Exhibition
Mire Lee
Hyundai Commission: Open Wound
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
Through March 16, 2025
Drawing inspiration from Tate Modern’s history as a power station, Mire Lee transforms the Turbine Hall with striking hanging sculptures and epic mechanical installations, reimagining the space as a living factory. A fascinating mix of materials such as silicone and chains bring her creations to life and challenge our ideas of what is beautiful, perverse, provocative and desirable. Open Wound invites us to revel in contradictory emotions: from awe and disgust to compassion, fear and love.
Publication
Hyun-Sook Song
Published by Sprüth Magers and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, 2024
Published on the occasion of Hyun-Sook Song’s exhibition at Sprüth Magers, New York, the richly illustrated catalogue is devoted to the creative process that leads Song to her paintings. Through thirty-three color plates and two essays by Fritz W. Kramer and Josef Helfenstein, the catalogue delves into the roots of Song’s practice in Korean calligraphy, which began in the 1970s after her move to Germany and continues to significantly influence her exploration of the memories tied to her homeland even today. The catalogue also features hitherto new and unpublished works by the artist.
Henni Alftan, The Bay (Night), 2024
Courtesy the artist, Karma & Sprüth Magers. Photo: Aurélien Mole
Exhibition
Henni Alftan
House of Mirrors
Longlati Foundation, Shanghai
Through January 18, 2025
Henni Alftan’s solo exhibition at Longlati Foundation, House of Mirrors, invites the viewer to a world where the boundaries between image and representation blur. Curated by Sun Wenjie, the exhibition comprises seventeen mostly recent works on canvas, her largest solo exhibition in Asia to date.
Publication
John Baldessari
Ahmedabad 1992
Published by Sprüth Magers and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, 2024
Throughout John Baldessari’s prolific and impactful career, he consistently examined and defied the expectations that influence our perception of art. Drawing from a wide range of sources – advertising, film culture, Marcel Duchamp, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – he created absurdist, complex yet accessible juxtapositions. Published in conjunction with John Baldessari’s solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers in London and Berlin, the accompanying catalogue presents the alluring series of mixed media assemblages Baldessari created during his residency at the Sarabhai compound in Ahmedabad, India. The catalogue features essays by Shanay Jhaveri and Mario D’Souza.
Exhibition
Cao Fei
Tidal Flux
Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai
Through February 9, 2025
Museum of Art Pudong proudly announces its third major exhibition of the year, Cao Fei: Tidal Flux, opening to the public from June 22 to November 17, 2024. This exhibition marks MAP’s first solo show dedicated to a female artist and its first major exhibition of moving images and media art since the museum’s inception. For artist Cao Fei, this marks her inaugural large-scale mid-career retrospective in Shanghai, and one of her largest solo exhibitions ever staged globally. This exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of Cao Fei’s nearly 30-year artistic journey. The exhibition delves into themes of time, the body, and technology, encompassing several of Cao Fei’s significant long-term projects. Highlights include her early works during the “Pearl River Delta” period, the exploration of digital and virtual realms in the “metaverse” originating from the RMB City body of work, and her research project HX. Furthermore, the exhibition features seven pieces making their global debut, and thirteen works/series being shown in China for the first time.
Photo: Timo Ohler
Publication
Oliver Bak
Ghost Driver, or The Crowned Anarchist
Published by Sprüth Magers, 2024
On the occasion of Oliver Bak’s first exhibition with Sprüth Magers, authors Hilka Dirks, Nils Emmerichs and Louis Scherfig examine Bak’s artistic practice from a wide variety of perspectives, capturing the many layers and references in his work. The catalogue takes readers on a stroll through Oliver Bak’s pictorial surrealities.
Exhibition
Walter Dahn
Have Love Will Travel. Works 1986–2024
Haus Mödrath, Kerpen
Through August 31, 2025
Walter Dahn’s solo exhibition Have Love Will Travel. Works 1986–2024 at Haus Mödrath provides a comprehensive insight into the artist’s work from 1986 onwards. As one of the protagonists of Mülheimer Freiheit in the early 1980s, Dahn became primarily known as a painter. Yet the exhibition deliberately begins after this period and sheds light on Dahn’s expanded concept of painting and his widely ramified system of references to (pop) culture as well as intellectual history. A central focus is on works with a clear reference to music. A catalog with texts by Diedrich Diederichsen and Oliver Tepel is published on the occasion of the exhibition.
