ArtReview November 2019

Telling truth to, you know‌ since 1949

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Tony Cragg Stacks

Jason Rhoades : Tijuanatanjierchandelier

David Zwirner

October 24 – December 7, 2019

519 West 19th Street New York

Jason Rhoades,Tijuanatanjierchandelier, 2006

Installation view, CAC MĂĄlaga, 2006 The Estate of Jason Rhoades

Courtesy The Estate of Jason Rhoades, David Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth

Adriano Costa

Henry Taylor

Otobong Nkanga

Alvaro Barrington

Iulia Nistor

Paloma Bosquê

Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato

Kishio Suga

Patricia Leite

Anna Bella Geiger

Leticia Ramos

Paulo Monteiro

Antonio Obá

Lucas Arruda

Paulo Nazareth

Celso Renato

Luiz Roque

Paulo Nimer Pjota

Dadamaino

Mariana Castillo Deball

Roberto Winter

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Marina Perez Simão

Rubem Valentim

Deyson Gilbert

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

Rosana Paulino

Fernando Marques Penteado

Michael Dean

Runo Lagomarsino

Francesca Woodman

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Sofia Borges

Francesco João

Neïl Beloufa

Solange Pessoa

Giangiacomo Rossetti

Nina Canell

Sonia Gomes

Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info@mendeswooddm.com

Samke, 2019. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 18 7/8 × 14 7/8 inches (48 × 38 cm)

Tomma Abts November 6–December 14, 2019

David Zwirner 533 West 19th Street New York

WAYNE THIEBAUD Mountains 1965–2019 18 East Seventy-Ninth Street New York, NY 10075 (212) 734-6300 Monday–Saturday, 10 am–5pm www.acquavellagalleries.com Canyon Pass [detail], 2019 Oil on canvas 60 × 60 inches (152.4 × 152.4 cm) Art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA , at Artists Rights Society ( ARS), NY

November 5 – December 13, 2019

Yayoi Kusama © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner

Yayoi Kusama : Every Day I Pray For Love

David Zwirner

November 9 – December 14, 2019

537 West 20th Street New York

VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES

Liz Glynn Emotional Capital November 2019 – January 2020

1700 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021

+1 213 623 3280

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MARK BRADFORD CERBERUS

2 OCTOBER – 21 DECEMBER 2019 LONDON WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

THE PATH TO THE RIVE R BE LONGS TO ANIMAL S , 2019, MIXE D ME DIA ON CANVAS , 168.9 × 22 .89 CM / 66 ½ × 90 IN © MARK BR ADFORD, PHOTO: JOSHUA WHITE

BRICE MARDEN Gagosian New York

ArtReview vol 71 no 8 November 2019

Disrupt this ArtReview is convinced that a famous art historian once said something along the lines of ‘if you want to understand a society you must read the book of its art’, but the internet does not concur and so ArtReview will have to say it, even at the expense of citing to support its point an established authority for whom you – my reader, my likeness, my sibling – might have some kind of respect. Because that’s ultimately why you’re here, isn’t it? Because you are a great respecter of authority and eager – this year as every year – to know to whom, and precisely how obsequiously, you should defer in order to advance your career, or whose opinions to parrot most faithfully in order to impress your peers, and which pariahs should be studiously avoided now they’ve fallen off the list, so that you can whisper behind your fans at the next salon about how you never really liked them, and haven’t you heard the rumours… … only joking! (Ha, ha, ha.) No, what ArtReview was wondering, before it got distracted looking for that quote, is how we might read the ‘book of art’ today.

One popular response might be that both art and the society it describes have recently strayed into illegibility. No one seems to know anymore what the hell is going on or who is in charge. A globalised world generates impossibly complex systems, and large parts of the world’s population feel alienated from decisions they are repeatedly told they (that’s you) are too dim-witted to properly understand. The consequence is that those in power are inclined either to hide behind that complexity or to deny it, effectively excluding the majority by restricting access to the facts or withholding the tools with which to interpret them.

Make up your mind

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Contemporary art, too, is often accused of being dominated by an intricately networked clique who have adopted an inscrutable language in order to preserve their own authority; of paying only the most cursory lip service to a wider public; of being a fenced-off playground for the superrich; of signalling its liberal virtues while remaining in thrall to global capital; of bulldozing local traditions in favour of homogenising internationalism… and so on, and so forth. Feel free to add your own objections.

If this is how the book of twenty-first-century art is to be read, then it seems to confirm the direst predictions for society. But that can’t be true, because everything is looking tickety-boo on that front. (Ha, ha, ha.) Anyway, while ArtReview sympathises with some of those points, it doesn’t entirely agree. If there’s one tendency that it is pretty certain should be resisted, it’s that which disengages from complex issues in favour of a general throwing-up of hands, or conflates a failure to acknowledge that there exist systems of power with them suddenly disappearing into thin air. And so ArtReview continues to believe that one of the key purposes of criticism – whether in art or otherwise – is to expose the otherwise invisible structures so that they can be understood and, if the reader of this particular book (ok, magazine) of art chooses, challenged and changed.

Because denial, as Mark Twain said (and the internet confirms), ain’t just a river in Egypt. ArtReview

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South, 2017, oil on canvas, 10' 9 15⁄16" × 8' 6 3⁄8" © Li Songsong

Li Songsong One of My Ancestors October 25 – December 21, 2019 New York @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

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25 25 Years Years Later Later 14 14 November November - 18- 18 January January 2019 2019 2626 Cork Cork Street, Street, London London W1S W1S 3ND 3ND

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Alfredo Jaar. The Silence of Nduwayezu, 1997

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Chen Fei, Painting of Peace (detail), 2019. Acrylic on canvas. 100 x 200 cm | 39 3/8 x 78 3/4 in. Courtesy the Artist and Perrotin.

TOKYO EMILY MAE SMITH TAKASHI MURAKAMI

Ellen Pau 鮑藹倫

Edouard Malingue Gallery

The Great Movement 大動作 馬凌畫廊

edouardmalingue.com

Hong Kong 香港 15.11.2019 - 09.01.2020

Hong Kong Shanghai

RUDOLF POLANSZKY CHIMERA

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BRUSSELS OCTOBER 24 – DECEMBER 21, 2019

Lines of Life, 2019. Oil on canvas. 120 x 140 cm | 47.2 x 55.1 in (detail)

8-30 NOVEMBER

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SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION AUTUMN EXHIBITIONS 2019 21 SEP 2019 – 15 FEB 2020 Marwan Rechmaoui, Bonne Nuit, 2014. From ‘Pillars’. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Hamburg-Beirut. Photo: Harry Heuts

Adam Henein: Lasting Impressions • Akram Zaatari: Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation • ’32: The Rescore Air Arabia Curator in Residence Exhibition • Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Sunset, Sunrise • Bani Abidi: Funland • March Project 2019 Exhibition • Marwan Rechmaoui: Slanted Squares • SHARJAPAN2

Wangari Mathenge Aura of Quiet October 19 – November 16, 2019 robertsprojectsla.com

ROBERTS PROJECTS

Art Previewed Tall Tales The singer is the artist

by Jonathan T.D. Neil 40

Dublin Feeling restless

by Declan Long 50

Mexico City Under attack

by Gaby Cepeda 42

Sounding Off Waking the dead

by Patrick Langley 52

London Spirit of disruption

by Philomena Epps 46

The Interview Jonas Lipps

by Ross Simonini 54

São Paulo Looking for new heroes

by Silas Martí 48

Coming Up Ten shows to see this month

by Martin Herbert 62

page 62 Éva Mag, Stand Up (still), 2015, video, 10 min.

Courtesy the artist (see Performa 19, New York)

November 2019

35

Power 100

36

Introduction 74

The List 126

The Power 100 76

Power in Numbers 133

The Year in Art (and in the Real World) 78

Back Page 138

ArtReview

Art Previewed

So it was needful 39

Terry Allen, The Exact Moment (MenWars), 2018–19, mixed media on paper, 76 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist and la Louver, Los Angeles

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ArtReview

Tall Tales

Jonathan T.D. Neil discovers that great country music and great art can come from the same place

I first learned Terry Allen’s name from Robert Earl Keen’s No.2 live Dinner, a 1995 recording of two live shows rek delivered at Floores Country Store and the Cactus Cafe Ballroom (two legendary Texas halls, allegedly; I’ve never been to either). I bought the album in 1996, on cd, and played it in my Jeep nearly continuously for a year. As Keen and his band begin to rip into the opening chords of Amarillo Highway, he says, for the audience’s edification, and to give credit where it is due (because this is how songwriters behave), “This is a Terry Allen song…”, and then the band is off, with Robert Earl Keen practically yelling: “Well I’m a high straight in Plainview/ a side bet in Idalou / and a fresh deck in New Deal…” I’ve listened to this intro so many times that I now hear “This is a Terry Allen song…” with every rendition of Amarillo Highway, even when Terry Allen plays it himself.

It was years later that I came across a visual artist named Terry Allen who made funky drawings that echoed Ken Price, or Ed Flood and the Chicago Imagists, but that trafficked in icons of the American West and its borderlands. I don’t know when I finally made the connection, that this Terry Allen, the artist, was that Terry Allen, the country singer-songwriter. Those two worlds were just too far apart. Even today the mention of country music in most artworld precincts gets you looked at sideways, as if you can’t be serious, because no serious artworld person listens to country music, or at least admits to it.

That all changed this summer when la Louver mounted Terry Allen: The Exact Moment

It Happens in the West, a substantial survey of Allen’s work in art and music from the 1960s until today, much of it in collaboration with his partner of more than half a century, Jo Harvey Allen. My colleague (at Claremont Graduate University) David Pagel rightly praised the show in the Los Angeles Times as ‘jampacked with love, suffering, and resilience’. I’d add that these conditions issue from Allen’s capacity as a storyteller, an inventor of characters and settings that manage to cohere in the imagination even when they only make fragmentary appearances on a sheet of paper or in one of his radio plays.

Allen has long been attuned to the frequencies of an American vernacular that no artist of his generation, even the coolest ones, ever picked up. The drawings from his 1969 series Cowboy & The Stranger, for example, depict these crazily odd cowpokes: one is all teeth, another all cactus, both are wearing chaps and doing things with food, such as riding it (a hot dog) or posing with it (Texas chili). The draughtsmanship is deft, easily comparable to the best cartoonists of the time, such as R. Crumb.

Yet the compositions are so weird that one can’t help thinking, wtf.

Ed Ruscha was making his ‘liquid word’ works then, such as Rancho (1968) and Adios (1969), which limned the language of the Southwest. The work from this period earned him status as a Pop icon. Allen’s drawings aren’t cool like that. They are not allegories of an idea of American Art, of what it could be and how it could be defined anew, because

November 2019

they are not after Art with a capital ‘A’. Allen’s works are after America, after all of its idiosyncratic grit and gumption, its endless dreams of self-improvement and self-regard – the kinds that only ever arise after a night of drinking in some dusty roadside bar and whatever follows in the tawdry motel nextdoor.

The Exact Moment It Happens in the West takes its title from a work in Allen’s recent series on paper called MemWars (2018–19). In it, a figure standing next to a saddled horse gives off the aroma of being a cowboy, though on closer inspection his outfit looks like it might be a suit, and his hat is closer to a fedora. The red wash over roughly the lower third of the sheet reads like landscape, its upper edge like horizon, but as it cuts through the figure and the horse, it takes on the character of a curtain coming down, or of colour being drained away. ‘The exact moment it happens…’ is the other side of ‘Once upon a time…’: both intros announce the coming of a kind of fiction, a fantasy of the West that occupies an outsized place in the global imagination; most people will hopefully hear in that title the echo of Sergio Leone’s 1968 epic spaghetti western, most of which was filmed in Europe.

It’s a testament to Allen’s art that for more than half a century it has produced that fantasy and revealed it for what it is: like Amarillo Highway, it’s an anthem of America.

Jonathan T.D. Neil is a contributing editor to ArtReview based in Los Angeles

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Mexico

Gaby Cepeda fears a populist attack on art

top Melanie Smith, María Elena (still), 2018, hd video, 24 min 30 sec. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich above Melanie Smith, Fordlandia (still), 2014, hd video, 29 min 42 sec. Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich, and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro & New York

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ArtReview

I cheated for this assignment. I asked around, both friends and acquaintances in the city, about great, or just-ok, but discoursealtering shows that occurred this year, and without much nudging, we all arrived at the same desolate mental bus stop: no, there weren’t really any that we could think of. The year in Mexican art went almost unremarked.

This doesn’t mean that the habitual reviews didn’t go out, that the blockbuster exhibitions went unvisited, that new platforms for art commentary weren’t launched, but perhaps that we in the art crowd had heavier things on our minds (funding issues, that’s what the things were) when we got together.

I was impressed, however, by Melanie Smith’s Farce and Artifice, a major solo show travelling from macba in Barcelona to muac in Mexico City and Museo Amparo in Puebla, and taking place in both institutions simultaneously. It showcased Smith’s production in a meandering way, the muac leg going back and forth in time: from the simulated museum-backroom installation of Irreversible/ Illegible/Unstable (2012), to the Atacama Desert in the video María Elena (2018), and back to the Amazonian jungle with the sculptures, paintings and videos of Fordlandia (2014). In both videoworks, created in Chile and Brazil respectively, Smith seductively uses rapid closeups and pans to create a feeling of disconnected and chaotic forward movement.

And although impressive, the collection of so many of her works in a single place revealed some of its blind spots. When dwelling on landscapes, plants and animals, Smith is quick to articulate an enjoyable surface-level sensuality, but when she lingers on the brown skin of bus passengers unaware that they’re being filmed, or on the bodies of fishermen and their children, the imagery tilts slightly towards the exploitative. The same can be said for the work that gives the show its title: Farce and Artifice (2006), in which a nonwhite Cuban man teaches an AngloSaxon woman Salsa moves. The woman, of course, is a stand-in for the challenges and complexities of getting around in Latin America as an outsider, a narrative that mimics Smith’s experiences as a British transplant living in Mexico, albeit for decades now, but one that seems purposefully to neglect the real emotional labour local people do to accommodate her and her ex-pat peers.

Also noteworthy was Los huecos del agua.

