cutting, Kelley Walker has explored pop culture’s consumption and reuse of images for the past two decades. This exhibition, the artist’s first solo museum show in America, will fill every part of the museum building, including its facade, project wall, courtyard, and mezzanine. In addition to new work made specifically for this show, Walker’s long-running series of screen-printed, collaged bricks and pieces from the “Black Star Press” series, featuring images of racial unrest digitally printed on canvas with silkscreened melted chocolate on them, will be on view here. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Carmen Herrera
Whitney Museum, New York
September 16–January 2
In what has to be one of the most glorious, feel-good stories of the year, Cuban-born painter Carmen Herrera, aged 101 and still hard at work, is getting a 50-work, three-decade survey of her ingenious hard-edge abstractions. It will be her first solo museum show in New York in nearly two decades, and Dana Miller, curator and director of the Whitney’s collection, is in charge. When the Whitney debuted its new building last year, it hung a Herrera alongside pieces by Ad Reinhardt, John McLaughlin, and Agnes Martin. The ensemble looked right. This show seems likely to secure Herrera’s place among her better-known contemporaries. —Andrew Russeth

Kai Althoff
Museum of Modern Art, New York
September 18–January 22
German artist and musician Kai Althoff is known for his immersive installations and spindly, memorable dynamic figures. With visual references to Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Édouard Vuillard, Althoff’s paintings and installations inhabit a darkly humorous world in which German history and contemporaneity are aesthetically alike. Because Althoff has had quite a few solo exhibitions (31, to be exact), his show at MoMA is sure to be characteristically introspective, provocative, and almost certainly a little morbid. Visitors can expect to be drawn into Althoff’s varied and twisted anecdotal paintings, which often deal with themes of sex, violence, and alienation, usually within the confines of dueling secularity and religion. —Tessa Goldsher

“Gustav Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918”
Neue Galerie, New York
September 22–January 16
Gustav Klimt’s portraits of society women are some of the finest examples of his work. They encompass his early Symbolist and Pre-Raphaelite influences as well as his iconic “golden style” and his later Fauve-inflected pieces. They also represent an apotheosis of fin-de-siècle Viennese culture. The show will feature some of the finest examples of Klimt’s portraits, including Portrait of Serena Pulitzer Lederer (1899), Portrait of Gertha Loew (1902), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Portrait of Mäda Primavesi (1912), Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16), and Portrait of Ria Munk III (1917–18). Preparatory sketches, along with mannequins dressed in corresponding period style (designed by one of Klimt’s muses, his sister-in-law, the fashion designer Emilie Flöge), will accompany these works. —Hannah Ghorashi

Anthony Hernandez
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
September 24–January 1
Anthony Hernandez’s intimate photographs of Los Angeles and its surrounding area are some of the most important images of Southern California ever taken, so it’s surprising that this show is the self-taught artist’s first retrospective. His “Landscapes for the Homeless” (1988–2007) and “Discarded” (2012–15) series are almost picturesque handlings of the dystopian-looking aftermath of urban sprawl. Likewise, his dreamy photos of pedestrians on Rodeo Drive show the flip side of L.A.’s glamor. Although Hernandez is best known for these subjects, this 45-year career retrospective, the first show in the museum’s newly revamped Pritzker Center of Photography, will also showcase his less-often-exhibited recent work, such as abstract, colorful close-ups of tunnels and glass around L.A. —Tessa Goldsher

“The Uses of Photography: Art, Politics, and the Reinvention of a Medium”
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
September 24–January 2
It’s almost hard now to imagine a time when photographs didn’t always have a political agenda, but in the late ’60s, when a new community of artists and academics was forming at the University of California San Diego, photographers were still breaking away from their medium’s formalist legacy. These Californian artists, among them John Baldessari and Eleanor Antin, wanted to learn about the politics hidden away in photographic images. What would it mean to put a woman or a person or color before a camera? Could photography be used as a tool for fighting against power structures? This show will take a rare in-depth look at the artists who studied and worked in California during the ’70s and ’80s, and who led to a new, more socially engaged kind of photography. —Alex Greenberger