Exhibition
Thea Djordjadze, Rosemarie Trockel
limitation of life
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Through April 27, 2025
The Lenbachhaus will present a collaborative work by the artists Rosemarie Trockel and Thea Djordjadze. Djordjadze was Trockel’s student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1998 to 2001 and the two have maintained a close artistic relationship ever since, realizing numerous joint projects and exhibitions. In their exhibition at Lenbachhaus, the artists want to delve into the conception of beauty and challenge established aesthetic conventions, taking inspiration from reflections by the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s opening lines from “Une saison en enfer” (1873) provide a leitmotif for the artists’ approach: “One evening I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter and I reviled her.”
Exhibition
Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin
It Waives Back
Prada Aoyama, Tokyo
Through January 13, 2025
Prada presents the exhibition It Waives Back, organized with the support of Fondazione Prada, at Prada Aoyama Tokyo. The sixth floor of the building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, will host the first presentation of this work by American collaborative artists Fitch and Trecartin in Asia, and their first solo show in Japan.
The exhibition presents new movies and sculptures conceived by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin as part of a broader body of work that began in 2016, when the artists moved their home and studio to rural Ohio. The foundational body of work, titled Whether Line, was commissioned by Fondazione Prada and debuted in 2019 as a large-scale multimedia installation in Milan. As explained by the artists, “Our project in Ohio is intended to be a ‘life project,’ providing space for experimentation and collaboration. Our goal is to allow the purpose of the space to evolve and grow.”
Exhibition
Gilbert & George
LONDON PICTURES
The Gilbert & George Centre, London
Celebrating a year since opening, Gilbert & George are thrilled to announce the second exhibition to take place at the Gilbert & George Centre – the ‘LONDON PICTURES’. The largest group of pictures created by Gilbert & George, they offer both a directory of urban human behaviour and a moral portrait of our times. Over a number of years, Gilbert & George stole newspaper posters found across London, filtering and sorting the stories they conveyed by subject matter. More than a decade since they were first unveiled on a global tour, the Centre will present 28 of the 292 pictures from the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ series, many of which have not been seen in the UK previously. Viewing these ‘LONDON PICTURES’ in 2024 will prompt viewers to consider how society has changed and what has remained central to our shared experience.
Exhibition
Nancy Holt
Power Systems
Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus
Through July 27, 2025
Nancy Holt: Power Systems features the most extensive inquiry yet into Nancy Holt’s studies of systems. The exhibition launches in summer 2024 with a presentation of Pipeline, which calls attention to the physical and economic systems powering buildings and to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. Holt visited Alaska in March of 1986 at the invitation of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska, with the hope she might create a work of art in celebration of the region’s beauty. Holt was instead struck by the infiltration of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System through the landscape. In response she made Pipeline, a sculpture made of steel pipes that twist in and out of the gallery, winding down to the floor where one section of pipe leaks—an incessant drip of oil pooling thickly on a white base. Pipeline points to the unchecked audacity and devastating consequences of the energy industry.
Exhibition
Nancy Holt
Seeing in the Round
The Art Institute of Chicago
Through April 20, 2025
In the early 1970s, Nancy Holt created her first sculpture, a viewing device that she called a Locator. Made from two pieces of welded steel pipe, with a viewing aperture set at the height of her own eyes, the Locator became a powerful means for Holt to ground her viewer in the conscious process of perception. The first Locators were installed in Holt’s New York studio in 1971. From here she could train a viewer’s eye on overlooked aspects of the urban landscape, focusing attention on found elements, such as ventilators on nearby rooftops or windows on neighboring buildings. She then created site-responsive installations, using the Locator as an apparatus to frame surprising passages in the built environment, which she selected and marked with paint.
Exhibition
Arthur Jafa
Works from the MCA Collection
Museum of Contemporary Art – MCA, Chicago
Through May 18, 2025
Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection surveys the artist’s output over roughly the last ten years through a selection of artworks held in the MCA’s collection, including his videos APEX (2013), Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016), The White Album (2018), and akingdoncomethas (2018). Accompanying the videos are a few key sculptural and photographic works that further underscore Jafa’s unique approach to visual culture and image making, in which the lines between popular and high culture blur and the personal collides with the political.
The exhibition is organized by René Morales, former James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, and Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.
Exhibition
Collection 1: Portraits of Her
Group Exhibition
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
Through January 26, 2025
The exhibition focuses on works from the museum collection that feature female figures, arranged in thematic sections. It considers what contemporary artists are entrusting to portraits of women as individuals with personalities and backgrounds, rather than simply as coded images, and what social, historical, and relational aspects they express in their works.
Exhibition
Take a Breath
Group Exhibition
IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Through March 17, 2025
Take a Breath is a major new exhibition that provides an historical, social, political, and personal examination of breathing – why we breathe, how we breathe and what we breathe – exploring themes of decolonisation, environmental racism, indigenous language, the impact of war on the environment and breath as meditation.