Arte actual de pueblos originarios (The holes in the water: current art from original peoples) at Museo Universitario del Chopo. The sprawling show intelligently pulled away from folklore and idealisation, and in doing so it joined a current of exhibitions

Tlacolulokos, Smile now, cry never, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 140 × 85 cm. Courtesy Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City

November 2019

taking place in Chile and Peru that effectively integrate the artistic languages and political discourses of these indigenous communities into contemporary art. The show’s curator, Itzel Vargas Plata, gave a platform to the different worlds, the diverse nations that exist under the unified Mexican territory, and to the importance of letting difference thrive and of refusing assimilation; and so the artists tackle the appropriation of their territories, the degradation of their natural resources and the defence of their languages among other urgent subjects. In his piece, Oaxacan

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austerity’ was just as terrible as centre-right, greed-fuelled austerity. At the end of last year, weeks after coming into power, they dealt a huge blow to artworkers by announcing a reduction of 500 million pesos (£20.5m) in state funding for culture. This was followed by attacks on fonca, the National Fund for Arts and Culture, made by official-party senator Jesusa Rodríguez, and a segment mocking artists on state-sponsored tv. In both, art and culture were painted as the hobbies of the bourgeoisie, an oft-parroted claim that of course only works to make even more invisible those in the Mexican art scene who do not come from money or power. Perhaps my personal highlight of the year was Sandra Sánchez’s article on this whole issue, ‘Pueblo es lo que falta, lo que hay que construir’ (‘A people is what’s missing, what needs to be built’), published on arts website gastv in June. In it she quotes the academic Salvador Gallardo Cabrera’s warning against the dangers of considering one culture elitist and another ‘for the people’, and how this can lead to oversimplification, the flattening and dumbing down of culture, and at worst, propaganda.

The idea of a people is a myth that we might work towards: because if it exists now, if we are – as the state is prone to fantasise – already a solid, cohesive, immutable collective, then we are, likely, fucked.

Gaby Cepeda is an independent curator and writer based in Mexico City artist Andy Medina denounces the way in which the state imposes Spanish on indigenous communities through public education.

Although there’s no official tongue in Mexico and there are 68 recognised indigenous languages in use, the government enforces their rapid disappearance with a public-school system designed for Spanish speakers only.

Titled lii qui gannalu’/ignorante (2016), the installation includes the Zapoteco words for ignorant, lii qui gannalu’, painted on a wall, a school desk directly facing the statement, one of its legs sawed off and supported by a stack of books: the Mexican Constitution, a Spanish dictionary, a Spanish–English one, a book on Mexico’s role in globalisation.

No, perhaps the most discussed issue this year was the new Mexican government, ‘la 4t’ or Fourth Transformation, as they have taken to calling themselves. This entrant leftwing government, which we had all hoped would bring respite from years of misappropriated state funds and corruption, almost immediately launched into punishing austerity, firing tens of thousands of government employees and underfunding many departments. It turned out that well-intentioned ‘republican

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top Andy Medina, lii qui gannalu’ / ignorante, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Ramiro Chavez.

Courtesy Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City above Tlacolulokos, Untitled, 2015, wooden ‘molinillos’, 35 × 89 × 6 cm. Courtesy the artists and Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City

ArtReview

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Contemporary Art Evening AUCTION NEW YORK 14 NOVEMBER

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The first exhibition I visited in 2019 – Grace Wales Bonner’s A Time for New Dreams at the Serpentine Galleries – exemplified the spirit of cross-pollination that has seen performance and dance, experimental literature, fashion and club culture staged in London’s museums and galleries over the past year. The BritishJamaican fashion designer’s presentation of shrinelike installations, sculptures, photography and video – by artists including Kapwani Kiwanga, David Hammons, Liz Johnson Artur and Eric N. Mack – explored spirituality and mysticism in black culture. Live events varied from deep-listening sessions and gong ceremonies by the meditation practitioner Laraaji to dance performances and poetry readings, with the closing weekend culminating in the presentation of Wales Bonner’s aw19 collection.

The Serpentine exhibition is symptomatic of the ways in which London’s cultural production is becoming more fluid and multihyphenate: designer-as-curator, artist-as-designer and so on. This was also pronounced in the South London Gallery’s summer exhibition dedicated to Susan Cianciolo, an artist who has wilfully evaded the distinctions between fashion, art and craft throughout her career.

Cianciolo’s repurposing of her own ephemeral archive in order to create new work, often intricate and talismanic assemblages of clothing, textiles, notes and sketches, signifies a resurgence of interest in lo-fi or emphatically handmade works. Fabric and material objects, particularly when framed within the context of the body, become a means to explore identity, selfhood and desire. Tenant of Culture (aka Hendrickje Schimmel), whose sculptures Eclogues (an apology for actors) (2019) were shown at Nicoletti Contemporary in the autumn, also utilises found and discarded materials in her work. Bulky plaster busts were dressed in bonnets, ruffs and blouses in the style of

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London

Everywhere she looks, Philomena Epps finds a desire to disrupt

top Kathy Acker in conversation with Angela McRobbie at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987. © ica, London above Laraaji, Transformation, 2019, (installation view of Grace Wales Bonner: A Time for New Dreams, Serpentine Galleries, London). © 2019 readsreads.info

ArtReview

milkmaids. Made from recycled garments and accessories, they were adorned with ribbons, loose threads, deconstructed wig pieces and tendrils of human hair. Made in response to the current nostalgia for a pastoral idyll in contemporary fashion, Schimmel’s exhibition explored the hypocrisy latent in the classes calling for a ‘return to a nature’ being those who also control the means of production.

The relationship between experimental art and literature was explored in the presentation of Antonin Artaud’s notebooks and drawings – Cahiers de Rodez et d’Ivry 1945–1948 – at Cabinet Gallery in the spring, and in the summer at the ica’s I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker.

The latter focused on Acker’s legacy, situating archival material alongside work by Jamie Crewe, Penny Goring, vns Matrix, Nancy Spero and others, in addition to programming lectures, panel discussions, theatrical productions, reading groups and film screenings.

Rather than positioning Acker as a one-sizefits-all forerunner, this sprawling exhibition showed how the cultural space can become a meeting point for the different economies of art, performance and publishing. That a public programme should be integrated into a show’s curatorial framework had already been set forth

by Beatrice Gibson’s exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, which opened in late January. Alongside two interconnected films, Gibson’s ‘expanded cinema’ led to the development of a live programme in collaboration with poets Eileen Myles and caconrad, encompassing readings, writing workshops and somatic rituals.

The title of Gibson’s show, Crone Music, was taken from the 1990 album by Pauline Oliveros. The composer’s ability to work across the realms of electronic music and art was summoned when watching Pan Daijing’s play Tissues (2019), which premiered at Tate Modern in the autumn.

Tissues was performed in the Tanks by three opera singers and ten performers and set to a dronelike industrial soundscape that oscillated cinematically between haunting melancholy and rousing, cathartic noise. Earlier in the year, Anne Imhof’s durational four-hour work Sex had ricocheted through that same subterranean space, blending choreography, tableau vivant and music in her fashionable (albeit divisive) version of Tanztheater, where the temporality, ebbing and flowing, echoed the circadian rhythm of a nightclub.

The pleasure and politics of club culture was another leitmotif this year, with the Barbican’s autumn show considering the artistic role of cabaret and clubs, and Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) gracing the halls of Tate Britain, 20 years after its original release. Both Kiss My Genders at the Hayward Gallery – a largescale survey exhibition, with over 100 works made by 30 international artists who identify across the gender spectrum – and Louise O’Kelly’s programming of draf’s annual Evening of Performances at Ministry of Sound considered the importance of nightlife as a radical and uncensored space,

top Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, The Scarcity of Liberty #2, 2016 (as seen in Queer Spaces: London, 1980s – Today, Whitechapel Gallery).

Courtesy the artists and Arcadia Missa, London

alluding to the troubling closure of numerous venues in the city. The closure of lgbtq+ venues was addressed by The Whitechapel Gallery’s Queer Spaces: London, 1980s – Today, which opened in April. The research-led archival presentation also avoided any vain attempt to translate the hedonistic nightclub experience into an environment as selfconscious as the gallery.

As a part of a wider institutional drive to revise the art historical canon, a number of previously underrepresented artists received their first or long overdue museum shows in the capital: Frank Bowling and Dorothea Tanning at Tate; Faith Ringgold and Luchita Hurtado at the Serpentine; Lee Krasner at the Barbican; the Chicago Imagists at Goldsmiths cca; Helene Schjerfbeck at the Royal Academy, to name a few. The appetite for figurative representation has also been sustained, with female painters interrogating and subverting the history of the medium. These range from Lisa Brice’s smoking nudes at Stephen Friedman Gallery in the autumn, to the work of Tschabalala Self, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, brought together

by Isaac Julien in his group show of ‘aesthetic reparations’ at Victoria Miro. At an unstable time in London, the impulse to disrupt feels like the only constant.

above Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Remain, Thriving, 2018 (as seen in Rock My Soul at Victoria Miro). Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London, and David Zwirner, New York

Philomena Epps is a writer and art historian based in London

November 2019

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This year, three works by an artist who has been dead for almost 50 years made all the headlines in São Paulo. For weeks on end, under sun and rain, in the shadow of the masp’s massive concrete underbelly, crowds queued for hours to see an exhibition of Tarsila do Amaral. These scenes on Paulista, the picture-postcard avenue that is home to São Paulo’s modern-art museum, seemed a nostalgic rerun of times before selfie culture and political chaos dominated life in this country – a recollection to when avid masses waited to see exhibitions of work by visiting superstars Claude Monet, Salvador Dalí or Pablo Picasso. But this time the star of the hour is a woman and a local, an artist Brazilians know from schoolbooks but only recently seem to have embraced as a native icon.

The Tarsila retrospective held at Lina Bo Bardi’s big box of glass and concrete had the sweet air of a homecoming. Its timing, however, couldn’t be odder. Her lush idea of modernity, a quintessential version of a tropical avant-garde – Parisian cubism softened and twisted by the blazing sun – comes at the darkest time for the arts in a nation rocked by political infighting, hateful rhetoric and reckless attempts at rewriting history. The sad spectacle of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, who has made censorship and an escalating war on culture a pillar of his government, lurks in the background as museums try to survive deep cuts to funding and a toxic public atmosphere. The struggle is such that almost all exhibitions, even the tamest of survey shows, come off as acts of resistance.

But this was far from anodyne. Tarsila’s works had come from a more modest retrospective at moma, while the artist, who died in 1973, has become something of a global artworld darling, her paintings coveted by museums internationally. masp took a bold step in its hang: three works faced the public as they stepped into the galleries – two selfportraits and A Negra (1923), one of the artist’s most revered and at the same time most controversial paintings. This depiction of a former slave, most likely a milkmaid and nanny at her family’s coffee plantation in the countryside outside São Paulo, shows the woman as a feral beast with exaggerated features – lips that are a garish protrusion from the face, a low hanging

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São Paulo

Brazil needs new heroes, says Silas Martí

top Tarsila Do Amaral, A Negra, 1923, oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm above Tarsila Do Amaral, Autorretrato (Manteau rouge), 1923, oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm both Courtesy Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

ArtReview

breast that droops over her arm like a strange, emaciated fruit, and a bald head that might be reminiscent of a Brancusi sculpture were it not sitting atop a mountain of nervous, almost twitching, reddish-black flesh.

In one of the paintings that flank this work, Tarsila depicts herself as a member of high society, sporting a red evening dress designed

by French couturier Paul Poiret that frames her fair neck and cleavage (Autorretrato (Manteau rouge), 1923). Her hand is held in a gesture that recalls that made by the milkmaid next to her.

In the other, her face seems to float against a white backdrop, a ghostly visage adorned with gold earrings and lipstick as red as the dress.

The ochre hue of the skin of her ‘negress’ echoes the red earth from the plantation. Tarsila seemed to be looking for her roots when she painted this in Paris, but it is a gaze driven by fetish. While the masks of African origin she observed in Picasso’s work have undeniable influence over the features of her Negra, the work, whether Tarsila wanted it or not, became the ultimate, perhaps most violent, modernist representation of Brazil there could be. The structural racism still apparent in the social relations within this country is here clad in tropical colours and modern strokes. The smooth surfaces in the painting, the supple skin and a bright leaf hanging overhead seem to be at odds with the high voltage of its undertones, making it an arresting clash between an involuntary expression of national pride and a testimony to the resignation of those who survived the barbarity of colonialism.

Nearly a century ago, Tarsila wanted to give visual contours to the mood of a nation steeped in its colonial history and hungry for a new aesthetic. This explains the twisted patriotic flourishes in much of her work, which paved the way for more official representations later on (not least Candido Portinari’s painting of heroic labourers, works which border on socialist realism). But most of those who crowded the galleries at masp are Paulistas like Tarsila, unconvinced until now that their own culture was worthy of the museum. It seems the attack on the arts by this government has ignited a search for forgotten icons, a different type of national pride than Bolsonaro’s nationalism, an attempt at preserving what hasn’t been entirely lost – yet.

Silas Martí is a writer and editor based in São Paulo

VALIE EXPORT, EINKREISUNG (DETAIL), 1976 BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPH, 79 x 130 CM © VALIE EXPORT

THE 1980 VENICE BIENNALE WORKS

VALIE EXPORT

LONDON DECEMBER 2019 – JANUARY 2020

During November, Dublin’s most topically on-the-nose exhibition is a display of cheese made from poisonous domestic mould.

Stinking up the city’s lab Gallery – a publicly funded space specialising in breakthrough shows by young artists – these deviant artisanal delicacies are the work of Irish conceptual trickster and recent Goldsmiths ma graduate Avril Corroon. For the past year, Corroon has been assiduously scraping mould samples from the walls and ceilings of shabby rented flats and grimy workplaces in both London and Dublin, compiling a rich collection of fungal spores that are then used as the active bacterial agents in a range of painstakingly produced, but dangerously inedible, cheese varieties.

Included in the list of ingredients for each neatly completed wheel of toxic fromage

Dublin

Declan Long sees art tested anew as the capital booms

Avril Corroon, Spoiled Spores, 2019, six cheese wheels in chiller fridge.

Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

(titled, collectively, Spoiled Spores, 2019) is the ridiculous rental cost or shitty salary associated with whichever dingy environment Corroon used as her mould-mine. Her pitch is cookery plus critique, Hans Haacke does The Great British Bake Off. Tainting these outwardly appealing craft products – speciality cheese being, maybe, the defining consumer emblem of pleasedwith-itself, middle-class good taste – are noxious traces of overpriced big-city living and unhealthy, low-income labouring. As a ripe take on millennial discontents – the struggle, simply, to access adequate means, to source decent accommodation – Corroon’s exhibition is, thus, uniquely pungent.

Corroon’s subversive cheese-production began in London, but it has further matured back home in Dublin – where, right now, the problem of finding a home is especially acute.

The postcrash recovery has led, once again, to crazy property prices, rocketing rents. Smallscale landlords privilege Airbnb weekenders over longer-term tenants. Largescale developers maximise profits by building highdensity student housing, dodging the planning constraints and rent controls associated with urgently needed, socially integrated residential schemes. Other property investors – as if in some strange, unwritten J.G. Ballard story – seem committed to constructing an entire city of hotels: selling visions of vibrant urban areas, now emptied out of inconvenient local communities. Every day there are more and more places to stay in Dublin, but fewer and fewer places to live. (It remains a dire irony that the leading website for hopeful househunting in Ireland is ‘daft.ie’.)

If the primary issue is a severe housing shortage, a secondary concern is an increasing lack of cultural accommodation. As in London, a boom for developers can mean bust for independent venues – and goodbye to alternative art spaces. Some, such as Pallas Projects – a valiant, artist-run studio-and-gallery initiative – have soldiered on, holding their ground in the face of aggressive gentrification, or touristification, in their immediate neighbourhood. (Dubliner Jonathan Mayhew’s recent Pallas exhibition, a series of shy sculptural tributes to artistheroes such as Scott Walker and Felix GonzalezTorres, proposed artful delicacy as a defence against crude worldly pressures, aspiring, as an accompanying statement declared, to ‘escape this reality by offering a more poetic one in its place’.) Several stalwart commercial galleries have also maintained or enhanced their position over recent years: the Kerlin’s classy minimalist haven remains the city’s most perfect bespoke art space; Mother’s Tankstation’s Dublin base is modest, but their reputational rise has been meteoric;

Kevin Kavanagh’s city-centre gallery continues to be a locally trusted resource for new directions in painting; Green on Red’s sizeable docklands showroom hosts a strong, eclectic mix of exhibitions; Oonagh Young’s compact shopfront unit stages – every now and then, whenever the need arises – dependably highquality, low-key projects.

Notably, though, the latest gallery to establish itself in Dublin has, perhaps wisely, escaped the city’s space race. Berlin Opticians, a new venture coordinated by Polish-born curator Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll, begins life with no fixed abode and with only one foot in the real world – its strategic shtick being a nonprecious attitude to online presentation.

Wieckiewicz-Carroll has assembled an impressive roster of ten youngish artists, working in a range of characterful styles – from Sven Sandberg’s exquisitely spooky figurative paintings to Barbara Knezevic’s bio-technospiritual installations. The gallery plan, so far, has been to showcase artists in individual six-week displays, the majority of which are staged for documentation in actual architectural environments, but only made available for online viewing via the gallery website; from time to time, there will be complementary forays into customary modes of real-life exhibition-making, each one occurring in a different location. Social-media circulation is, therefore, a priority – outweighing the routine need for closeup artistic encounters.

Those of us with memories of the twentieth century will recognise, of course, clear downsides to this approach: the elegance or awkwardness of art’s 3d actuality, and our embodied excitement or discomfort in its unpredictable company, become secondary

considerations; two-dimensional presence, and promotional allure, trump experiential complexity. But in a city, and a time, when securing long-term space for art – on a startup, restricted-means basis – has become a nearimpossible commitment, who’s to say that this virtual, nomadic model won’t guarantee a more effective boost for the artists involved?

In titling her elusive gallery, WieckiewiczCarroll borrowed the brand name of a family business that had quietly thrived in the centre of Dublin for decades but that, quite recently, ceased trading. As such, the name ‘Berlin Opticians’ – an identity that implicitly proclaims Euro-visual affiliation for Ireland’s artists in the current Brexistentialist era – is employed as a way of honouring endurance and longevity in a specific setting. Yet as she starts out, Wieckiewicz-Carroll is also testing newly nimble styles of sticking around. Dublin is, at present, the Eurozone’s most expensive city – beating Paris and Milan to that dubious accolade – and in this financially oppressive context, Berlin Opticians has been set up without the need to settle down: avoiding rental burdens, repeatedly shifting location, favouring virtual distribution. For now, at least, with options ever more limited, restlessness means resistance.

Declan Long is an art critic and lecturer based in Dublin

top Barbara Knezevic, Tools for wellbeing, ‘Scapes: Rose Quartz’, 2018, mixed media, dimensions variable above Sven Sandberg, The Venetian, 2018, oil on linen, 51 × 40 cm both Photo: Lee Welch. Courtesy the artist and Berlin Opticians Gallery, Dublin

November 2019

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At Tate Britain, a friend and I drifted around Mike Nelson’s installation of rusted hulks and greasy, stilled machines. The show reeked of pathos – the weight of postwar British history borne by industrial objects reclaimed from salvage yards, the evisceration of factories and the jobs they supported – but I couldn’t see past the cobwebs: silvery threads spun from pillar to spindle and quivering in the lathes. Had Nelson collaborated with an uncredited team of arachnids, I wondered, working on spidery overtime to floss the exhibition with Halloweenish decay? I texted an acquaintance who had worked for Nelson.

‘Yeah I trained them,’ he texted back. ‘We had an away day in Slough.’

Our laughter was lost to the room. The hall was bustling, yet the Tate’s Duveen Galleries have the absorptive quiet of a church, noises rising up into that bright, arched space and merging, dissipating, finessing into reverb. I thought of the Sistine Chapel – as one does – and the security guard who, in his exasperated attempts to quell the chatter of hundreds of jampacked tourists, yells Silencio! every couple of minutes, defying his own injunction at the moment he makes it. At the Tate, the contrast between restless crowd and mute works of art served a more mournful function. The thrum of Satanic mills decried in William Blake’s Jerusalem (1804) – a first edition of Britain’s ‘alternative’ national anthem is included in an exhibition of the artist-poet just a few rooms away – drowned out by the shuffling footfall of museum-goers. Over the exit hung another reclaimed piece of British heritage: a painted plaque on which the phrase ‘Long May They Reign’ was framed by Union Jacks with a threadbare, back-of-theattic look. A further reminder of how invocations of Britain’s glorified past draw attention to its current decline.

The sun was out, so we wandered north along the river towards the centre of London. Nearing the Palace of Westminster, we heard shouting.

There were Union Jacks here, too, draped over shoulders and fluttering from plastic poles. At the head of the march, a skinhead in a bomber jacket, tight jeans and Dr Martens boots was waving a Cross of St George with ‘England’ emblazoned across it. The protest concerned the country’s future. So why was he cosplaying a neofascist from the 1980s?

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Sounding Off

Patrick Langley gets spooked out

Mike Nelson, The Asset Strippers (installation view, Tate Britain, 2019).

Photo: Matt Greenwood

ArtReview

Another protester held a megaphone to his iPhone, through which he began playing a recording of God Save the Queen. The combination of tinny speaker and crackly amplification lent England’s plodding anthem the woozy feel of a knackered vinyl on a hand-cranked gramophone.

That line from Nelson’s installation returned as a distorted echo from the recent past as the crowd sang along to the degraded, grainy recording.

It became momentarily difficult to place myself in time. For an instant – brief but sincere – I wondered what century I was in. The anthem didn’t seem a nostalgic ode to Britain’s imperial past or a patriotic celebration of the present.

It sounded like the machinery of history had short-circuited and this man’s megaphone was picking up a radio broadcast from a different era: London during the Blitz, perhaps, with air raid sirens blaring through antique speakers and propaganda on the staticky wireless.

It sounded like a musical seance.

That I found this all so unnerving is, on one level, a reflection of my political leanings. But it also says something about how powerfully sound can evoke the sensation that time is out of joint. The ghoulish effect of the past breaking into the present is described by hauntology and often associated with music – I became obsessed with the theory by listening to the music of The Caretaker and reading Mark Fisher’s blogs about Burial – but it applies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1609) as to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

In the more recent of those two ghost stories, Jack Nicholson drifts into a grand hotel hall resplendent with dashing flappers and men in black tie. A dreamy 1930s foxtrot sways in the background, but it sounds far-off, an echo of an echo – sounds finessing into reverb, like our laughter in the Tate. What’s unsettling about the crowd isn’t that they are ghosts, suspended in a spectral realm between death and life, now and then: it’s that Jack will become one too. The past – an idealised version of it, at least – proves so seductive to him that he is driven insane by his desire to stay there.

If Nelson’s installation harnessed the dead quiet of defunct machines to serve as a melancholic reminder of what had been lost, then the marchers used sound to summon an undead past. If only for a song, they succeeded.

Patrick Langley is a critic and novelist based in London

ORANIENBURGER STRASSE 18

10178 BERLIN

HANNE DARBOVEN ERDKUNDE UND (SÜD-) KOREANISCHER KALENDER SEPTEMBER – DECEMBER 2019

RYAN TRECARTIN RE’SEARCH WAIT’S SEPTEMBER – DECEMBER 2019

7A GRAFTON STREET

LONDON, W1S 4EJ

KARA WALKER

FROM BLACK AND WHITE TO LIVING COLOR: THE COLLECTED MOTION PICTURES AND ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTS OF KARA E. WALKER, ARTIST. OCTOBER – DECEMBER 2019

PETER FISCHLI DAVID WEISS SHOULD I PAINT A PIRATE SHIP ON MY CAR WITH AN ARMED FIGURE ON IT HOLDING A DECAPITATED HEAD BY THE HAIR? JANUARY – MARCH 2020

5900 WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

LOS ANGELES, CA 90036

GILBERT & GEORGE THE PARADISICAL PICTURES NOVEMBER – JANUARY 2020

WWW.SPRUETHMAGERS.COM

Jonas Lipps, 2018 (installation view, Halle f端r Kunst, L端neburg).

Courtesy the artist; Halle f端r Kunst, L端neburg; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

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ArtReview

The Interview

by Ross Simonini

Jonas Lipps

“Some of it will stay in my head, under the radar, connecting to other stuff coming by, doing its work, and years later I will suddenly have understood it”

A Jonas Lipps exhibition is a modest and casual affair: small unframed, untitled works on paper, pinned directly to the wall in a nice, even row. It’s a nonprecious presentation that would equally suit the local kindergarten.

Beyond this superficial description, however, the forty-year-old Freiburg-born artist’s works vary in almost every way: medium, technique, content, attitude. Some are painted on ragged found surfaces – an old pizza box, a crushed Styrofoam cup – while others are crisp and pristine, fashioned with meticulous detail.

Many suggest expressionist cartoons or watercolour illustrations of familiar scenes (eg a queue at a cinema), but some push against these tendencies with chunky collage, hardedged formalism and, occasionally, full-blown abstraction. All in all, it’s an exploded compilation of the last hundred years of painting.

The work resists generalisation, and so asks the viewer to step closer and witness the gentle touch of Lipps’s brush, or the quiet humour percolating behind the images.

The refusal of a cohesive style also implies

November 2019

an artist uninterested in forming a consistent persona. Likewise, Lipps has given few interviews, and photos of him are hard to find.

For the following exchange, I corresponded with the artist over email. It was late summer, a time of vacation for Lipps and his family.

As we wrote, he travelled from his home in Berlin to Burgundy to Athens to the island of Hydra. Like his paintings, his answers were brief and unexpected, filled with an abundance of personality but countered by a strict refusal of indulgence.

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The most superior artform ross simonini Why are you in Burgundy right now? jonas lipps Summer escape. I visited the Gallican site of Bibracte, wanted to look at the Romanesque sculptures of Gislebertus but took bike rides instead. Every evening, at 8.50pm prompt, a dormouse came out of its nesthole over the terrace door.

rs Do you often take vacations?

jl No.

rs Do you enjoy not working?

jl In the beginning it makes me fairly nervous, but after some practice it can be pleasant.

under the radar, connecting to other stuff coming by, doing its work, and years later I will suddenly have understood it.

able to title the few sculptures I have made.

They seem to be more robust against this treatment. The same applies to photographs.

rs What’s the last thing you read that had a significant effect on you?

rs Do you generally dislike titles for other people’s art?

jl I read the ‘Little Hans’ [1909] case study by Freud, for the second time. How Hans plays around with turds, horses, boxes and a crumpledup giraffe impresses me, and I like the way he talks.

rs Does reading ever directly inform your images?

jl Sometimes they are mere illustrations of text.

Fictional book covers. Or representations of biblical scenes, such as Abraham about to slay his son.

rs Does not working ever help your art?

jl No.

rs What do you read when you’re not working?

jl For example, it frames an image or puts it in its place or explains or illuminates it or christens it or claims the artist’s control over it or makes an assertion about the artist’s attitude towards it, etc. I find it more interesting, or rather it is more possible for me, to try to let an image do this to another image.

rs Do you forgo physical frames for a similar reason?

jl It amplifies the interactions between the images, at least that’s what I like to think. When I have finally decided which works will be in a show it’s usually too late to call the framer anyway.

rs In place of titles, you use dates.

What does this do to the image?

jl As a kid I got paid to recite poems by heart, but that didn’t entice me.

I seem to lack a certain sensitivity that is needed to appreciate it.

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rs What does a title do to an image?

jl Yes, of course, among other dictates, like good form and public decency.

rs Why not poetry?

jl I don’t understand it, I read it again, still all Greek to me. But some of it will stay in my head,

rs What’s a good title?

jl Wrong Thought by [American sculptor] Matt Hoyt.

rs Does this dictate how you curate the works in your shows?

jl All sorts of literature except poetry. I particularly like reading psychoanalytical theory, which often I don’t understand or forget immediately.

rs A sensitivity to language?

jl There is just too much going on in poems, too hectic for me. I don’t touch it. But I am sure it’s the most superior artform.

rs Where does painting sit in this hierarchy of artforms?

jl Top to bottom: poetry–prose– painting–film–sculpture–pantomime–conceptual art. Music has its own place.

rs What kind of relationship do you have with music?

jl It has become a quite nostalgic one.

rs What music hits your nostalgia button?

jl Sorry, nostalgic was the utterly wrong term.