Toba Khedoori
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
September 25–January 2
Toba Khedoori’s paintings and drawings of faded, empty rooms are quietly beautiful. They cause viewers to inevitably wonder, Are these enigmatic visions of minimalist objects, or could they represent a larger sterile environment? In the past, Khedoori’s ghostly architectural and household forms have earned her critical praise and a MacArthur Foundation Grant. Now, an exhibition at LACMA will survey the Iraqi-Australian artist’s newer work, which combines abstraction and detailed realism to creepy, arresting effect, in addition to work that she has previously shown at the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, among other places. —Tessa Goldsher

“Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
September 26–January 8
On its website for “Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven,” the Met notes that the Holy City was, during those years, about the size of midtown Manhattan. It is pretty remarkable, then, that it nurtured our three global religions and became the fulcrum of the world’s most powerful trade routes. The Met’s show will explore the four centuries in which a rapidly shifting global landscape allowed for the creation of new kinds of artworks, with over 200 pieces gleaned from 60 lenders, some of which are religious institutions loaning out the works for the first time. Taking the subway uptown is certainly easier than flying to Israel. —Nate Freeman

OCTOBER

“Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium”
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
October 1–January 2
A member of Brazil’s Neo-Concrete group in the late 1950s, Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) relentlessly pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art. This, the first comprehensive survey of Oiticica’s work in the United States, will follow his career trajectory as he moved from making colorful abstract paintings and spatial constructions to creating increasingly participatory artworks: walk-in environments that immersed the viewer in the shapes, textures, sounds, and tastes of Brazil; local billiard halls designated as art; and costumes for the famed samba dancers of Rio de Janeiro’s Mangueira favela. A highlight of the exhibition is sure to be Oiticica’s rarely shown Eden (1969), a massive installation equipped with tents and beds designed for sleeping, listening to music, or reading—a piece that is, like much of Oiticica’s joyous work, created anew by each person who inhabits it. —Anne Doran

Edgar Arceneaux
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
October 14–January 8
Los Angeles–based artist Edgar Arceneaux will present a trilogy of interconnected works at the contemporary-art outpost of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his practice, Arcenaeux weaves together a disparate stream of materials and references, drawing from sources as varied as pop culture, literature, architecture, and politics. Through this work, the artist highlights the complexities of narrative, history, memory, and identity. The MIT exhibition will premiere Arceneaux’s 2016 work Until, Until, Until…, which takes a look at Ben Vereen’s career-disrupting performance at Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inaugural celebration. —John Chiaverina

Ragnar Kjartansson
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
October 14–January 8
Ragnar Kjartansson’s primary contribution to contemporary art has been to slow it down. He first came to prominence in the United States with a 2011 work at New York’s Performa biennial in which he and a group of Icelandic opera singers sang the final aria of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro on a live loop for 12 hours. In 2013 he had the rock band The National play its three-minute-thirty-second song “Sorrow” for six hours straight at MoMA PS1. (That piece was called, appropriately, A Lot of Sorrow.) In Kjartansson’s first museum retrospective, his feats of endurance will appear alongside his work in other mediums—photography, painting, and video. —M. H. Miller

“R. H. Quaytman, Morning: Chapter 30”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
October 16–February 6
A member of the legendary artist-run collective gallery Orchard, R. H. Quaytman combines abstract forms and found photographic images culled from art history, the news, and her personal life in modestly scaled, oil-and-silk-screen panel paintings. The artist (who is the daughter of poet Susan Howe and abstract painter Harvey Quaytman) brings a conceptual depth and obliquely narrative dimension to these pieces by arranging them into site-specific groupings she calls chapters. Each chapter relates in some way to the place in which it is exhibited. Quaytman’s quiet work has been making a lot of noise of late—she was a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize, awarded each year by the Ludwig Museum. This show will be her first museum retrospective. —Anne Doran

