Cao Fei
Staging the Era
Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing
Through June 21, 2021

As a leading member of China’s avant-garde, Cao Fei uses multimedia formats—film, video, virtual reality, and installation—to surreally depict the dramatic social changes of a globalizing China and the state of the individual under such conditions. Cao Fei’s UCCA exhibition, her first major solo show in China, assembles works from different periods of her artistic career and situates her practice within the context of the country’s profound social upheavals.

Thomas Demand
House of Card
M – Museum Leuven, Belgium
Through April 18, 2021

In the fall of 2020, the Belgian museum M Leuven presents a major solo exhibition of Thomas Demand’s work, focusing on his relationship to architecture. The starting point of the show at M is his ongoing series of Model Studies, in which the concept of the model itself is key. The Model Studies deal with the relationship between Demand’s work and that of other artists, architects and (fashion) designers, such as John Lautner, SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa), Hans Hollein and – in more recent works – Azzedine Alaia or Gio Ponti.

STUDIO BERLIN
Group Exhibition
Berghain, Berlin
Through May 2, 2021

In the exhibition STUDIO BERLIN, the Boros Foundation is showing works by over 100 contemporary artists who live and work in Berlin. On display are national and international positions from the fields of photography, sculpture, painting, video, sound, performance and installation. The venue of the exhibition organized by the Boros Foundation is Berghain, including the Panorama Bar, the column and the adjacent hall.

Gilbert & George
The Great Exhibition
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Through May 16, 2021

Gilbert & George have been creating art together now for over half a century. Their outstanding body of work is still as explosive as it is significant. The SCHIRN is dedicating an extensive retrospective to the visually powerful and sometimes provocative universe of this eccentric, London-based artist duo, showing works from 1971 until 2019. As both subject and object of their own work, Gilbert & George form a complete artistic unity that draws no distinction between art and life. As “living sculptures,” they embody their art and are both topic and focal point of their large-format collages and screened pictorial worlds. Their work revolves around death, hope, life, fear, sex, money, and religion. These are also soci­etal issues, which they depict in all their contra­dic­tions: at once joyful and tragic, grotesque and serious, surreal and symbolic. The duo deal with every­thing that makes us uneasy. Their goal, however, is not to shock, but rather to make visible what is happening in the world, according to their motto “Art for All”.

Andreas Gursky
Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany
Through August 22, 2021

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig in 1955, the same year his family fled to West Germany and later settled in Düsseldorf. The connection to Leipzig was never severed but it is only this autumn that the internationally celebrated artist will finally be honored with a retrospective of his work in his native city at the Museum der bildenden Künste.

Thomas Ruff
Thomas Ruff: afterimages

Works 1989-2020
National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung
Through July 4, 2021

Thomas Ruff: afterimages will be the first institutional solo exhibition of the German artist (born in 1958, Zell am Hamersbach) in South East Asia. It presents excerpts of 15 of the in-between 31 series the artist has produced since his beginnings in 1979. After his retrospective at Haus der Kunst Munich (2012), his recent Japan survey (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2016/17) and his solo show in K20 – Kunstsammlung NRW (2020-21), this exhibition with around 105 works is one of his most comprehensive to date. A new series by Thomas Ruff, entitled Tableaux chinois, based on propaganda photography from a magazine for foreign relations from the PR China and coffee table books on Mao’s life and the history of the great achievements of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s and 1970s, will have its premier in Asia.

Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha: Okla
Oklahoma Contemporary, Oklahoma City
Through July 5, 2021

In spring 2021, Oklahoma Contemporary will present Ed Ruscha: OKLA, a landmark survey of work by Oklahoma-raised, world-renowned artist Ed Ruscha, his first-ever solo exhibition in his home state. Focusing on his groundbreaking drawings, prints, books, photos, films and graphic design, the exhibition will include works from all stages of his 60-year career.

Frank Stella
Frank Stella’s Stars, A Survey
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Through May 9, 2021

Among the myriad of forms that have appeared in Frank Stella’s work, the star is the most singular, standing out as a stable and immediately identifiable shape in the midst of the complex tangle of abstract, invented forms that the artist has utilized over his long career. Frank Stella’s Stars will be presented both indoors and outdoors, with several monumental works being sited in the Aldrich’s Sculpture Garden.