I am babbling. I love music but really have nothing to say about it. Music is the best thing.

rs You said you read things you don’t understand.

What do you get out of that?

jl No, some people are good and competent titlers.

jl It’s just a half-useful ordering system. They might as well be numbered consecutively. The dates are not even real. rs So you don’t intend the dates to point back to your life?

rs Do you usually think of a narrative and then depict it? Or do the images arise more unconsciously? jl Often I start with the former and almost always I end up with the latter.

A walking contradiction rs Do you resist titling your work? Or is the work just unsuited to titles? jl Sometimes I do think up titles, the good thing is I don’t use them. They are always really pretentious, like an embarrassing hat. But I was

ArtReview

jl No I don’t.

rs The dating makes the work feel like an ongoing journal.

jl Some works are documentary. Favourite holiday adventures or a removal or crying on the toilet. Personal experience is rich material.

I would be stupid not to exploit it.

rs You work with so many different surfaces. Do you do this to encourage different kinds of pictures?

jl To be surprised and less in control.

rs Because you dislike control?

facing page Untitled, 2018, casein paint, watercolour, pencil and collage on paper, 34 × 26 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

above Untitled, 2018, casein paint, pencil and collage on paper, 48 × 101 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

November 2019

top Untitled, 2019, pencil, casein paint and collage on paper, 43 × 49 cm. Courtesy the artist; Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

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Untitled, 2018, watercolour and ink on paper, 17 Ă— 25 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin

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ArtReview

jl No, control is alright. However, to find something new you need to lose control, if you’ll pardon the calendar motto. The inclusion of chance, or, on the opposite side, sets of rules determined in advance which automatise certain sequences, or collage, or less specifically any foreign material, or overhasty spontaneity, etc – any kind of measure to discharge myself temporarily of decision-making and to implant unforeseen elements is welcome.

rs Do you push against a consistent style?

jl My views and convictions are fairly volatile.

This is reflected in a lack of style.

rs Do you often contradict yourself?

jl Yes. But isn’t absolutely everybody a walking contradiction.

rs Do you ever make yourself laugh with your work? jl At times I laugh when I look at a work of mine and the idea that I created that thing is seeming highly improbable.

[Lipps travels to Athens]

Self-righteous, smug and pimply

rs Why are you in Athens?

jl My partner is showing some magnificent paintings here.

rs How does having an artist as a partner affect you?

jl It’s good. We have something to talk about.

rs Do you work from home? jl No, my partner wants me out of the house during the day. rs What’s your studio like?

jl It’s in a boring neighbourhood and measures 30sqm. There are four work desks in it. I can hear my neighbours through the walls.

rs Are the four desks used in any kind of organisational way?

jl In theory, one is for messy stuff, one for tidy stuff, one only for watercolours and so on, but in reality all of them are cluttered.

rs Do you have any habits while you work?

jl I don’t eat much.

rs Because you forget to eat? Or because you find that eating is detrimental to the work?

jl It has interesting effects on the serotonergic system.

rs You’ve mostly made smaller works. Are you more attracted to small gestures?

jl I like art made by pupils. Like them I work horizontally, sitting at a desk, looking down.

Like in an office. Which has an effect on size. And I work out of the wrist, I don’t want the whole arm or the whole body to be palpable.

rs Because you dislike the look of full-limbed gestures?

The feeling of it?

jl I take that back. But, considering all the inadequate work I produce, if it were in big format where would I store it? The amount of paint I would need. It would be a logistical and psychological nightmare.

rs How would making work vertically affect you?

jl Watercolours drip.

rs What attracts you to work made by pupils?

jl For instance the economy of means. And the simultaneity of zealous, forward-pressing expression and imposed schoolwork. Generally, school, with its classes, teachers, grades, its architecture, blackboards, janitors, ideals, divisions and hierarchies, is good material for me.

“Generally, school, with its classes, teachers, grades, its architecture, blackboards, janitors, ideals, divisions and hierarchies, is good material for me” rs Did you enjoy school?

jl Not especially. Thinking of it as a repressive institution and therefore disliking its human chummy face, I rather wanted school to be clean and strict. But I was self-righteous, smug, pimply and much less clever than I thought.

rs Were you drawing in your school days?

jl A lot. Mannered, comiclike and not worth mentioning. I did some nice paintings though.

Most of them I gave to my parents. When they moved to another house some years later, one of the bigger paintings didn’t fit on the kitchen wall until they used a buzzsaw to make it smaller.

[Lipps travels to Hydra]

Stress headaches rs Why are you in Hydra?

jl Having a vacation.

rs What do you do in that time?

jl Loitering. rs Does making art feel like work to you?

jl In the best case it does.

rs Because work is more gratifying than play?

jl I am prone to a guilty conscience, and work is easily justifiable. Also, while making art I am a grafting grown-up, which is turning into a teenager, which is playing an adult. Which is enacting an unoccupied older person. And so on.

I think that this indiscernibility of work and play is a good definition of art. rs Would you say that most your work comes out of drawing?

jl Lately I’ve increasingly been using thicker paint and a more restricted palette, and now the line or mark is less important.

Maybe not so much in the result, but in the operation of painting. It’s less drawing than colouring in.

rs Does colouring feel childlike to you?

jl It’s an enjoyable way to spend time. Working can be a torment. Meditative activities like colouring are soothing.

rs What most frustrates you about the act of painting?

jl Producing a lot of boring and unpleasant stuff on my way to an adequate result.

rs What’s the ratio of unpleasant to adequate work?

jl 9:1.

rs Do you throw away the work you dislike?

jl Only the most unsupportable pieces.

The rest is kept on file. Some of it, left sitting in the dark for years, might grow on me.

rs How would you describe your experience of exhibiting work?

jl In the beginning I was very nervous.

I had to throw up during openings. I still get stress headaches.

rs Why do you continue to do it?

jl You mean showing my work? It’s very simple, I strive for recognition. Sometimes it also pays my bills. rs Do you ever consider not showing? jl It’s more that other people consider not showing my work. As long as I am engaging in this line of work, I will always try to publicly give account.

rs How often are you not working? jl Maybe two months a year.

November 2019

Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

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安卓藝術 Taipei MORI YU GALLERY Kyoto nca | nichido contemporary art 日動畫廊當代館 Tokyo, Taipei neugerriemschneider 纽格赫姆施耐德 Berlin NUKAGA GALLERY Tokyo, Osaka, London

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Shanghai, Taipei Perrotin 貝浩登 Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai Project Fulfill Art Space 就在藝術空間 Taipei Richard Saltoun Gallery London Sabrina Amrani 薩尼畫廊 Madrid SCAI THE BATHHOUSE 洗澡堂畫廊 Tokyo Sean Kelly New York, Taipei SHIBUNKAKU 思文閣 Kyoto, Tokyo, Fukuoka Simon Lee Gallery Simon Lee 畫廊 London, Hong Kong, New York Soka Art 索卡藝術 Taipei, Beijing, Tainan Sprüth Magers 施布特-瑪格畫廊 Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Cologne, Hong Kong Sullivan + Strumpf 沙利文施特倫普夫 Sydney, Singapore Takeda Art Co. Tokyo Tang Contemporary Art 當代唐人藝術中心 Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangkok Tina Keng Gallery 耿畫廊 Taipei, Beijing TKG+ Taipei Tokyo Gallery+BTAP 東京畫廊+BTAP Beijing Tomio Koyama Gallery 小山登美夫畫廊 Tokyo Tso Gallery 別古藏藝術空間 Taipei Waddington Custot 沃丁頓庫斯托 London WAKO WORKS OF ART Tokyo White Cube 白立方 Hong Kong Whitestone Gallery 白石畫廊 Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, Karuizawa Yavuz Gallery Singapore, Sydney Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery Osaka SOLOS 個人展藝: 182ARTSPACE Tainan | intext Art Front Gallery Tokyo | Iku Harada Artinformal Gallery Makati, Mandaluyong | JC Jacinto BASTIAN 巴斯蒂安畫廊 London, Berlin | Dan Flavin Galerie Bhak 朴榮德畫廊 Seoul | Nam June PAIK galerie frank elbaz Paris, Dallas | Sheila Hicks GALLERY SIDE 2 Tokyo | Takeo Hanazawa HdM GALLERY HdM 畫廊 Beijing, London | Christopher Orr KALOS GALLERY 真善美畫廊 Taipei | Hsu Jui-Chien MASAHIRO MAKI GALLERY 正大牧畫廊 Tokyo, Paris | Koichiro Takagi Mind Set Art Center 安卓藝術 Taipei | Marina Cruz mother’s tankstation Dublin, London | Atsushi Kaga Sies + Höke Düsseldorf | Jonathan Meese Sokyo Gallery 現代美術 艸居 Kyoto | Kimiyo Mishima STANDING PINE 立松 Nagoya | Pe Lang Wada Fine Arts | Y++ 和田美術| Y++ Tokyo | Tetsuya Ishida YIRI ARTS 伊日藝術計劃 Taipei | Hsiao Sheng-Chien Yuka Tsuruno Gallery Tokyo | Tomona Matsukawa YOUNG GALLERIES 新生畫廊計劃: albertz benda New York Double Square Gallery 双方藝廊 Taipei GALLERY VACANCY Shanghai KOSAKU KANECHIKA 金近幸作畫廊 Tokyo OVER THE INFLUENCE Hong Kong, Los Angeles Whistle 惠思 Seoul

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Gabriel De La Mora, 127,687 (127,687 eggshell fragments on wood) (detail), 2019. Eggshell, wood. 90 x 90 x 4 cm | 35 7/16 x 35 7/16 x 1 9/16 in

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1 Carlos Amorales, Orgy of Narcissus, 2019.

Courtesy the artist; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City & New York; and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen

2

3

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Charlotte Perriand on the Chaise longue basculante B 306, 1929. © adagp, Paris 2019 / achp

Carroll Dunham, Distant Hills (Broken Tree), 2007–08, mixed media on linen, 152 × 168 cm. © the artist

ArtReview

Coming Up

by Martin Herbert

Febrile abstracting; Mexican wrestling; a forward-thinking curator; Czechoslovakia’s first feminist; an architect and a badass; a spinning jenny; and the greatest living painter of trees

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 23 November – 5 April

It’s appropriate that the Of course, the meeting between art and as the initials suggest, pointing to a name other first-ever European nonart isn’t always disreputable; indeed, than her own.) In Paris, in a show marking the 1 retrospective of Carlos the aim of many artists over the past couple 20th anniversary of her death, her career will Amorales’s work is taking place in Amsterdam. be reexamined via reconstitutions of her of decades has been to eliminate any vestigial environments, an accent on the feminist slant It was there that he studied, at the Gerrit Rietveld line between art and nonart, even if that someAkademie and the Rijksakademie, and there of her work and – bringing us fortuitously times means artists making shitty fashion lines that Aguirre Morales took up what he’s called back to artistry – works of art chosen by her (or worse, Banksy). Anyway, we’re taking this his ‘stage name’, inspired by Mexican lucha libre for her living spaces. generalised dissolving as an excuse to showcase wrestlers. Borrowing and lending have been Carroll Dunham and 3 2 architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, Kunsthalle central to Amorales’s career ever since. Artists, Albert Oehlen apparently not least because Düsseldorf, wrestlers and strangers have adopted his nom each see the other as the 30 November Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, she was a badass. de guerre and a bespoke mask for fights and world’s best living painter of – 1 March Early on – she 2 October – 24 February trees. (Alex Katz could not be performance, while a digital image bank, lived between Liquid Archive (1999–2010), made with assistants reached for comment.) Their first-ever show 1903 and 1999 – the Frenchwoman collaborated using vector graphics, has constituted the basis together maybe doesn’t constitute a bout to with Le Corbusier, with whom she shared ideas for much of his production: it’s also been shared settle that, and we might not expect the artists that there was an art to living and one’s environand migrated into record covers, fashion, etc, to arrive at the opening wearing masks, laceup ment should support it. (Among other collaboas part of Amorales’s wider reflection on, and boots and spandex. But it gives the rest of us a rations with Corb, she later designed parts of staged sparring with, pop culture, neoliberalism chance to absorb, and compare, the work of two the Unité d’Habitation housing developments.) and what the artist calls ‘the globalized assembly- After going on to work with Jean Prouvé and of the more influential daubers of their generaline’. The Stedelijk show, timed to coincide tion. Oehlen has travelled from self-described becoming immersed in leftist causes and egalwith Amsterdam Art Weekend, will track back ‘bad painting’ in punky, neo-expressionist itarian design, she pivoted away from expensive through all of that via paintings, drawings, 1980s West Germany to his present course of materials towards woods and handcraft, and textiles, videos, animations and more, across near-beautiful, digitally assisted, faintly cynical went on to design everything from student 14 rooms of the museum, culminating in a new semiabstractions. Dunham, in the same era, housing to ski resorts. Among her classics work made specially for the exhibition. Whether has pursued an obliquely sexualised, cartoonish – made while she was in Le Corbusier’s studio – there’ll also be fighting – at least of the orgapath in something like the other direction, from is the lc4 chaise longue, designed to be deeply nised kind – is unconfirmable as we go to press. abstraction to biomorphic figuration populated sympathetic to the body’s contours. (Albeit,

November 2019

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by odd characters. As tree painters, they also diverge. Oehlen’s are wintry, leafless silhouettes that serve as graphic motifs within blocky and smeary abstracts, Dunham’s windblown and leafy or felled. One might take a psychological attitude to this – two lions in autumn ruminating on passing time via a useful motif – or just enjoy the spectacle of transatlantic artistic cousins who can handle paint superbly but are allergic to the self-seriousness that might come with that.

