This year there was no Documenta, no Venice Biennale, not even the Berlin Biennale or Sydney Biennale. But the absence of major biennales has left plenty of room for international museums. Large museum exhibitions compensate for this with large retrospectives and publicized research.
This trend will continue around the world this fall. Let`s have a look at the museum exhibitions to see beyond the US.
“Gavin Jantjes: To Be Free! A Retrospective” at Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates
November 18, 2023–March 10, 2024
“One cannot speak of form and color when the environment speaks of poverty, hunger and death,” artist Gavin Jantjes once wrote. This statement can be applied to his entire career. This exhibition will showcase Africa through prints, paintings and more. The artist now lives in Oxfordshire, England, and will be honored with a retrospective at the Sharjah Arts Foundation, where he was in residence in 2022.
“Everything Gets Lighter” at Museo Jumex, Mexico City
November 18, 2023–February 11, 2024
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Museo Jumex, the private museum of fruit juice magnate Eugenio Lopez Alonso, presents 65 works from its permanent museum collection that explore fluidity and death. Ironically, the curator insights were some weighty works—gritty pieces from heavy hitters like Felix González-Torres, Ana Mendieta, Bas Jan Ader and others.
“Georgiana Houghton: Invisible Friends” at Art Gallery NSW, Sydney
November 4, 2023–March 10, 2024
A Kandinsky blockbuster at the Art Gallery NSW may be the big attraction in Australia this fall. But one of the complementary museum exhibitions devoted to Georgiana Houghton, a lesser-known spiritualist who worked contemporaneously to him, is likely to be the season’s true star. Houghton created gorgeous watercolors formed from multi-hued spirals and lines that overlap and intersect. According to the artist they were messages from beings beyond this world who had communicated with her.
“Indigenous Histories” at Museu de Arte de São Paulo
October 20, 2023–February 25, 2025
This show, the latest in MASP’s acclaimed Stories series, is a rich and wide-ranging exploration of the many different indigenous cultures originating from the regions of North America, South America, Scandinavia and Oceania. Its organizers are not aiming to provide something total and comprehensive, but rather a partial picture with interconnecting historical strands. If past “Histórias” museum exhibitions stand as evidence, expect this show to be eye-opening.
Mark Rothko at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
October 18, 2023–April 2, 2024
Leave Leave it to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a museum with a penchant for blockbusters, to make museum acquisitions of all nine of Rothko’s Seagram murals for this retrospective, in which the paintings will make a rare journey from the Tate, its longtime owner. Seagram’s 1958 murals represent the pinnacle of Rothko’s Abstract Expressionist style—vast, engulfing fields of blackish-red that conjure the sublime, and then more—but they are unlikely to be the only gems among the 115 works on display here. Accordingly, the museum brought out the big guns: Rothko’s son Christopher co-organized the exhibition with Suzanne Paget.