“Monet: The Early Years”
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
October 16–January 29
A century before the arrival of the Allied Forces, there was another significant landing on Normandy’s beaches: that of Claude Monet. There, under the mentorship of Eugène Boudin, Monet first encountered oil painting and the plein-air technique. The period also saw the young artist, together with his contemporaries Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley, take his rst steps toward Impressionism. This chapter of Monet’s life and art is finally getting its due in this 60-painting exhibition. —Robin Scher

Mark Leckey
MoMA PS1, New York
October 23–March 5
After a leisurely start (nine years of his career passed before he made the widely acclaimed 1999 video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a druggy montage of clips of club kids dancing), British artist Mark Leckey has earned an international reputation—and a Turner Prize—for his hard-to-pin-down yet influential oeuvre. This show, the largest survey of his work to date, includes Fiorucci, as well as such works as GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010), in which the artist channels the thoughts and feelings of a black Samsung bottom-freezer fridge, and Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD (2015), an autobiography told through archival television clips and YouTube videos. Leckey’s work speaks of ecstasy and oblivion in the language of contemporary pop culture and digital technology. Call it a Romantic sublime for the 21st century. —Anne Doran

“Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910–1950”
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
October 25–January 8
From massive mural cycles in public buildings to intimate canvases in private collections, Mexican modernist art is tied inextricably to the country’s revolution, which lasted from 1910 to 1920. Mexican artists sought to articulate the sweeping changes taking place in their society; mixing a range of sources—including European, colonial, and indigenous cultures—they shaped a new national identity. This exhibition will bring together a wealth of objects, including mural sketches, paintings, prints, photographs, broadsheets, and books by the likes of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, and Rufino Tamayo, as well as the less famous artists who contributed to this cultural renaissance, including Dr. Atl, María Izquierdo, Roberto Montenegro, Carlos Mérida, and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. —Maximilíano Durón

“Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest”
New Museum, New York
October 26–January 8
Pipilotti Rist was the talk of the town earlier this year when a Beyoncé video paid homage to Rist’s two-projection installation Ever Is Over All (1997), in which she dances down a street, bashing in car windows with a hammer. Something about the allusion felt at home with Beyoncé’s music, where empowered-looking women appear on beaches and in forests. Rist’s colorful, trippy work, like Beyoncé’s music, situates viewers in natural environments dotted with video screens that play footage of flowers, bodies, and trees. In this multi-floor show, the Swiss artist’s most comprehensive survey in New York to date, older work will be presented alongside a new installation that looks at the evolution of technology and shows how it has affected the way we see both nature and women. —Alex Greenberger

“Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016”
October 28–February 5
Whitney Museum, New York
There have been moments in the past year when it seemed that every other New York City gallery was exhibiting a film or video installation. As the line between artist and filmmaker becomes ever less distinct and new technologies ever more accessible, a show devoted to artist’s films seems not only timely but overdue. Organized by the Whitney’s redoubtable Chrissie Iles, this survey of moving-image art from 1905 to 2016 will include work by such pioneers of the form as Oskar Schlemmer, Joseph Cornell, and Stan VanDerBeek as well as by emerging artists like Ian Cheng and Alex Da Corte. In between, look for masterpieces, both celluloid and digital, by Hito Steyerl, Philippe Parreno, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and many more. —Anne Doran

NOVEMBER

“World War I and American Art”
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
November 4–April 9
When we think of the impact World War I had on art, we tend to consider it in terms of the Europeans—Der Blaue Reiter painter August Macke was felled on the front in Champagne, France; the French poet Apollinaire suffered a head wound, as documented in a drawing by his friend Picasso. After all, that’s where the front was. The subject of the war’s impact on American artists has not, to date, been explored. The PAFA is rectifying that, with a substantial show—160 works by 80 artists, including Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Georgia O’Keeffe, Horace Pippin, and Norman Rockwell—that will chart how the war changed aesthetic perspectives and produced some tough artworks, not least John Singer Sargent’s Gassed (1918–19), on loan from the Imperial War Museums in London. The horrors of war are writ large in this grisly—note the dead bodies—20-foot-long tableau, which shows the aftermath of a mustard-gas attack. At around this time, war documentation began falling into the domain of photography, while more recently film and the Internet have been assuming the mantle. Paintings, however, convey equally powerful representations of suffering, as shown here. —Sarah Douglas