The aerial view of a practice occasioned by a midcareer retrospecLACMA, Los Angeles, tive couldn’t be more 3 November – 17 May 4 apt for Julie Mehretu, since the 35 paintings and 40 works on paper from 1996 onwards at lacma are likely to be characterised by her signature febrile abstracting of topographies of the urban landscape. The Ethiopia-born American painter’s works overlay figuration and nonrepresentation, blending maps, snippets of architecture, weather charts

and more in teeming, omnidirectional, dizzying fifty-six. The institution is paying tribute to compositions that contain multitudes but are both her and her desire to create new cultural also specific. Political consciousness – and the networks Centre for Contemporary Art, imprint of geopolitics and capitalism on places throughout Lagos, 4 November – 31 January and people – is at the heart of Mehretu’s project, Africa with which she views as a form of resistance and 5 Diaspora at embodied possibility. See her three Stadia (2004) Home, a collaboration with Paris’s kadist that paintings, which merge architectural plans of is, in turn, part of the latter’s larger project of stadiums, quotations of corporate logos and international collaborations. The nub of the flags of the world; Mogamma: A Painting in Four show, for which the eight included artists Parts (2012), which spins off from the layout and produced new works in Lagos and entered into buildings of Tahrir Square in Cairo, that public dialogue with the local art scene, is that migraspace central to the Arab Spring; or recent tion and mobility are pretty much the norm paintings that collide images from the 2017 within the African subcontinent (and have white nationalist ‘Unite the Right’ rally in been since the tenth century, beginning with the trans-Saharan gold trade). Here, some artists Charlottesville, California wildfires, Muslim bring distant narratives to the city, such as Ban protests and other evidence of our grimly Em’kal Eyongakpa’s recordings of water and fractured moment. Expect this show, then, sounds from the underreported Cameroonian to be as timely as her work itself. civil war, Chloé Quenum’s exploration of ‘the Earlier this year, Bisi Silva, the forwardtransnational journey of fruits from the market thinking curator and founder of the Centre of Lagos’ and Bady Dalloul’s unpacking of the for Contemporary Art in Lagos, died aged just

3 Albert Oehlen, Ohne Titel / Untitled, 2014, oil on Dibond, 375 × 250 cm. © the artist and vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

4 Julie Mehretu, Migration Direction Map, 1996, ink on mylar, 46 × 30 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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ArtReview

6 Em’kal Eyongakpa, Untitled 1 (naked routes), 2011, b/w photo.

Courtesy the artist and kadist collection

7 Fernand Léger, Le Mécanicien, 1920, oil on canvas, 116 × 89 cm. © vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

6 Anna Daučíková, Thirty-Three Situations (still), 2015–17, single-channel video, colour, sound, 108 min 56 sec. Courtesy the artist

history of the city’s North African and Middle Eastern communities. Adding to the sense of dialogue, the show enfolds artists’ residencies and a series of talks and colloquies.

6 On Wikipedia, Anna Daučíková is described as ‘the first Project Czechoslovak feminist Arts Centre, and queer female artist’.

Dublin, On Documenta’s website, 22 November meanwhile, Paul B. Preciado – 18 January says that one could call her that, ‘except that [her] work problematizes the terms of this seemingly simple enunciation.

Who can claim to be first? Who can act in a nation’s name? What does it mean to be feminist? Can a subject to whom female gender has been assigned at birth resist becoming female?

Who qualifies as an artist?’ Arguably addressing all of this, Daučíková’s art since the 1990s in particular constitutes a space in which she’s observed and questioned, both from inside

and out. A moving target, she’s moved from automatic paintings questioning authorship (while working as a glassblower and being what Preciado calls an ‘undercover lesbian’ in 1980s Moscow) to cofounding queer feminist journal Aspekt, to making installations, performances, textual documentation and videos that explore and confound normativity and often focus on sex and aspects of ideological control, as enforced by state surveillance to the Catholic church (eg Scene Book, 2014, an a4 pad containing 36 observational reports, a formalised piece of spying, seemingly by and on the artist herself). In Daučíková’s first show in Ireland, expect a mix of recent and older works, including Thirty-three Situations (2015), which she describes as somewhere between a police dossier, a medical history and a ‘stigmatic script of the individual situations’.

Postinternet art may have lately seemed more like a punchline than a legitimate if

November 2019

Museum Folkwang, Essen, 8 November – 15 March

evanescent art movement, but the Museum Folkwang is bringing it back. Well, sort of.

7 In The Assembled Human, a few of the better artists drawn into its latterday orbit form the endpoint of a 150-year continuum of mankind’s engagements with the mechanical, ie from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age, or whatever our current mediated hellscape is called. Naturally, expect the tone to be less than sanguine, since for all that technologies have given us they’ve also taken away – and, from the spinning jenny to ai and social media, one thing diminished in particular has been a sense of agency, freedom, individuality. In any case, the artist list here is excellent, ranging from Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger to Jon Rafman and Ed Atkins, stopping off at figures including Rebecca Horn, Maria Lassnig, Max Ernst and Tony Oursler along the way. Meanwhile, a counterposition

65

Talbot Rice, Edinburgh, might be glimpsed 2 November – 1 February New York City-wide performance festival 8 in The Extended – which this year looks back to the 100-year Mind, at Talbot Rice, whose loosely McLuhanite anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus to proposition is that the mind exists outside of put a stress on interdisciplinary practice – to be our brains, but is also inherent in our bodies spreading his wings. Among the other early and the world outside us, including the tools announcements of commissions is one by Nairy and technologies we use, and the ‘techniques Baghramian, mixing her interests in dance and we might use to orient our understanding of theatre with a focus on how the body accommoourselves’. Twelve artists articulate this broad dates itself to architecture, everyday objects and position, from Gianfranco Baruchello to Daria ‘gendered roles in domestic spaces’; a musical

by Korakrit Arunanondchai based on Ghost Martin, Angelo Plessas to Magali Reus; we can Cinema, a collective postwar ritual in Vietnam expect everything from shadow puppetry of involving outdoor screenings that serve as a extinct animals, to robots that learn through conduit between the earthly and spirit worlds contact, to excursuses on ‘the impact of electro(we’re looking forward to seeing how that plays magnetic waves on our Various venues, out); and another musical by Samson Young thoughts and cultures’.

New York, that looks set to mash up Chinese folk myth, The aforementioned 1–24 November comic books, Balanchine and Stravinsky. Really.

Atkins is branching out into 9 theatre as part of Performa 19, which makes Al Held 10 sense given the wordiness of his previous video was a boss of White Cube, Hong Kong, 22 November – 4 January work (and his writerly tendencies generally). hard-edge He’s not the only artist in the long-running painting, his

work moving from seriocomic geometry in the 1960s – Red Gull, from 1964, looks like both what its title partly describes – a red gull moving through a blue sky with a yellow sun behind it – and a Pop-flavoured closeup of a superhero’s costume. b/w v from 1967–68 predates Michael Craig-Martin with its thick black outlines of a tumble of stacked boxes. Held broke away from Greenbergian formalism and obsessive flatness – he was fascinated by Renaissance volumetrics – and his later works up to his death in 2005 feel at once like serious, intricately composed, brightly coloured systems of interlocking forms, artists’ impressions of fairground rides and high-end sci-fi book covers. Either way, they’re a lot of fun to look at; if you’re in Hong Kong, Modern Maverick begs for a detour. The fact that this writer recently made a lame ‘Al Held broke loose’ joke on social media shouldn’t keep you from taking the American artist seriously, though how you should approach its author is another matter entirely.

8 Nikolaus Gansterer, untertagüberbau, 2017, three-channel hd video installation, stereo soundtrack. Courtesy the artist; Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch, Brussels; and Galerie Crone, Berlin & Vienna

9 Kia LaBeija, Untitled, Bauhaus, 2019. Courtesy the artist

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9 Yu Cheng-Ta, Fameme, 2019. Photo: Yuping Chang.

Courtesy Performa, New York

10 Al Held, Red Gull, 1964, acrylic on canvas, 244 × 183 cm. © The Al Held Foundaton. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

10 Al Held, b/w v, 1967–68, acrylic on canvas, 290 × 290 cm. © The Al Held Foundaton. Courtesy White Cube, London & Hong Kong

November 2019

67

miart

17 – 19 april 2020 preview 16 april

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Photograph taken at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)

Participating Galleries Galleries # 303 Gallery 47 Canal A A Gentil Carioca Miguel Abreu Acquavella Altman Siegel Applicat-Prazan Alfonso Artiaco B Guido W. Baudach elba benítez Ruth Benzacar Bergamin & Gomide Berggruen Fondation Beyeler Blum & Poe Peter Blum Boers-Li Marianne Boesky Tanya Bonakdar Bortolami Luciana Brito Gavin Brown Buchholz C Canada Cardi Casa Triângulo David Castillo Ceysson & Bénétière Cheim & Read Clearing James Cohan Sadie Coles HQ Continua Paula Cooper Corbett vs. Dempsey Pilar Corrias Chantal Crousel D DAN DC Moore Massimo De Carlo Di Donna

E Andrew Edlin frank elbaz Essex Street F Konrad Fischer Foksal Fortes D‘Aloia & Gabriel Peter Freeman Stephen Friedman G Gaga Gagosian Galerie 1900-2000 Gladstone Gmurzynska Elvira González Goodman Gallery Marian Goodman Bärbel Grässlin Richard Gray Garth Greenan Greene Naftali Karsten Greve Cristina Guerra Kavi Gupta H Hammer Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Max Hetzler High Art Hirschl & Adler Rhona Hoffman Edwynn Houk Xavier Hufkens hunt kastner I Ingleby Taka Ishii J Alison Jacques rodolphe janssen Catriona Jeffries Annely Juda K Kalfayan Casey Kaplan

Karma Kasmin kaufmann repetto Kayne Griffin Corcoran Sean Kelly Kerlin Anton Kern Kewenig Peter Kilchmann Tina Kim Kohn David Kordansky Andrew Kreps Krinzinger Kukje kurimanzutto

N nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder Nagel Draxler Edward Tyler Nahem Helly Nahmad Francis M. Naumann Leandro Navarro neugerriemschneider Franco Noero David Nolan Nordenhake

L Labor Landau Simon Lee Lehmann Maupin Tanya Leighton Lelong Leme Lévy Gorvy Lisson Luhring Augustine

P P.P.O.W Pace Pace/MacGill Parra & Romero Franklin Parrasch Peres Projects Perrotin Petzel Plan B Gregor Podnar Eva Presenhuber Proyectos Monclova

M Magazzino Mai 36 Maisterravalbuena Jorge Mara - La Ruche Matthew Marks Marlborough Mary-Anne Martin Philip Martin Jaqueline Martins Barbara Mathes Mazzoleni Miles McEnery Greta Meert Anthony Meier Menconi + Schoelkopf Mendes Wood DM kamel mennour Metro Pictures Meyer Riegger Victoria Miro Mitchell-Innes & Nash Mnuchin Modern Art The Modern Institute mor charpentier

O Nathalie Obadia OMR

R Ratio 3 Almine Rech Regen Projects Revolver Roberts Projects Nara Roesler Tyler Rollins Thaddaeus Ropac Michael Rosenfeld Lia Rumma S Salon 94 SCAI The Bathhouse Esther Schipper Thomas Schulte Marc Selwyn Jack Shainman Sicardi Ayers Bacino Sies + Höke Sikkema Jenkins Jessica Silverman

Simões de Assis Skarstedt Fredric Snitzer Société Sperone Westwater Sprüth Magers Nils Stærk Christian Stein Stevenson Luisa Strina T Templon Thomas Tilton Tornabuoni Travesía Cuatro V Van de Weghe Van Doren Waxter Vedovi Vermelho Vielmetter W Waddington Custot Nicolai Wallner Wentrup Michael Werner White Cube Z Zeno X David Zwirner Nova Antenna Space Barro blank Carlos/Ishikawa Central Fine Chapter NY Company Anat Ebgi Thomas Erben James Fuentes Ghebaly Mariane Ibrahim Isla Flotante JTT David Lewis Josh Lilley Linn Lühn Edouard Malingue moniquemeloche Morán Morán Nanzuka

Jérôme Poggi ROH Projects Anita Schwartz Tiwani Contemporary Positions Sabrina Amrani Christian Andersen Bendana-Pinel Maria Bernheim Callicoon Commonwealth and Council Cooper Cole Document Agustina Ferreyra M+B Madragoa Magician Space Project Native Informant Marilia Razuk Edition Cristea Roberts Crown Point Gemini G.E.L. Carolina Nitsch Pace Prints Paragon Polígrafa Susan Sheehan STPI Two Palms ULAE Survey 10 Chancery Lane acb Almeida Nicelle Beauchene Tibor de Nagy espaivisor Eric Firestone Hackett Mill Hales Pippy Houldsworth Instituto de visión Mitterrand Parker Louis Stern Venus Over Manhattan waldengallery

7.10 NOV 2019 GRAND PALAIS

GALLERIES – MAIN SECTOR 127 Marrakech 1900-2000 Paris ACB Budapest AIR DE PARIS Romainville AKIO NAGASAWA Tokyo ALAIN GUTHARC Paris ALARCON CRIADO Sevilla ALINE VIDAL Paris ANITA BECKERS Frankfurtam-Main ANNE-SARAH BÉNICHOU Paris ART+TEXT Budapest ATLAS London AUGUSTA EDWARDS London BAUDOIN LEBON Paris BENDANA|PINEL Paris BENE TASCHEN Cologne BERTRAND GRIMONT Paris BINOME Paris BLINDSPOT Hong Kong BRAVERMAN Tel Aviv BRUCE SILVERSTEIN New York CAMERA OBSCURA Paris CAMERA WORK Berlin CARLIER|GEBAUER Berlin CARLOS CARVALHO Lisbon CAROLINE SMULDERS Paris CASEMORE KIRKEBY San Francisco CHARLES ISAACS New York CHRISTOPHE GUYE Zurich CIPA Beijing CLÉMENTINE DE LA FÉRONNIÈRE Paris DANIEL BLAU Munich DANZIGER New York DEL CEMBALO Rome DIE MAUER Prato DIRIMART Istanbul DIX9 – HÉLÈNE LACHARMOISE Paris DOMINIQUE FIAT Paris DU JOUR AGNÈS B. Paris EDWYNN HOUK New York ELVIRA GONZÁLEZ Madrid ENGLAND & CO London EQUINOX Vancouver ERIC DUPONT Paris ESTHER WOERDEHOFF Paris ETHERTON Tucson FAHEY/KLEIN Los Angeles FELDBUSH WIESNER RUDOLPH Berlin FIFTY ONE Antwerp FILOMENA SOARES Lisbon FLOWERS London FRAENKEL San Francisco FRANÇOISE PAVIOT Paris GAGOSIAN Paris GALERIST Istanbul GILLES PEYROULET & CIE Paris