Taking as its starting point the nature of breath and its vital role in our very existence, the exhibition reflects on the social, political, environmental, and spiritual aspect of breathing, tracking this vital act from the impact of post-industrial air pollution to modern-day wars and the effect on environment, health and how we live; to the suppression of protests of voices from different communities, where breath is a symbol of community and resistance; and the use of breath as personal meditation.
Exhibition
Barbara Kruger
No Comment
ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum
Through April 21, 2025
As a critical observer of popular culture, feminist, and conceptual powerhouse Barbara Kruger – one of the most influential artists of our time – grapples with power dynamics, late capitalism, and media overload in the most comprehensive presentation of her work in Denmark.
No Comment surveys Kruger’s digital productions of the past two decades: her signature text and image ‘paste-ups’; large-scale, vinyl wall and floor installations; multi-channel films and soundscapes.
Exhibition
Anthony McCall
Solid Light
Tate Modern, London
Through April 27, 2025
In Summer 2024, Tate Modern will present a focused exhibition of immersive works by Anthony McCall. Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, McCall is known for his ‘solid-light’ installations that began in 1973 with the seminal work Line Describing a Cone, a key work in Tate’s collection.
Exhibition
Anthony McCall
Rooms
MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon
Through March 17, 2025
Rooms is the first solo exhibition by British artist Anthony McCall in Portugal. Developing in a space between sculpture, cinema, drawing and performance, McCall’s work is recognised for the innovative way in which it explores these intersections: simple and complex, and highly sensory.
This exhibition presents four works that mark McCall’s career and which he dubs Solid Light Works, produced between 2007 and 2020. These are film installations that flow through space like immaterial yet apparently three-dimensional sculptures of light and smoke. The performative dimension of these works arises from the articulation between the viewer’s participation, bodily sensation, and perception of the physicality of the forms drawn by the light.
Publication
Reinhard Mucha
Urlaub im All / Holiday in Space
Edited by Sprüth Magers in cooperation with Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Luhring Augustine, Lia Rumma Gallery
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, March 23, 2023
Urlaub im All / Holiday in Space is an artist book which can be considered as Reinhard Mucha’s personal oeuvre catalogue. It comprises two volumes in a slipcase and is based on Reinhard Mucha's so-called portfolio books that he created for himself over the years, relating his photographically documented works to one another both formally and aesthetically. Nearly 800 reproductions as well as detailed image and work information provide unprecedented, comprehensive insight into both his work and understanding of sculpture. Also published for the first time are 19 letters and texts by Mucha further elucidating his artistic thinking.
Exhibition
Senga Nengudi
Dia Beacon, New York
Through early 2025
Dia Art Foundation will present a long-term exhibition of work by Senga Nengudi, which will open at Dia Beacon on February 17, 2023. Sculptures and room-sized installations made between 1969 and 2020, including recent acquisitions for Dia’s permanent collection, will be on display. This long-term exhibition of Nengudi’s work will be accompanied by a performance program and publication, revealing the multiplicity of her practice.
Exhibition
Jon Rafman
¡ʎʇıuɐɯnH ǝɥʇ ‘ɥO
Whangarei Museum of Art, Town Basin, New Zealand
December 21, 2024–March 23, 2025
¡ʎʇıuɐɯnH ǝɥʇ ‘ɥO presents a series of films by Jon Rafman created between 2013 and 2021. Combining found images, custom animations and 3D models with footage from video games and other sources, Rafman constructs uncanny digital landscapes that feel at once nostalgic and disorienting. His fragmented, non-linear approach to narrative mirrors the circular way stories are told in digital spaces, where everything becomes a hyperlink to a hyperlink, with sidebars and rabbit holes replacing beginnings, middles and ends. The exhibition has been divided into two “sides,” one showing the dense and introspective A Man Digging, Remember Carthage and Legendary Reality, and the other the confronting and visceral Poor Magic, Disasters Under the Sun and Shadowbanned. There is also a seventh video, Punctured Sky, situated in a hidden storage area behind the galleries, in which themes of memory, nostalgia and the loss of self in digital spaces offer a complement to (and commentary on) the other works.
Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, 1966
© Ed Ruscha. Photo: Bill Ganzel, Ganzel Group Communications, Inc.
Exhibition
Ed Ruscha
Paper
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha
Through February 23, 2025
Ed Ruscha draws inspiration from familiar subjects, including roadside gas stations, consumer products, and commercial logos. Colloquial speech also fascinates him. Rhymes, puns, guttural sounds, and catchphrases are among his signature motifs. Transforming the seemingly mundane into the extraordinary, Ruscha offers a fresh perspective on American vernacular culture.
