PARIS — Organizing 236,000 square feet of exhibition space around one theme seems like an impossible task, as impossible as the coldness of the sun. However, since it was reborn in 2012 as Europe’s largest non-collecting art museum, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris has been focusing on exactly that: massive presentations of temporary group and solo exhibitions in its Place du Trocadéro space, all around a central theme, with the current being Soleil Froid (Cold Sun).
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LONDON — When God said “let there be light,” he probably didn’t anticipate how much that statement would cost in the 21st century. Regarding the Hayward Gallery’s current exhibition, Light Show, security on hand are quick to note that this is one of the most expensive exhibitions the institution has ever staged, with staff receiving strict instructions to keep viewers’ hands off the artwork, especially Leo Villareal’s “Cylinder II” (2012), an ethereal column of LEDs that reach up into the first gallery’s cavernous space.
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LOS ANGELES — What do you get when you invite 1,500 people to make clay sculptures of whatever they want? An incredibly weird, crumbling, monotone wonderland. As part of his current retrospective, New York-based artist Urs Fischer organized this freewheeling project at the Geffen Contemporary MoCA in downtown Los Angeles, and titled, appropriately, “YES” (2013).
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WASHINGTON, DC — If you need one good reason to see the must-see Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, that reason would be the shockingly holographic “Head of an Apostle Looking Up” from 1508.
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Before pride parades, Stonewall, the It Gets Better Project, and “Born This Way,” a circle of friends, lovers and artists unabashedly embodied and represented their own homosexuality. This group coalesced around Paul Thek, expressing their identity during a deeply conservative era, as seen in the important and enlightening exhibition Paul Thek and His Circle in the 1950s at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.
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TORONTO — Appropriation and amalgamation take center stage at “Beat Nation,” organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and currently on view at The Power Plant in Toronto, a show focusing on the influence of hip hop culture in Aboriginal contemporary art.
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The next few years are going to have the art world’s focus zooming in more and more on West Asia, or at least that’s the expectation of mammoth museums like the Louvre and Guggenheim which both plan to open shiny new outposts in Abu Dhabi. As something of a lead up to this era of eastern art expansion, Walid Raad is collaborating with the Louvre on a project taking place over three years, which began with the opening of the Louvre’s new wing for Islamic Arts in Paris and will continue to their opening in Abu Dhabi in 2015.
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BRIGHTON, UK — Warhol’s old mantra, “I think everybody should like everybody,” has been endowed with fresh significance in Belfast, where his first show ever to take place North of Ireland’s contentious border is now underway at the Metropolitan Arts Centre.
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The Met has dedicated an entire room to a prized portrait painted by Diego Velázquez titled “Duke Francesco I d’Este” (1638), on loan from the Galleria Estense in Modena, Italy.
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LOS ANGELES — Often, I find museum exhibitions that have to do with celebrity or Hollywood culture to be a shameless attempt to generate a blockbuster-sized crowd who, flocking to the museum in droves, boost attendance numbers for the year. That being said, the massive installation Stanley Kubrick at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art transcends the sticky landscape of vapid popular culture and embraces a filmmaker that many would term artist. The exhibition, which was originally curated by the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt was brought to LACMA in collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
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