With the patronage of the Ministry of Culture

GITTERMAN New York GOODMAN Johannesburg GRÉGORY LEROY Paris HACKELBURY London HAMILTONS London HANS P. KRAUS JR. New York HAUSER & WIRTH Zurich HENRIQUE FARIA New York HOWARD GREENBERG New York HUXLEY-PARLOUR London IBASHO Antwerp IN CAMERA Paris JACKSON Atlanta JAMES HYMAN London JEAN-KENTA GAUTHIER Paris JENKINS JOHNSON San Francisco JOHANNES FABER Vienna JUANA DE AIZPURU Madrid JULIAN SANDER Cologne KAHMANN Amsterdam KARSTEN GREVE Paris KICKEN Berlin KLEMM’S Berlin KUCKEI + KUCKEI Berlin LAURENCE MILLER New York LE RÉVERBÈRE Lyon LELONG & CO. Paris LES DOUCHES Paris LES FILLES DU CALVAIRE Paris LOOCK Berlin LOUISE ALEXANDER Los Angeles LUIS ADELANTADO Valencia LUISOTTI Santa Monica LUME Sao Paulo LUMIÈRE DES ROSES Montreuil LUNN Paris M97 Shanghai MAGNIN-A Paris MAGNUM Paris MARIANE IBRAHIM Chicago MARTIN ASBÆK Copenhagen MAUBERT Paris MELANIE RIO Nantes MEM Tokyo MICHAEL HOPPEN London NAILYA ALEXANDER New York NAP Tokyo NATHALIE OBADIA Paris NICHOLAS METIVIER Toronto NIKOLAUS RUZICSKA Salzburg NORDENHAKE Berlin ONLY PHOTOGRAPHY Berlin PACE/MACGILL New York PACI Brescia PARIS-BEIJING Paris PARROTTA Cologne PATRICIA CONDE Mexico City PERSONS PROJECTS / HELSINKI SCHOOL Berlin PETER FETTERMAN Santa Monica PHOTO & CONTEMPORARY Turin PHOTON Ljubljana POLKA Paris

PRISKA PASQUER Cologne RICHARD SALTOUN London ROBERT HERSHKOWITZ Lindfield ROBERT KOCH San Francisco ROBERT MANN New York ROBERT MORAT Berlin ROCIOSANTACRUZ Barcelona ROLF ART Buenos Aires RX Paris SAGE Paris SIES + HÖKE Dusseldorf SILK ROAD Tehran SIT DOWN Paris SOPHIE SCHEIDECKER Paris SOUS LES ETOILES New York SPRINGER Berlin STALEY-WISE New York STENE PROJECTS Stockholm STEPHEN BULGER Toronto STEPHEN DAITER Chicago STEVENSON Cape Town SUZANNE TARASIEVE Paris TAKA ISHII Tokyo THE PILL Istanbul THE THIRD GALLERY AYA Osaka THOMAS ZANDER Cologne TOBE Budapest TOLUCA Paris V1 Copenhagen VAN DER GRINTEN Cologne VINTAGE Budapest VINTAGE WORKS Chalfont VON LINTEL Los Angeles VU’ Paris XIPPAS Paris YANCEY RICHARDSON New York YOSHIAKI INOUE Osaka YOSSI MILO New York YUMIKO CHIBA Tokyo PRISMES SECTOR ANNIE GENTILS Antwerp FEDERICO LUGER Milan FISHEYE Paris GUILLAUME Paris HATJE CANTZ Berlin INDA Budapest JECZA Timisoara MARIANE IBRAHIM Chicago METRONOM Modena PURDY HICKS London SPAZIO NUOVO Rome THE RAVESTIJN Amsterdam THIERRY BIGAIGNON Paris THIS IS NO FANTASY Fitzroy XIPPAS Paris

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CURIOSA SECTOR ANCA POTERASU Bucharest BINOME Paris CIBRIÁN San Sebastian DEROUILLON Paris ESPACIO VALVERDE Madrid FISHEYE Paris FRIDMAN New York INTERVALLE Paris KORNFELD Berlin LA FOREST DIVONNE Paris MADÉ Paris OVER THE INFLUENCE Los Angeles ROLF ART Buenos Aires UN-SPACED Paris PUBLISHERS & ART BOOK DEALERS – BOOK SECTOR 5UHR30.COM Cologne ACTES SUD Arles AKIO NAGASAWA Tokyo ANDRÉ FRÈRE ÉDITIONS Marseille APERTURE New York BENRIDO Kyoto BOOKSHOP M Tokyo CASE Tokyo DAMIANI Bologna DELPIRE Paris PHOTOSYNTHÈSES Paris DEWI LEWIS Stockport ÉDITIONS BESSARD Paris ÉDITIONS XAVIER BARRAL Paris FILIGRANES Paris GOLIGA Tokyo HARTMANN Stuttgart HATJE CANTZ Berlin KAPH Beirut KEHRER Heidelberg KERBER Bielefeld KOMIYAMA Tokyo L’ARTIERE Bologna LE BEC EN L’AIR Marseille MACK London MAX STRÖM Stockholm RADIUS Sante Fe RM Barcelona RVB Paris STEIDL Gottingen TASCHEN Paris TBW Oakland TEXTUEL Paris

Index 25/09/2019 Subject to modification

organiza organised by

26 01 Feb Mar

20

Power 100

To undertake some operation 73

Introduction

It was an otherwise largely forgotten British historian who wrote the much-quoted line ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. ArtReview admits it doesn’t spend much of its time reading the works of John Acton (1st Baron Acton, 1834–1902), but it does think about power – and particularly how power shapes art and the artworld – all the time. And what is becoming increasingly clear to ArtReview is that, far from being absolute, the nature of power in that context has never been less absolute, and never more in flux, than at the current moment.

That doesn’t mean all the old bastions are crumbling or that the artworld has suddenly become a model of equality. But this has been a year in which its highest reaches – the big museums, galleries, art fairs and auction houses – have been disrupted by the noisy, lively and insistent incursions of other voices. Those institutions have been asked to provide a convincing answer to the question of who art is for – who it represents and who it speaks for – and not all have found one.This has been a year in which protesters – rising up against all manner of injustices and iniquities – came to the gates of those institutions and succeeded in wresting changes from them; a year in which the power of money – particularly the money of those who support the artworld’s biggest players – has been put under the spotlight. Some institutions are now refusing the millions they once comfortably took from rich philanthropists, while board members have resigned their positions at major museums as protesters have drawn attention to the means by which their fortunes were amassed. These unprecedented developments point to a growing sense among many who comprise art’s ever-expanding audience that the artworld – which is always telling everybody how good art is – should, at the very least, think about the sources from which its benefactors derive their wealth.

Protesting the ethics of philanthropy is, of course, only a small aspect of a wider sense that what used to be taken for granted may no longer hold.

But if anything characterises the Power 100 in 2019, it is that the exercise of power and influence has never been more uncertain and provisional.

Power still appears, in this year’s list, most concentrated in the hands of those we might expect to wield it – in the hands of the Western, mostly white (though not necessarily male) directors of the most powerful

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ArtReview

commercial galleries and public institutions. To deny as much would be refusing to address the embedded structural biases that reproduce such imbalances in other fields. But to focus solely on this would be to neglect how the debates transforming the global dialogue about art produce a dynamic situation that these institutions now feel obliged to respond to. It is due to art’s peculiar combination of exclusivity and visibility – attributable in part to digital culture’s transmission and circulation of information – that artists can assert their vision on all manner of issues, from the future of the environment, to the politics of race and gender, to the corrupting power of network culture itself. That they often do this by sidestepping the traditional gatekeepers of visibility and influence accounts for their high position on the list. When photographer Nan Goldin can exert influence by withholding her work from exhibition, or when Banksy can play the art market by setting one of his works to selfdestruct at auction (though it didn’t, quite – or did it?) as an anarchic satire of the art market’s excesses, the sense that art is provoking, creatively and disruptively, the question of its own value becomes acutely evident.

That disruptive energy is also challenging the dominant discourses in art, not just the dominant institutions, and a determination to change the narrative characterises some of the highest new entries on this year’s list. As an increasingly connected and internationalised art system comes to reflect on global inequalities of power (since globalisation hasn’t necessarily brought equalisation), the issue of redressing those imbalances has become more critical. The short name for this is ‘decolonisation’. Which is why, for example, the authors of a major report on the restitution and repatriation of artefacts from French museums feature so highly. It’s why the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is so eager to position the rehang of the world’s most powerful modern art institution as an acknowledgement that the history of art is more global and less linear than previously accounted. And why – a mere 15 years after a group of (mostly Western) artists declared that ‘the next Documenta should be curated by an artist’ – the next Documenta exhibition will be curated by artists: the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa. ArtReview

November 2019

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1

Museum Director American Last Year 13 Lowry’s Museum of Modern Art may have only just reopened on 21 October, after four months of building works, but the $450m project to refurbish and extend the 90-year-old institution’s galleries and public spaces isn’t simply about showing more of the museum’s 200,000 or so works. Instead, Lowry declares, it’s about making ‘space that allows us to rethink the experience of art in the Museum’.

As moma’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, Ann Temkin, pointed out, this isn’t ‘more room to do exactly what we did, the same way we did it’. Lowry’s goal is for a museum offering a more global representation of art’s history, and a better representation of the diversity of artists working now and across the decades. The sixty-seven-year-old director has explained that the newly expanded museum will change its displays every six to nine months; it will be a ‘work in progress’ in which the linear, often static narrative of art will become an evolving one. And while moma’s turn to a more global and plural perspective on art history might not be the first among the big international museums, no other institution can match the quality and depth of its staggering collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Meanwhile, moma’s inaugural exhibitions, featuring African-American, African and Asian artists including Pope.L, Betye Saar and Haegue Yang, bear witness to its commitment to the contemporary axis of that global view.

While moma was being overhauled, its director has been busy projecting his vision of a truly global institution. Whether it was speaking out against the current freeze on museum loans between the us and Russia at a conference in February, or extolling the virtues of art scenes in the uae, India and Korea, Lowry is an incessant networker. Brokering influence is one of Lowry’s strong suits – the presentation of paintings by the Kenyan Michael Armitage comes as the first of a series of shows curated for moma by Studio Museum Harlem’s Thelma Golden (herself tipped as a potential successor to Lowry). Another opening

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show, Sur moderno, showcases the large gift of Latin American art made by supercollector (and moma board member) Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

And while the physical moma was closed, its brand was being broadcast on yet other channels: in June moma launched its online magazine, while to mark its reopening it announced, partnering with the bbc, a 30-part podcast series on art.

To realise his vision Lowry has assiduously developed a younger generation of curatorial staff, joining key figures such as Temkin. This year saw the appointment of Briton Kate Fowle, from Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, to helm moma ps1 in Queens. Fowle is the most recent addition to a curatorial staff that includes Stuart Comer (media and performance art), Christophe Cherix (drawings and prints), Rajendra Roy (film) and Martino Stierli (architecture and design). moma’s departments, once carefully separated, are now cocurating the displays holistically.

By definition, a $450m expansion doesn’t come cheap, so it helps to have friends with deep pockets – confirming its expansion plans in February, it also announced an unprecedented $200m gift from the David Rockefeller Estate. Nevertheless, Lowry has had to deal with the increasingly controversial question of private philanthropy in the wake of the resignation of Warren Kanders from the board of the nearby Whitney Museum; as moma opened its doors for the launch party, campaigners were demanding that board member Larry Fink, ceo of financial firm Black Rock, divest from companies involved in running for-profit prisons.

Perhaps in recognition of how much moma’s recent fortunes are tied to Lowry’s leadership, the museum changed its rules to allow him to continue as director until 2025. Lowry’s tenure is already the longest in the institution’s history. Having achieved the task of turning this twentieth-century institution into one fit for the twenty-first, the question might now, as moma heads towards its centenary, be how Lowry sets the stage for his successor.

ArtReview

1 Photo: Peter Ross

Glenn D. Lowry

3 Iwan & Manuela Wirth

2

Gallerists Swiss Last Year 6

3 Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 4 Photo: Trevor Paglen

Nan Goldin Artist American Last Year 18 Goldin has in the past two years pivoted from artist – specifically, peerless photographic documenter of subcultures and loss since the 1970s – to activist. In 2017, after her own addiction to OxyContin following wrist surgery alerted her to the scale of the opioid crisis in the United States, she set up Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (p.a.i.n.). The target was, and is, the Sackler family (members of which own the company, Purdue Pharma, that produces the drug) and their philanthropic ‘artwashing’. Goldin has spearheaded demos and die-ins at Sackler-connected institutions including the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. This, in turn, has led to refusals of Sackler money by institutions including the National Portrait Gallery (after Goldin threatened to pull out of a planned solo exhibition of her work) and Tate, as well as her arrest at a protest in New York. Goldin is living proof that art, and artists, can effect change.

It’s not known what the queen thought of Michael Day Jackson’s exhibition Pathetic Fallacy at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, but it’s testament to the Wirths’ (pictured above with us-based partner Marc Payot) connections that the British monarch paid their rural gallery a visit in March. Their unique selling point is the lifestyle to which they can offer collectors access: the Fife Arms in Aberdeenshire, the couple’s first excursion into hospitality, was recently named The Sunday Times Hotel of the Year 2019. That trend continued with the opening of a gallery in St Moritz last December; a bookshop in Zürich, which doubles as hq for the gallery’s publishing arm; and the announcement of a new exhibition space with a ‘robust’ education programme and a restaurant in Menorca in 2020. To fill these spaces, the gallery continues to hoover up artists: signings including Ed Clark, Annie Leibovitz, Glenn Ligon, Mika Rottenberg, Nicolas Party and the estate of John Chamberlain upped the firepower this year.

4 Hito Steyerl Artist German Last Year 4 It’s ‘like being married to a serial killer’ was Steyerl’s assessment in April of the artworld’s ties to the Sackler family, the major arts philanthropists with links to big pharma and the United States’ opioid epidemic. The artist, speaking at the opening of her show at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, might also have been talking about her own conflicted relationship with the industry’s political and economic interests: in June, Steyerl was among those to mobilise against Serpentine Galleries ceo Yana Peel after The Guardian revealed her financial links to an Israeli cyberweapons company (Peel quit). For all that Steyerl’s work casts a steely eye on the intersection of politics, capital and media – her contribution the Venice Biennale tackled ai – she remains very much in demand. While shows at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the Art Gallery of Ontario received mixed reviews, this year confirmed Steyerl as the world’s most powerful voice of conscience.