Ed Ruscha: Paper includes drawings, prints, and photographs from the artist’s recent gift to the Museum. These works, produced over six decades, feature graphics, typefaces, and letterforms rendered in ink, acrylic, pencil, pastel, and gunpowder on paper. A celebration of the artist’s wry use of image and text, this exhibition also highlights his experimentation with diverse media and techniques.
Exhibition
Salvo
Arrivare in Tempo
Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin
Through May 25, 2025
The exhibition Arrivare in tempo (Arriving on time) at Pinacoteca Agnelli is the most comprehensive exhibition of the Italian artist Salvo to date. The exhibition offers a path through Salvo’s oeuvre, emphasizing how his approach to painting – in its recurrent thematic cycles, attention to art historical references and exploration of light – has always been in continuity with his early conceptual research.
Developed in close collaboration with the Archivio Salvo, the exhibition will focus on some of the fundamental motifs of his artistic exploration: the concept of repetition and probing recurring motifs both as painting technique and conceptual urgency; the reflection on painting as a language and language as art; the relationship between art history and the representation of the everyday.
Exhibition
Martine Syms
Total
Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
Through February 9, 2025
In her first survey in France, Syms invites visitors into a total work of art engaging with the theater of the everyday and the roles we play in it. Engaging with both the idea of a survey and the “total” found at the bottom of a receipt, the show reconstructs the space of a shop and conflates it with the spaces of the museum and the artist's personal studio. With early works alongside newly produced objects, Total traces the artist's long-standing interest in images and their effect on reality, how they impact the ways in which relationships form, and how they're embedded in the construction of identity, or the “fictioning of self.”
Exhibition
Nora Turato
IN SITU #1 – I hear you, I hear you.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Through August 31, 2025
The Stedelijk launched IN SITU, a new series in the mezzanine of the new building. A new generation of artists has been commissioned to create experimental works for one of the museum's largest intermediate spaces.
For her new work, Turato examines the impact of language on our self-image, expression, and identity—from how we learn to speak as children to how we constantly adopt the words of others. By combining language and typography, she questions how much control we truly have over how we communicate. For her site-specific work, Turato is developing a custom-made typeface and a script for her own monumental moving billboard. She explores how rhythm, pronunciation, design, and typography influence the power, ambience and character of language.
Exhibition
Marcel van Eeden
The Villa
Villa Flora, Kunstmuseum Winterthur
Through March 23, 2025
In The Villa, created for the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, the artist examines the history of Villa Flora including the famous collector couple Hedy and Arthur Hahnloser and connects it with his own artistic universe. In his series and large-format drawings, Van Eeden investigates historical events that date from before his birth, over the years creating a monumental artistic project that links his own existence with the flow of time—resulting in the paradoxical coupling of romantic personalization and melancholic distance.
Exhibition
Kara Walker
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – SFMOMA
Through spring 2026
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker.
Kara Walker has long been recognized for her incisive examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality. Her work leverages expressions of fantasy and humor to confront troubling histories and dominant narratives, repossessing control in the process. Inspired by a wide range of sources, from antique dolls to Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, Walker’s new commission, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), considers the memorialization of trauma, the objectives of technology, and the possibilities of transforming the negative energies that plague contemporary society. The presentation marks the first time that SFMOMA has commissioned an artist to create a site-specific installation for the Roberts Family Gallery.
Exhibition
John Baldessari
The End of the Line
Craig Robins Collection
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, Manantiales, Uruguay
January 4–February 9, 2025
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry (MACA) presents John Baldessari: The End of the Line, the first panoramic exhibition dedicated to the great pioneer of conceptual art in South America. The exhibition brings together more than 40 works, including paintings, photographs and installations, from the collection of Craig Robins, one of the most important collectors of Baldessari’s work, who was also his friend, promoter and close interlocutor. The exhibition highlights the foundational works of the American conceptualist in the 1960s and 1970s. In it we find the deafening gesture of the incineration of his own work, his serial -almost compulsive- approach to photography, his constant exploration of the link between image and language, and between the world of text and the world of ideas.
Exhibition
Kaari Upson
Doll House – A Retrospective
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek
May 27–October 26, 2025
Bodies tell tales. Objects remember. Memories leave traces. In Kaari Upson’s distinctive world, beauty meets horror, sensitivity resonates with despair. The first retrospective museum exhibition featuring Upson after her untimely death shows the strength and range of an artist already well on her way to becoming a modern classic. At her untimely death from cancer in 2021, aged 51, Kaari Upson was widely regarded as one of the most significant and versatile American artists of her generation with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, performance, film and painting. Though her career was cut short, she has left behind a rich, intense and strongly personal body of work that revolves around identity, body, relationships, emotions, illness and loss.
