Rules & Repetition: Conceptual Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum
Group Exhibition
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
Through February 18, 2024

Despite its often-cool appearance, conceptual art was made by real people with urgent concerns about  their world and the role that art can and should play within it. Drawn from the Wadsworth’s permanent collection, Rules & Repetition features artists who developed and embraced serial repetition, instruction-based artmaking, and other key conceptualist strategies. Taken as a whole, the works in the exhibition suggest how our experiences are shaped by structures and systems, celebrating the ability of art to help us understand how we relate to the world in new ways. 

Bernd & Hilla Becher
September 16–November 7, 2023
Berlin

For over five decades, Bernd and Hilla Becher produced a remarkable oeuvre in the pursuit of a straightforward theme: variation within limits. Precision, fine detail and methodology mark the Bechers’ work, which straddles several artistic categories. By systematically photographing commonplace industrial buildings across Europe and North America, they captured an architectural landscape in the process of disappearing. Approaching the structures with scientific interest, the artists classified, compared and contrasted their subjects in varying groups and ‘typologies,’ as they named their celebrated grids. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to announce Bernd and Hilla Becher’s first solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin. Showcasing the Bechers’ iconic style and formal rigor will be several seldom-seen works along with two typologies, one of which features a rare amount of twenty-four photographs – intriguing images that allude to the cultural and social significance of the constructions the artists referred to as ‘anonymous sculptures.’

Rust
Bernd & Hilla Becher, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Stephen Shore
July 2–October 1, 2022
Berlin

The photographic group exhibition Rust looks at the decline of the American Rust Belt through the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore and LaToya Ruby Frazier. The nuanced takes of the three artists offer complementary views on the industrial Northeast and Midwest since the late 1970s to the present day against a backdrop of wider societal changes.

Bernd & Hilla Becher
September 7–October 21, 2017
Los Angeles

In a photographic project spanning five decades, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented the soon-to-be-forgotten architectural forms of industry – Mine Heads, Blast Furnaces, Water Towers, Coal Bunkers, Cooling Towers, Industrial Facades, Gas Tanks and Grain Elevators, to name but a few. Systematically photographing each structure, the artists examined their shared qualities and categorized the images into grid typologies or displayed them individually.

Bernd & Hilla Becher
September 3–October 4, 2014
London

Over the past five decades, as both teachers and artists, Bernd and Hilla Becher have become among the most influential figures in contemporary photography. Featuring five typologies of industrial structures, as well as a number of single, large-scale photographs, the exhibition at Sprüth Magers is their first solo show in London since the Camden Arts Centre in 1998 and the largest presentation of their work since ‘Cruel and Tender’, at Tate Modern, in 2003.

Das Licht von der anderen Seite – Teil II Photographie
John Baldessari, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Victor Burgin, Walter Dahn, Jimmy De Sana, Barbara Ess, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli  David Weiss, Hamish Fulton, Günther Förg, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel, Thomas Locher, Allan Mccollum, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, James Welling, Richard Wentworth
September 17–October 29, 1988
Cologne