November 2019

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SHREDDED! “BANKSY IS A

stunt when his Girl with Balloon (2006) appears to partially selfdestruct during an auction at Sotheby’s London.

With the hammer down on its sale for just over £1m, the picture slips from its mount and passes partway through a shredder hidden in its frame.

The artist, who continues to protect his anonymity despite repeated ‘unmaskings’ in the press, claims to have activated the shredder by remote control and blames a malfunction for its incomplete destruction. Speculation mounts over the coming days that Sotheby’s had colluded in the headline-grabbing prank, an allegation denied by the auction house.

This apparently anticapitalist gesture against an overblown art market nonetheless ended without anyone losing any actual

5 October The British street artist Banksy pulls off a spectacular

... nba star apologises for claiming that earth is flat ... miracle cure kills sixth patient ... thanos is not the main villain ...

October 2018

Real/World

27 October Eleven people killed in worst anti-Semitic attack in us history at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue

9 October Official figures reveal that China’s economy grew at an annual pace of 6.5 percent in the previous quarter, the lowest level of growth since the first quarter of 2009

8 October Report by un Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) warns that without drastic action before 2030, catastrophic climate change will become impossible to avoid

3 October Chinese actor Fan Bingbing reappears after three months during which she had been presumed missing. She apologises for tax evasion and announces that she will pay ¥883m to the Chinese state to avoid prosecution

2 October Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi enters the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and does not reappear. After initial denials, the Saudi government concedes that he has been murdered. Later in the month, the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York refuse Saudi funding for upcoming Middle Eastern art programmes amid international condemnation of the murder 3 October Kerry James Marshall criticises decision by city of Chicago to sell mural he created for the city’s public library as exploitative of his labour. Valued at $10–15 million, Marshall’s Knowledge and Wonder (1995) was eventually withdrawn from

fraud. Sotheby’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit was denied in June 2019

19 October Cofounder Riyas Komu steps down from his responsibilities with Kochi-Muziris Biennale after being accused of sexual assault by an anonymous post on the Instagram account @herdsceneand, which aims to expose abuses of power in the Indian artworld. An enquiry by Kochi Biennale Foundation into the allegations was dropped in March after ‘no complaint was forthcoming after pursuing the matter for several weeks’.

Komu resumes his position

a claim against the judge of historic sexual misconduct

IN TATTERS

6 October Brett Kavanaugh confirmed as President Trump’s nominee to the United States Supreme Court after conclusion of fbi investigation into

1 October Jean-Claude Arnault, the French photographer whose alleged abuse of several women led to the postponement of the 2018 Nobel prize in literature, is convicted of rape by a Swedish court. Arnault is married to the poet Katarina Frostenson, one of 18 members of the Swedish Academy; divisions over how to handle the accusations led to the deferment of the prize

REPUTATIONS

3 October Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev files lawsuit against Sotheby’s for $380m, alleging that the auction house ‘materially assisted in the largest art fraud in history’. Rybolovlev accuses Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier of vastly overcharging him in the sale of 38 artworks for $2bn, and alleges that Sotheby’s knowingly facilitated the alleged

Art/World

23 October The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, announces Diedrick Brackens as the winner of the 2018 Joyce Alexander Wein Prize, a $50,000 award supporting the achievements of AfricanAmerican artists. Previous winners include Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Lorna Simpson

18 October Simone Leigh announced as winner of 2018 Hugo Boss Prize. Leigh, who was selected from a shortlist comprising Bouchra Khalili, Teresa Margolles, Emeka Ogboh, Frances Stark and Wu Tsang, receives a stipend of $100,000 and a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York

15 October Tavares Strachan receives $100,000 Frontier Art Prize, which rewards artists with a ‘pioneering spirit’

FEB 1952

19 October News breaks that British-Dutch oil and gas company Shell has ended its 12-year corporate sponsorship of London’s National Gallery. The conclusion

8 October Activist movement Decolonize This Place stages third annual Anti-Columbus Day tour of the American Museum of Natural History in New York to protest racist stereotypes in its display and demand the removal of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside the museum

1 October Olu Oguibe’s Monument to Strangers and Refugees (2017), a 16m-tall obelisk made for Documenta 14 and installed in Kassel’s main square, is taken down. The controversial sculpture, which drew the ire of rightwing politicians, was re-erected on a quieter square in the German city in August 2019

31 October Indian President Narendra Modi unveils the world’s tallest statue in Gujarat.

Standing 183m high, the bronze Statue of Unity depicts India’s first deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

30 October Thomas Campbell, former director of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, announced as new head of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

He succeeds Max Hollein, who left to take over... the Met

28 October National Museum of Damascus reopens, six years after it closed its doors and hid most of its antiquities to protect them from looting at the height of Syria’s civil war

of the relationship is hailed as a victory for campaigners against fossil-fuel sponsorship of the arts

A.A. Ingham, Education Department, Municipal Offices, Harrogate

Prizes

SALARY: MEN £375 X £18–£30; WOMEN £338 X £15–£504.

4 October JPMorgan Chase donates $300,000 to the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit run by artist Theaster Gates in Chicago’s South Side. The funds go towards the final phase of the renovation of St Laurence School

the auction at Christie’s New York by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel

COLLECTOR CRIES WOLF

Harrogate School of Art. Assistant Teacher, Drawing and Design.

CLASSIFIEDS

money. Banksy agrees to authenticate the remains as a new work, and the collector accepts the offer, no doubt advised by Sotheby’s that the thousands of column inches devoted to the stunt meant that the ‘new work’ was likely to be more valuable than the old.

An appreciation to which this article is no doubt contributing.

The event overshadowed the altogether more conventional sale of Jenny Saville’s Propped (1992) for £9.5m, setting a new auction record for an artwork by a living female artist

ILLEGIBILITY ARTIST”

5

6 Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy

Gallerist German Last Year 1

Economist / Art Historian Senegalese / French NEW

The German who cracked the United States is expanding in the Old Continent, too. Having opened his London outpost in 2012, Zwirner is setting up in Paris this October (bringing his franchises to six: three galleries in New York, plus Hong Kong). Not one to mince words, he told the Financial Times that ‘Brexit changes the game… I would like a European gallery’. A year after his proposal that megagalleries subsidise their smaller colleagues at Art Basel was adopted, Zwirner broke that art fair’s sales record by shifting a Gerhard Richter for $20m. There was more crusading in the us, too: when Volta, the New York art fair for emerging galleries, was pushed out of its venue, Zwirner provided alternative premises. And there was even time for some art: new signees included Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Nate Lowman, Liu Ye and the estate of Paul Klee.

7

8 Thelma Golden

Yayoi Kusama

Museum Director American Last Year 8

Artist Japanese Last Year 16

Golden has devoted her career to ‘creating space’ for the expression of diverse voices, which she describes as a ‘cultural act, but also a political act’. It’s a reminder that, while strides may recently have been made towards the decolonisation of Western art institutions, this curator has been pushing for change since time immemorial (ok, the mid-1980s).

As the $122m expansion of the Studio Museum in Harlem, of which she is director, moves towards completion, she has taken its activities offsite. Its residency programme is one of the artworld’s most reliable bellwethers (The New York Times calls it a ‘who’s who of the contemporary black canon’), and Golden has also helped to train a generation of black curators whose influence is now being felt across the United States.

All of which means that Golden, who also serves on the boards of the Obama Foundation and lacma, is among the cultural gatekeepers doing the most to throw open the doors.

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When President Macron commissioned two academics to produce an advisory report on art and antiquities added to France’s national collection during the colonial era, few expected such wide-ranging consequences.

Published this year, their document proposed the unconditional restitution of any object gained through ‘theft, looting, despoilment, trickery, and forced consent’. Their conclusions might not have surprised those in the know – Savoy has form, having resigned as adviser to the Humboldt Forum over the handling of its ethnographic collection, while Sarr is editor of the Journal of African Transformation – but the scale of its impact might have. Several countries have since requested the return of artefacts, while European institutions have been forced onto the defensive. In June the pair accused the British Museum of having its ‘head in the sand’, and in October signed an open letter condemning the ‘scandalous’ situation in Germany. As debate rages over representation and ownership in the artworld, Sarr and Savoy are resetting the terms of the discussion.

Yayoi Kusama’s 2017 show at David Zwirner in New York drew some 75,000 visitors. For her latest one, which opens in November and features a new Infinity Mirrored Room, they’re expecting 100,000 people, lines around the block and – of course – one hell of a presence on Instagram. Kusama’s polka dots, pumpkins, polished metal balls and mirrors are the I-wasthere backdrops of our time, regardless of their standalone quality. In this regard, Kusama is a hugely important figure in the artworld’s transitioning and ballooning into – well, whatever it’s turning into, underwritten by social media and fomo. The guaranteed turnstile action means she’s a huge draw with museums – and she’s had her own in Tokyo since 2017 – though there’s also an undervoiced case for her art speaking to the revival of interest in psychedelic experiences. What’s unarguable is the gratifying irony that the artworld’s hottest ticket is for shows by a pumpkin-obsessed ninety-year-old woman.

ArtReview

5 Photo: Jason Schmidt. Courtesy David Zwirner 6 Photos: Antoine Tempé (Sarr) and David Ausserhofer (Savoy) 7 Photo: Julie Skarratt 8 Photo: Noriko Takasugi. © the artist. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, David Zwirner and Victoria Miro

David Zwirner

9

10

9 Photo: Hugo Glendinning 10 Photo: Jin Panji / Gudskul 11 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 12 Photo: Tyler Mitchell

Maria Balshaw

ruangrupa

Museum Director British Last Year 17

Artist Collective Indonesian NEW

In her third year as director of the Tate galleries, Balshaw avoided the foot-in-mouth moments that blighted her 2018 by redirecting attention to a varied exhibition programme across the four locations: William Blake, Frank Bowling, Olafur Eliasson, Keith Haring, Otobong Nkanga, Vincent van Gogh, Franz West… and ending the year on an upswing, Kara Walker’s well-received Turbine Hall commission. When she did speak up – as at the Verbier Art Summit – it was to argue for the art museum as ‘premised on an ethics of care, for people, different views, values and realities’, and elsewhere she could be heard hymning Tate’s ambitions as a global brand fostering the values of liberal democracy.

Meanwhile, Tate expanded its partnership with Hyundai Motors to create a new research initiative designed to make its acquisitions and display of twenty-first-century art more ‘transnational’. Such globe-straddling aims, as much as putting on a mix of crowd-pleasing and educative shows at home, seem now at the centre of Tate’s remit.

‘We were busy enough here, with or without Documenta,’ said farid rakun, one of the ten ‘core members’ of ruangrupa, shortly after the Jakartabased artist collective was announced as artistic director of the German quinquennial. The 2022 edition will mark the first time a collective has curated the exhibition, and the first time its artistic director has hailed from Asia. The group has pledged to stick to the methodologies they’ve been developing since 2000 (two years after the fall of Suharto), working as an ‘organism without a fixed structure’ and pursuing the question of ‘how to turn our approach into a practice that covers the whole planet’.

They’ve already made strides towards implementing those systems (albeit on a local level) by opening an exhibition and events venue in Jakarta and founding Gudskul, a public education space developed with two fellow collectives. In the artworld’s search for new institutional models, ruangrupa exemplifies the creative possibilities of collaboration, social engagement and exchange. Here’s hoping it catches on.

11

12 Miuccia Prada

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Collector Italian Last Year 20

Curator Swiss Last Year 7

That the Fondazione Prada in Milan is often credited with staging ‘museum standard’ exhibitions might even undersell it, and it’s this challenge to institutional power that explains its founder’s ascent of this list. The fashion supremo also operates a seamless crossover of art, celebrity and branding: artists contribute to the label’s campaigns (Cao Fei produced a short film starring C-pop star Cai Xukun for Fall 2019) and, in the case of Theaster Gates, even shape its policy (the American artist was appointed cochair of the brand’s ‘diversity council’ in February). The foundation this year hosted a retrospective of Jannis Kounellis and a photography exhibition by Trevor Paglen and ai researcher Kate Crawford that had real-world reverberations, with over 600,000 images being removed from a facial recognition database. Serious stuff, but Prada knows how to have fun, too: she debuted Prada Mode, a pop-up social club, during Art Basel Miami and Hong Kong, and restaged it at Frieze London.

‘The work of the Serpentine – and its incomparable artistic director – cannot be allowed to be undermined,’ wrote ceo Yana Peel on quitting the London institution following revelations of her links to a cyberweapons company. Peel’s resignation was swift, allowing Obrist to concentrate on what he does best: being everywhere, knowing everyone. Outside the Serpentine Galleries – including shows for Pierre Huyghe, Emma Kunz, Hito Steyerl and Faith Ringgold this past year – and keeping a hand in the Luma Foundation in Arles, Obrist is also artistic adviser to The Shed, the New York arts complex that opened in April. That institution is directed

by Alex Poots, his old chum from the Manchester International Festival, to which Obrist returned this year to cocurate an ‘exhibition of literature’ with novelist Adam Thirlwell. Not content with shaping art, Obrist also was art: the subject of 50 Times Obrist, a suite of paintings by Francesco Bonami. With this workload, Obrist really does need cloning.

November 2019

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6 November Russian billionaire art collector Dmitry Rybolovlev detained by Monaco authorities and his house searched over claims of corruption. It’s the latest saga in an ongoing dispute with art dealer Yves Bouvier and Sotheby’s, accused of fraud by Rybovlev

6 November Cannupa Hanska Luger awarded $50,000 Burke Prize for contemporary craft by the Museum of Arts and Design, New York

23 November Report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron recommends the restitution of African artefacts and artworks. Authored by the Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr and French historian Bénédicte Savoy, the report advises that any objects in French museums whose legitimate provenance cannot be proven should be permanently returned to the countries from which they came

20 November Photographer and human rights activist Shahidul Alam is released from jail in Bangladesh. Alam spent more than 100 days in jail for ‘spreading propaganda and false information against the government’ in the wake of student-led protests in Dhaka earlier in the year

Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016, and at time of going to press remains in jail

NOV 1958

Photo sent on request.

Young 6ft.

MALE MODEL OF CLASSICAL PHYSIQUE AVAILABLE.