“The Artist’s Museum”
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
November 16–March 26
The men and women on ARTnews’s annual Top 200 Collectors list will likely be pleased to learn that collecting can be interpreted as a creative impulse, closely related to the process of artistic creation. ICA senior curator Dan Byers (with help from curatorial assistant Jeffrey De Blois) has assembled works from 12 American and European artists—Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Rachel Harrison, Louise Lawler, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, Christian Marclay, Rosemarie Trockel, Xaviera Simmons, and Sara VanDerBeek—that use methods of museum display to draw out relationships between artworks of the past and issues of the present. The “artist’s museum” must be understood conceptually: in their museum-minds, these artists remix art history in order to process how the world works today. A highlight of what promises to be an intellectually stimulating exhibition is Anna Craycroft’s The Earth is a Magnet, commissioned by the ICA; in it, the work of photographer Berenice Abbott meets pieces by Craycroft’s artist peers. —Sarah Douglas

“Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction”
Museum of Modern Art, New York
November 20–March 19
The godhead of so much that is outrageous, outré, and wildly fun in contemporary art, the painter, poet, publisher, and all-around gadabout Francis Picabia (1879–1953), will receive what is being billed as the “the first major exhibition in the U.S. to encompass the full range of the artist’s audacious, provocative, and profoundly influential career.” (Earlier efforts left out the Dadaist’s sexy, long-reviled, now-beloved, late pinup paintings.) MoMA curator Anne Umland is at the helm, along with Cathérine Hug, curator at the Kunsthaus Zurich, where the show originated earlier this year, and MoMA curatorial assistant Talia Kwartler. With some 200 works on offer, this is easily one of the season’s most anticipated exhibitions. —Andrew Russeth

“Question the Wall Itself”
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
November 20–May 21
Taking Marcel Broodthaers’s wily exhibition strategies as an inspiration, this show, organized by the Walker’s artistic director, Fionn Meade, and curatorial fellow Jordan Carter, will examine how artists have engaged the architecture and decor of places where they were showing work. The artist list is heady and multigenerational, ranging from contemporary giants, like Rosemarie Trockel, Walid Raad, and Theaster Gates, to the late, great dealer and curator of conceptual art and textiles Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) to the inimitable Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944), who showed her spry paintings of soirées and family in a studio amidst luscious furniture and cellophane curtains of her own design. —Andrew Russeth

“Renaissance and Reformation: German Art in the Age of Dürer and Cranach”
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
November 20–March 26
It’s a rare opportunity to be regaled with such a rich show of works from the German Renaissance and Reformation period, dating from 1460 to 1580. The more than 100 pieces on view will include paintings, drawings, sculptures, arms and armor, and decorative arts coinciding with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. An all-star cast of artists, led by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Mathias Grünwald, Tilman Riemenschneider, and Peter Vischer, among others, will reveal the historic, scientific, political, and intellectual complexity of the time as well as the sophisticated state of art- and craft-making that prevailed. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Thomas Bayrle
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
November 29–March 26
For decades the legendary 78-year-old German artist Thomas Bayrle has been blazing a path through new media, pop, and conceptual art to achieve a singular style centered on his self-coined “superforms,” which involve collaging together thousands of pictures to create a new image. His upcoming survey show at ICA Miami is his first major solo institutional exhibition in the United States and will feature close to 50 years’ worth of paintings, sculpture, and video, much of it examining the influence of contemporary technology on culture and humanity. There will also be new work on display, most notably a site-specific installation created for ICA’s Atrium Gallery. —John Chiaverina

