We’re thrilled about these seven F/W 2015 must-see museum shows!
1) Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth at Hammer Museum (closes September 27)
(Mark Bradford, Lights and Tunnels, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 84 x 108 in. (213.4 x 274.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Joshua White.)
Scorched Earth is Mark Bradford’s first solo museum exhibition in his native Los Angeles and on view at the Hammer Museum now through September 27, 2015. Comprising a suite of new paintings, a multimedia installation, and a major painting on the Lobby Wall, this new body of work by Los Angeles–based Bradford refers to formative moments in his life and ruminations on the body in crisis. As an artist who has long been interested in strategies of mapping and the psychogeography of the city he calls home, Bradford uses his characteristic painting style to excavate the terrain— emotional, political and actual—that he inhabits. Examining the moment and afterlife of the 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles, which he experienced from his studio in Leimert Park, Bradford has translated the outrage and lasting wounds of the riots into these new paintings. Scorched Earth opened June 20, 2015.
2) Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood at Rose Art Museum (September 12–December 13, 2015)
(Lisa Yuskavage, Wilderness, 2009. Collection of Liz and Eric Lefkofsky. Courtesy the artist and David Zwriner, New York:London)
Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood opens September 12, 2015, at the Rose Art Museum, part of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. The exhibition will survey 25 years of painting by an artist whose work traverses styles, theories, thresholds and histories, advancing a boldly unique vision for the figurative tradition in painting and the potential relationship of the medium to contemporary culture.Â
The Brood will be Lisa Yuskavage’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States in over 15 years, and is not so much a comprehensive survey of Yuskavage’s career but a story of notable apexes of creativity that together advance an account of her development and identity as a painter. From the earliest works in the exhibition, painting and the female body are both presented as sites of defiance and decadence. While painting has historically been a platform for wild invention and misbehavior, what distinguishes Yuskavage is her willingness to merge the refinement and grand tradition of oil painting with the expansive vocabulary of female transgression and empowerment. The boisterousness of her palette and paint application reiterate and amplify the same characteristics found in her subjects to produce paintings that enthrall the viewer’s eye and tempt the imagination.Â
3) Picasso Sculpture at Museum of Modern Art (September 14, 2015–February 7, 2016)
(Pablo Picasso, Bull, c. 1958, Plywood, tree branch, nails, and screws, 46 1/8 x 56 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (117.2 x 144.1 x 10.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Jacqueline Picasso in honor of the Museum’s continuous commitment to Pablo Picasso’s art. © 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
Picasso Sculpture is a sweeping survey of Pablo Picasso’s innovative and influential work in three dimensions. This will be the first such museum exhibition in the United States in nearly half a century.
Picasso Sculpture focuses on the artist’s lifelong work with sculpture, with a particular focus on his use of materials and processes. The exhibition, which features more than 100 sculptures, complemented by selected works on paper and photographs, aims to advance the understanding of what sculpture was for Picasso, and of how he revolutionized its history through a lifelong commitment to constant reinvention.
4) Mark Rothko: A Retrospective at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Sep 20, 2015 - Jan 24, 2016)
(Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1951, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. © 1998 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko)
Long recognized as among the foremost figures of the Abstract Expressionist vanguard, Mark Rothko embraced the possibility of beauty in pure abstraction with a painterly eloquence that gave a new voice to American art.Â
The MFAH is the sole U.S. venue to present Mark Rothko: A Retrospective, which draws upon the unrivaled holdings of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Across a career spanning the most troubled years of the 20th century, Rothko (1903–1970) explored the tragic and the sublime, and his canvases remain a testament to the deep humanism he brought to modern painting.Â
This definitive retrospective comprises more than 60 paintings that trace the artist’s full career arc, highlighting milestones in the development of his signature style.
5) The Broad Museum (officially opens September 20)
(Installation view of The Broad third-floor gallery)
The Broad Museum will officially open its doors to the public on Sunday, September 20, 2015, on Grand Avenue between 2nd and 3rd streets in downtown Los Angeles directly across the street from MOCA. Forty years in the making, The Broad will be home to one of the most prominent and important collections of postwar and contemporary art assembled by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. The Broad collection includes nearly 2,000 works by more than 200 artists. For the inaugural exhibition, the entire building will be dedicated to a chronological installation of the collection covering the many periods Eli and Edythe have collected beginning with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and their works that date to the '50s, in some cases, as well as Cy Twombly. Moving into Pop, there will be works by Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Roy Lichtenstein that come from the prime era of pop in the early '60s and throughout the '60s. Onto the '70s and the '80s, there will be a deep representation of artists who emerged then, such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, painters like Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jeff Koons.
For a collection which has previously only been seen publicly in fragmented ways, the expansive Broad collection will be on view for the first time to tell a particular story about postwar art through today.
6) Frank Stella: A Retrospective at Whitney Museum of American Art (October 30, 2015–February 7, 2016)
(Frank Stella, Harran II, 1967, Polymer and fluorescent polymer paint on canvas, 120 × 240 in. (304.8 × 609.6 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; gift, Mr. Irving Blum, 1982. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
The Whitney Museum of American Art will present a career retrospective of Frank Stella (b. 1936), one of the most important living American artists. This survey will be the most comprehensive presentation of Stella’s career to date, showcasing his prolific output from the mid-1950s to the present through approximately 120 works, including paintings, reliefs, maquettes, sculptures, and drawings. Co-organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Whitney, this exhibition will feature Stella’s best-known works alongside rarely seen examples drawn from collections around the world. Accompanied by a scholarly publication, the exhibition will fill the Whitney's entire fifth floor, an 18,000-square-foot gallery that is the Museum’s largest space for temporary exhibitions.
7) Robert Ryman: Real Light, 1958–2007 at Dia:Chelsea (December 9, 2015–June 8, 2016)
(2015 Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Bill Jacobson, The Greenwich Collection, Ltd.)
Last month, The Dia Art Foundation announced that it would mount the first American survey in more than 20 years of the work of Robert Ryman, whose austere white-on-white paintings are among the most important of the postwar period. Robert Ryman: Real Light, 1958–2007 is set to run December 9, 2015, to June 18, 2016, at 545 West 22nd Street in New York City.Â
The comprehensive exhibition will bring together six decades of Ryman’s vital paintings ― ranging in date from the 1950s through the 2000s –– and will be the first expansive look at the work of Mr. Ryman, 85, in this country since a 1993 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that later traveled to San Francisco and Minneapolis. For many, it will also provide a first chance to see paintings and sculpture that for decades have rarely traveled.