DECEMBER

“Basim Magdy: The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings”
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
December 10–March 19
Basim Magdy’s photographs often come in rich shades of red-orange and emerald green, but a dark reality underlies their damaged, pretty surfaces. Through a process he calls “pickling,” Magdy puts chemicals on photographs and celluloid, causing them to turn psychedelic colors. While ostensibly depicting visions of colorful utopias, they are actually quite ugly—what is ideal can, in fact, be toxic. Now, after being named Artist of the Year by Deutsche Bank, and after being featured in the 2015 editions of the New Museum Triennial and MoMA’s “New Photography,” the Egyptian artist will have his first U.S. solo museum show. He’s warned viewers that the issues he’s interested in with this show—potentially harmful political situations—are “not pleasant,” but then again, beauty isn’t what Magdy aims for. —Alex Greenberger

INTERNATIONAL

SEPTEMBER

Gwangju Biennale
Various venues, Gwangju, Korea
September 2–November 6
In the 12th century, Persian mystic and philosopher Sohravardi came up with the idea of an “eighth climate,” the concept that beyond the seven physical climates identified by the ancient Greeks, there’s an extra atmosphere imperceptible to the senses where matter and spirit coexist—a place where, for instance, inspiration might come from. In keeping with that idea, the 11th Gwangju Biennale, which is titled “The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?),” will ponder whether contemporary art can reveal anything at all to future audiences. With a range of artists spanning from Philippe Parreno to Raqs Media Collective, the biennial is about artists who conjure a sense of tomorrow for contemporary viewers. “Art is a form of understanding with a special ability to deal with contemporary reality,” artistic director Maria Lind, together with curator Binna Choi, said in an interview. “As such it helps us make the simplified more nuanced, the incomprehensible possible to grasp and the unknown imagined.” —Robin Scher

Laure Prouvost
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
September 3–November 6
French-born, Antwerp-based artist Laure Prouvost was the surprise winner of the 2013 Turner Prize for her video Wantee. The piece was part of an installation that combined found objects and video to stage a tea party of sorts, centered around a film depicting the fictional relationship between Prouvost’s pretend grandfather and the artist Kurt Schwitters. For her first major German exhibition, the artist’s film work will be front and center, contained within large installations that incorporate a variety of collaged mediums. The show will also serve as a continuation of the Wantee narrative, which has so far seen Prouvost’s grandfather dig a tunnel from his living room to North Africa for an art project, fully disappearing in the process. —John Chiaverina

“René Magritte: The Betrayal of Images”
Centre Pompidou, Paris
September 8–January 9
The canvas depicts a serene, androgynous-looking woman from the shoulders up, her back to a dull gray sea. At the center of the woman’s likeness is a jagged void, like a hole in a broken window. A corresponding shape, containing the missing features, has been placed to the left of the original figure, while within the void, sleigh bells drift down the face of a rocky chasm as if by some biomechanical process. This perturbing image is by René Magritte, known for works that question the viewer’s perception of reality. A new exhibition dedicated to the Belgian Surrealist will comprise over 200 of Magritte’s paintings, drawings, and objects, and will be divided in five parts, each exploring one of the artist’s recurring motifs: fire, shadows, curtains, words, and the fragmented body. —Maximilíano Durón

Bienal de São Paulo
Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo
September 10–December 12
With global warming, political uprisings, and immigration crises in the news almost every day, it would be safe to say we live in an age of uncertainty. Taking this fact as its inspiration, the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo will reflect on today’s unpredictable political and social climate. Curated by German historian Jochen Volz, along with Lars Bang Larsen, Gabi Ngcobo, Sofía Olascoaga, and Júlia Rebouças, this biennial, titled “Incerteza viva” (“Live Uncertainty”), will bring together 81 artists and collectives from around the world. Without being overly prescriptive or descriptive, their work addresses the inability to know what’s next. Likewise, Volz’s goal for himself and his cocurators is to reflect our unstable global situation without offering any easy answers. —Robin Scher

“Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer”
Fondazione Prada, Milan
September 15–January 8
In 1972, for an assemblage called The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, Betye Saar famously armed a mammy figurine with a tiny broom and a small rifle. Even by today’s standards, the work is potent—it’s a symbol of black history, in particular black women’s history, fighting back. For the past five decades, Saar, a key member of the Black Arts Movement in the ’60s and ’70s, and one of the most under-appreciated American contemporary artists working today, has brought viewers face to face with America’s ugly past, evoking slave ships, confederate flags, and minstrelsy with her assemblages. History, as Saar shows, never disappears—it resurfaces at unexpected, particularly political moments. Likewise, Saar, who recently celebrated her 90th birthday, is becoming a late-career hit, and is sure to continue to gain international recognition with this show, her first exhibition in Italy and her second-ever solo museum show abroad. —Alex Greenberger

William Kentridge
Whitechapel Gallery, London
September 21–January 15
South African artist, filmmaker, and opera director William Kentridge will bring to Whitechapel Gallery his stop-animation films based on large-scale drawn, erased, and reworked charcoal drawings, the drawings themselves, and an assortment of large-scale installations, all addressing the human condition. Highlights of the show, curated by Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel director, will include Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time (2012), based on the work of science historian Peter Galison; the set-design model for his 2015 production of the Alban Berg opera Lulu; and O Sentimental Machine (2015), a video-and-sound work, featuring a pair of megaphone-headed creatures, whose title derives from Leon Trotsky’s idea that people are “sentimental but programmable machines.” —Barbara A. MacAdam

“Abstract Expressionism”
Royal Academy of Arts, London
September 24–January 2
Providing a modern art movement the United States could call its own and shifting the art world’s center of gravity from Paris to New York, first-generation Abstract Expressionism is indelibly associated with the post–World War II American nationalism of the 1950s. It is often viewed in monolithic terms, defined solely by the monumentally scaled, emotionally charged work of the giants of the New York School—among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. This, the first survey of Ab Ex painting to be mounted in London since 1959, will examine the multigenerational and multifaceted movement in its entirety, through the inclusion of such West Coast artists as Sam Francis and significant women players such as Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell. —Hannah Ghorashi

Donna Huanca
Zabludowicz Collection, London
September 29–December 18
When the Zabludowicz Collection announced that Donna Huanca would do its first performance commission, it seemed like strange news for a museum that typically funds projects involved with the digital, like recent video installations by Jon Rafman and Ryan Trecartin. Though very different in its approach, Huanca’s work is also about how humans act in spaces like the Internet, where users take on personas—in a sense putting on new skins. This is literally what Huanca’s performers often do in her pieces, which involve them covering themselves in colorful paint and then gradually removing it by touching their surroundings. For her commission, Huanca’s performers will respond to a three-story glass structure that suggests screens, dirtied over time like the surfaces of iPads. —Alex Greenberger

OCTOBER

Roni Horn
Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland
October 2–January 1
Employing a variety of mediums, American artist Roni Horn addresses the fluidity of identity and experience—particularly the viewer’s experience of a work of art. Much of her output over the past four decades has been inspired by the weather and geography of Iceland, a country which she has visited frequently over the years. But the real connective tissue throughout has been Horn’s notion of the contingent relationship. This idea will be celebrated in her upcoming solo show at Foundation Beyeler, which, in addition to photographs, works on paper, and glass sculptures, will feature a first-of-its-kind “multipartite work” created just for the exhibition. —Robin Scher

“The Figurative Pollock”
Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland
October 2–January 22
Jackson Pollock’s name is a byword for abstraction, thanks to the allover drip paintings that he made between 1947 and 1950. However, few know that Pollock’s drip period was in fact bracketed by bodies of figurative work. Following the lead of last year’s enormously successful traveling show “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” which featured the rarely seen, semi-figurative black enamel paintings Pollock produced between 1951 and 1953, this exhibition—comprising approximately 100 paintings and works on paper made between the mid-1930s and the 1950s—will be the first ever dedicated to these significant chapters of the artist’s career. —Hannah Ghorashi

Zeng Fanzhi
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
October 9–November 13
Prolific Beijing-based painter Zeng Fanzhi comes to the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art this fall for his largest exhibition in China to date. Zeng is known for applying Western historical styles like German Expressionism to personal or speci cally Chinese subjects in his “Hospital” and “Mask” series of the 1990s, as well as in later large-scale portraits and nocturnes. This survey will include a recent series of works on paper that show the artist adopting a dialectical approach to Eastern and Western painting traditions. In so doing, the exhibition will highlight Zeng’s bridging of social, historical, and geographic divides in his art. —Robin Scher

Ulay
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
October 13–January 8
Poor Ulay! He’s basically known only for his 1970s and ’80s collaborations with former romantic partner Marina Abramović, whom he recently sued for back payments from sales. Abramović became a pop culture icon in 2010 for a performance in which she sat in a chair and stared down museum visitors in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but she was at her most transgressive and downright weird with Ulay (born Frank Uwe Laysiepen in 1943). Their work together included the two of them holding a drawn bow and arrow to Abramović’s heart, and the couple breaking up on the Great Wall of China. In recent years, Ulay has been trying to step out of Abramović’s long shadow. The artist’s first major survey should further his efforts. —M. H. Miller

“Louise Bourgeois: Structures of Existence: The Cells”
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
October 13–February 26
“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” the late Louise Bourgeois once said. Begun in 1989, her “Cells” series marked an important progression in the latter part of her 70-year career. Continuing her exploration of physical, emotional, and psychological trauma—from her own childhood unhappiness, inflicted by a philandering father, to, more generally, the distress caused by an imbalance of power between the sexes—the “Cells” are large-scale structures built from salvaged architectural materials and filled with everyday objects like mirrors, articles of clothing, and furniture, as well as the artist’s sculptures. Most of the 20-plus “Cells” included in this show cannot be entered; visitors peer into them, witnesses—and perhaps voyeurs—to suffering. —Maximilíano Durón

Michael Krebber
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal
October 15–January 15
Don’t expect fireworks from this survey of Michael Krebber’s paintings and drawings from the 1980s until now. A member of the Cologne art scene of the 1980s and ’90s (and a former assistant of its provocateur-in-chief Martin Kippenberger), Michael Krebber was perhaps the most dedicated proponent of the group’s anti-market stance. While appearing to have been made by someone too exhausted to take them any further, his works on paper and canvas—or stretched cotton gingham—consisting of a few marks, a patch of color, or a childlike doodle represented a deeply felt commitment to upending the conventions of art production and consumption, materials and technique, beauty and artistry. Though slacker painting may be overplayed these days, Krebber’s version of it distinguishes itself by its politics and brilliance. —Anne Doran

Tino Sehgal
Palais de Tokyo, Paris
October 16–December 12
When the Palais de Tokyo gave free rein over its entire building to Philippe Parreno in 2013, it was the first such arrangement in the institution’s history. Now, Tino Sehgal—who makes what he calls “constructed situations”—is being granted the same access. Little was known in advance about what Sehgal was planning, but since he eschews the creation of physical objects, it will be interesting to see how he fills the venue’s monumental space. Just don’t expect to take in this show via Instagram, as might be possible with other exhibitions—Sehgal doesn’t allow any documentation of his work. —Nate Freeman

La Biennale de Montréal 2016
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal
October 19–January 15
Canada, America’s weird and likely goateed cousin, is known for a lot of things: beautiful landscapes, long winters, moose, Leonard Cohen. The contemporary Canadian art scene, however, remains something of a mystery outside the provinces. This biennial exhibition, which has been running since 1998, has been quietly expanding in recent years, forging a path to show where Canada fits in today’s global art world. Artists participating in the 2016 edition, which is inspired in part by Jean Genet, include Canadians Nadia Belerique, Moyra Davey, Brian Jungen, and Luis Jacob, alongside international superstars like Thomas Bayrle, Nicole Eisenman, Kerry James Marshall, and Luc Tuymans. —M. H. Miller

Yves Klein
Tate Liverpool, England
October 21–March 5
Legend has it that the trauma of having one of his artworks included in the 1962 shockumentary Mondo Cane contributed to Yves Klein’s death at 34. Nevertheless, Klein himself was not averse to a kind of refined sensationalism; the piece in question was one of his “Anthropometry” performances, in which nude women, slathered in the artist’s signature International Klein Blue, pressed themselves against canvases in front of an audience. In fact much of Klein’s work—which anticipates Conceptual, Minimalist, and Pop art—is an admixture of the sublime and the spectacular. In this retrospective, expect to see, in addition to the Anthropometries, fire paintings made with blowtorches, plaster casts of classical sculptures painted ultramarine blue, and plans for buildings made of air. —Anne Doran

NOVEMBER

Lawrence Weiner
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
November 12–January 15
A member of the first generation of American Conceptual artists, who questioned both what a work of art is and whether it has to take material form, Lawrence Weiner, in 1968, drew up a manifesto, whose basic tenets are: “The artist may construct the piece,” “The piece may be fabricated,” and “The piece need not be built.” Each of these conditions, he wrote, would be consistent with the artist’s intent. Since then, Weiner, with elegance and wit, has been sculpting ideas using words as his medium. This exhibition, a comprehensive survey of Weiner’s work, will include a typographic “sculpture” mounted on the exterior of the building, as well as Weiner’s designs for playing cards, wristwatches, books, posters, graffiti, and even tattoos. —Barbara A. MacAdam

Avery Singer
Secession, Vienna
November 18–January 22
There is something strangely funny about Avery Singer’s paintings, in which robot-like artists create art for the digital age. Often rendered in flat black-and-white blocks, Singer’s paintings are made using a David Salle–like technique: she projects designs created in the 3-D modeling program SketchUp onto canvases and then paints them in acrylic. These works suggest that, in a post-Photoshop world, painting has become flat, in both senses of the word—the medium has lost depth and originality. In this show, the young New York–based painter will show recent work that has become even more abstract, as though it were made by a computer algorithm smashing together shapes on a digital canvas. —Alex Greenberger

Cy Twombly
Centre Pompidou, Paris
November 30–April 24
This survey of the work of Cy Twombly at the Centre Pompidou is set to be the largest ever staged in Europe, and it’s the first Twombly retrospective anywhere since the artist’s death, in 2011. The show will trace the painter, sculptor, and photographer’s career from his studies at the Art Students League of New York and at Black Mountain College to his life in Rome, where he made his home after first visiting in the 1950s. The press release for the exhibition also mentions “the strong relationship maintained by the artist with the city of Paris”—because of course the French would try to claim a Lexington, Virginia–born artist who lived in Italy as one of their own. —Nate Freeman

DECEMBER

Robert Rauschenberg
Tate Modern, London
December 1–April 2
Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, is justly famous for collapsing the divisions between traditional mediums in his 1954 to 1964 series “Combines,” which wedded gestural painting with collage and such objects as his own bed and a stuffed goat. His experimentations, however, extended far beyond that; decades before the Pictures Generation and the Internet, Rauschenberg was making revolutionary work about the boundary between art and life, reproduced images, globalization, and technology—the same concerns addressed by many young artists today. The most comprehensive Rauschenberg show since the Guggenheim’s 1997 blowout, this retrospective will bring to light just how far ahead of his time the artist was—and how far emerging artists have to go before they catch up to him. —Alex Greenberger

Loretta Fahrenholz
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
December 11–March 5
In Loretta Fahrenholz’s photographs and videos, there are a lot of performers, and a lot of screens within screens. Her film Ditch Plains (2013) alternates recorded video messages seen on cracked iPhones with shots of street performers flex dancing through vacant New York apartments in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In fact, iPhones show up often in Fahrenholz’s fake documentary photos and her video reenactments of Kathy Acker plays. This show, one of Fahrenholz’s first institutional outings, brings together Ditch Plains and some of her recent photography. How, Fahrenholz asks, will technology continue to alter our behavior? As the digital becomes an increasingly essential part of everyday life, her work keeps us up to date. —Alex Greenberger

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of ARTnews on page 32 under the title “Editors’ Picks.”