21 November riba International Prize awarded to Children Village, a dormitory at the Canuanã school in northern Brazil. The 25,000 sqm complex was designed by Aleph Zero and Rosenbaum and is constructed from locally sourced materials

Prizes

2 November Trevor Paglen wins 2018 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize

16 November Turkish police detain 13 academics and journalists suspected of links with jailed human rights activist Osman Kavala, founder of the Anatolia Culture Association. Kavala was imprisoned after the attempted coup against President Recep

3 November The art fair conglomerate mch Group, the parent company of Art Basel, pulls out of its involvement in Art sg, the Singaporean art fair scheduled to launch in November 2019. Follows news in September that mch had sold its stake in India Art Fair

8 November Chris Dercon announced as new director of Grand Palais and Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. He starts in January 2019

9 November Daniel Bejar’s exhibition at Westchester Community College’s Fine Art Gallery closes a week early following complaints over the work Rec-elections (False Flag) (2018). Resembling the Stars and Stripes, the stars in Bejar’s flag are arranged to spell out the word ‘fake’. The early closure is intended to avoid a clash with Veterans Day on 11 November

2 November Tom Inns steps down after five years as director of Glasgow School of Art, five months after fire devastated the school’s famous Charles Rennie Mackintosh building (still being restored following a blaze in 2014). He is replaced by Irene McAra-McWilliam

LEGITIMATE SOURCES? CLASSIFIEDS

8 November A French court rules that Jeff Koons is guilty of plagiarising the work of a French advertising executive for his sculpture Fait d’Hiver (1988). The work was found to infringe the copyright of Franck

Davidovici’s 1985 campaign for the fashion brand Naf Naf. Koons, his business and the Centre Pompidou (which exhibited the work in 2014) are ordered to pay €135,000 in compensation

JUDGE: KOONS IS 100% NAF NAF

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November 2018

3 November Performance artist Sadaharu Horio, an influential member of the Gutai Art Group, which revolutionised Japanese art after the Second World War, dies

29 November Raqs Media Collective – Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta – announced as artistic director of the 2020 Yokohama Triennale

15 November David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sells for $90.3 million at Christie’s, New York, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist to be sold at auction. The record previously belonged to Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) (2000), which sold at Sotheby’s in 2013 for $58.4 million

$90.3M

A POOL

FOR

SPLASHING CASH

13

14 Banksy

Artist French Last Year 12

Artist British NEW

A visit to Huyghe’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery, which he had infested with bluebottles, was an unpleasant experience. The buzzing beasties added to the sense of claustrophobia generated by standing led screens showing layered, flicking, nightmarish images derived by running data from fmri brain scans through neural imaging networks. Yet Huyghe’s joining of the dots between man, machine and nature has never been comfortable, as the residents of Okayama are now finding. As director of that city’s second art summit, Huyghe has roped in 17 (Western) artists and collectives including Matthew Barney and Lili Reynaud-Dewar to create an exhibition as ‘living entity’ through which to ‘navigate heterogeneous things, chemical and algorithmic processes, as well as different intelligent life forms’. If this sounds natural for an artist long associated with Relational Aesthetics, it makes sense that the man who coined the term, Nicolas Bourriaud, included Huyghe’s work in the group show inaugurating the curator’s Contemporary Art Center of Montpellier.

The street artist and provocateur is on this list because he neither seeks nor needs the support of the artworld’s established critical, institutional or commercial infrastructures. While the man behind the moniker remains in the shadows, Banksy the brand is rarely out of the news, and over the course of a three-decade career has become the British artist most cherished by the public that museums are forever claiming to serve.

His headlines in the past year include shredding an artwork mid-auction (moments after its sale for £1m); opening a merchandise shop after a dispute with a greetings-card company; and producing the stab-proof vest worn by grime star Stormzy during his set at Glastonbury festival (yours for £850). His popularity is matched by his commercial clout: his 2009 painting Devolved Parliament fetched £9.9m at auction in October, and The Art Newspaper predicts Banksy will open a secondary market sales platform. Which, whatever their opinion of his work, gives the artworld’s gatekeepers something to chew over.

15

16 Wolfgang Tillmans

Fred Moten

Artist German Last Year 11

Philosopher American Last Year 10

There has recently been a rash of exhibitions looking back to Berlin’s club-capital days – not least c/o Berlin’s No Photos on the Dance Floor! – and naturally Tillmans has been a staple. But Berlin is not as edgy as it was, and it might seem that the photographer has also mellowed, swapping the dancefloor for the opera house and the boardroom, designing a set for English National Opera and becoming chair of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Yet the fire isn’t spent: the foray into politics that began with a pro-eu poster campaign during the Brexit referendum continues through his Berlin-based Between Bridges Foundation, which this year roped photographers including Rineke Dijkstra and Nick Knight into a campaign to promote voter participation in the eu elections. The artist was also busy with gallery exhibitions and a museum show in Addis Ababa; on the horizon are surveys at Wiels in Brussels next year and at moma, New York, in 2021.

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‘Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering.’ So wrote Moten and Stefano Harney in their landmark 2013 book The Undercommons, which has done much to shape the cultural discourse in the us. Indeed, Moten has become emblematic of the public intellectual whose influence extends beyond his own discipline. A professor in the department of performance studies at New York University, Moten has written significant books on the histories of jazz and poetry, and this year was to be found on symposia at Penn State (‘Racial Disposability and Cultures of Resistance’), Princeton (‘Poetics of Violence’), the European Graduate School (‘Black Thought: Physics, Poetics, Sociology’), lending support to the New Museum Union and collaborating with an ensemble formed by artists Wu Tsang and boychild. Meanwhile, the wider artworld is adopting a language of collaboration, representation and resistance that Moten helped to codify.

ArtReview

13 Photo: Ola Rindal 15 Photo: Seth Fluker 16 Photo: LaMont Hamilton

Pierre Huyghe

17

18

17 Photo: 9mouth 18 Photo: Paul Stuart for New Scientist 19 Decolonize This Place protest in front of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 14 October 2019. Photo: Ashoka Jegroo 20 Photo: Julian Salinas

Cao Fei

Eyal Weizman

Artist Chinese Last Year 41

Architect Israeli Last Year 9

At just over forty, Cao (pronounced ‘Tsow’, if you didn’t know) is the generational lodestar of Chinese art and the most explicit tracker of her country’s barrelling cultural changes. Her own art has evolved accordingly fast, from landmark incursions into Second Life to recent projects predicated on change, fragmentary memory and the hazy line between the real and the virtual, such as this year’s feature-length film Nova and associated four-years-in-the-making multimedia project hx, both of which emerged out of her move to the industrial Hongxia district of Beijing after her studio was razed. Cao has lately received some blowback for her work’s emphasis on mirroring China’s developments rather than critiquing them, but it isn’t keeping international institutions from lionising her. This year Cao became the first Chinese artist to have a solo show at Paris’s Pompidou, following on from a significant survey of her work at the recently opened Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, while next year she’s feted by the Serpentine Galleries and, on home turf, Beijing’s ucca.

Forensics is, according to Weizman, ‘one of the fundamental arts of the state, the privilege of its agencies: the police, the secret services, or the military’. It is a neat bit of subversion, then, that it is also the weapon wielded by Forensic Architecture – Weizman’s collective of researchers, architects and journalists – against those same bodies. The collective’s exhibition schedule this year included the Whitney Biennial and the Chicago Architecture Biennial: in New York, Weizman’s team investigated the use of teargas manufactured by Safariland, the ceo of which was, not coincidentally, vice chairman of the Whitney’s board (he has since stepped down). At the architecture biennial, the collective presented a work piecing together the events leading up to the death of Harith Augustus, killed by Chicago police in 2018. For a show at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in March, the group unveiled its newest division: the Centre for Contemporary Nature, conducting investigations into environmental crimes in Palestine and Colombia.

19

20

Decolonize This Place

Theaster Gates

Activist Movement American NEW

Artist American Last Year 30

‘The general population needs to think more about what the beauty of museums is built on,’ The Art Newspaper quoted one protester as saying during Decolonize This Place’s fourth annual demonstration on Columbus Day. The New York-based movement is ‘facilitated’ by mtl+ Collective, at the heart of which are Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon, and seeks to raise awareness of ‘Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification’. When it transpired that the vice chair of the Whitney’s board, Warren Kanders, was also ceo of a company that manufactured teargas used at the Mexican border, dtp led protests that generated acres of coverage, encouraged several artists to withdraw from the showpiece Whitney Biennial and led to Kanders’s resignation. It was a signature victory for a group that has become synonymous with campaigns for social justice in the artworld and their impact on institutional programmes, politics and perhaps even infrastructures.

Paris’s Palais de Toyko, where Gates exhibited in February, describes the artist’s aim as being to establish ‘compelling new models for legacy building, social transformation and making art’. This, famously, has involved a vast artist-led, socially responsive regeneration project on the South Side of Chicago, which this year staged an exhibition of works by artists Glenn Ligon, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Henry Taylor; hosted residencies for young artists and musicians of colour; and put on a public programme of activities including adult ballet. Gates had a busy exhibition schedule in his own right. In addition to Paris, shows at his wellheeled commercial galleries and turns for Prada’s ‘members’ club’ during art fairs (he is cochair of the brand’s diversity and inclusion advisory council), the artist took over the Walker in Minneapolis, filling it with what he termed ‘negrobilia’, historic objects that, wrote The Wall Street Journal, amounted to ‘part installation and part sociology research project’.

November 2019

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HE SAID

3 December

A row over ethics at the Whitney in New York escalates when the museum states that it will not remove Warren B. Kanders as vice chair of its board. The announcement comes after an open letter from staff demanding action in response to a Hyperallergic article on 27 November revealing that Kanders is ceo of a company that manufactures teargas deployed against people attempting to cross the us–Mexico border.

Responding to the letter, which stated that ‘to remain silent is to be complicit’, Kanders argues that he is ‘not the problem the authors seek to solve’. The Whitney’s director, Adam Weinberg, issued a statement to the effect that the values of the museum are ‘easy to tear down but so much more difficult to build and sustain’.

Activist group Decolonize This Place reacts by organising the first of a series of protests on 9 December, tying the controversy in to wider issues around discrimination in the

CANISTER

STORM IN A

no way in a manger ... rock stars’ plea to g8: don’t fail the global poor … snowflake kids get lesson in chilling … robbie tells fans

December 2018

CLASSIFIEDS

17 December China confirms that the award-winning photographer Lu Guang, who had disappeared after going to Xinjiang, is under arrest. It is believed that he was documenting a crackdown by the Chinese government on Muslim minorities

4 December European Court of Human Rights upholds verdict that Russia violated the human rights of Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich when jailing the three members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in 2012

FEB 1960

Hard-wearing, easy fitting, protective

for artists and craftworkers.

SMOCKS

THE FRENCH ARE REVOLTING!

12 December Tania Bruguera misses opening of KochiMuziris Biennale, where she was due to give a performance, to remain in Cuba to fight implementation of a controversial censorship decree

1 December Hundreds arrested in Paris after rioting breaks out during mass protest by the ‘gilets jaunes’. Over 400 are arrested and more than 130 injured, making it the largest outbreak of civil unrest in the French capital since 1968

5 December Italy’s Supreme Court rules in favour of an order that the Getty Museum in Los Angeles return an Ancient Greek statue. Discovered off the Adriatic coast by fishermen in 1964, the fourth-century bce bronze is known as the Victorious Youth and attributed to Lysippus.

The statue has been the subject of a decade-long legal battle; the Getty Museum has promised to vigorously defend its ownership of the artefact

4 December Glasgow-based artist Charlotte Prodger wins the 2018 Turner Prize. She is selected from a shortlist also including Forensic Architecture, Naeem Mohaiemen and Luke Willis Thompson by a jury including ArtReview’s Oliver Basciano

3 December Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector is blasted into space on a rocket from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

It is joined in orbit by Tavares Strachan’s enoch, a sculpture inspired by the first African American to be selected for the us space programme, Robert Henry Lawrence Jr

27 December National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (mmca) in South Korea opens new branch in Cheongju.

Occupying a former tobacco factory, the mmca’s fourth site will eventually host around half the museum’s holdings

20 December New York’s Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit brought against Artforum and its former publisher Knight Landesman on charges of sexual harassment. The judge finds that the case, which was brought by former employee Amanda Schmitt and nine other women, did not meet the necessary requirements 14 December The withdrawal of several works addressed at artificial intelligence from the Guangzhou Triennial sparks accusations of censorship. Works

by Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Floris Kaayk and Zach Blas with Jemima Wyman are pulled at the last minute 14 December Subodh Gupta is accused of being a ‘serial sexual harasser’. A post on the anonymous Instagram account @herdscene alleges that the Indian artist made unwanted sexual advances towards employees. Gupta denies the claims unequivocally, but steps down from his position as guest curator of the 2018 Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa so as not to ‘detract’ from the event

19 December Support grows for a petition calling on the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow to drop sponsorship from Russian property developer pik. The company has been criticised for its role in the displacement of residents from neighbourhoods under redevelopment 7 December Protest led by the Angry Asian Girls Association disrupts exhibition of Nobuyoshi Araki’s photography at c/o Berlin.

The demonstration comes after one of the photographer’s former models accused the artist of treating her ‘like an object’ and failing properly to remunerate her work.

The gallery responds by inviting people to ‘join the debate’

BLAST OFF

artworld. Kanders and the museum stick to their position, but the furore grows…

‘FUCKOFF’ AND THAT WAS THE PROBLEM

21

22 Kerry James Marshall

Activist Movement International Last Year 3

Artist American Last Year 2

While #MeToo did not dominate the news cycle in 2019 to quite the extent it had the previous year, the movement that gives a voice to victims of sexual harassment and assault continues to have a significant impact on the artworld. Patriarchy smashed? Well, no, unfortunately not. In the artworld, the movement has suffered setbacks: in September, the artist Subodh Gupta sued the Instagram handle @herdsceneand over anonymous accusations of sexual harassment, claims the artist denies; in April, Tate and the National Galleries Scotland ‘resumed contact’ with Anthony d’Offay, the veteran dealer who has also denied accusations of inappropriate behaviour towards female employees, published by We Are Not Surprised. Former Artforum staffer Amanda Schmitt’s case against that magazine and ex-publisher Knight Landesman makes slow progress through the New York courts. Yet there is no doubt that the movement has raised awareness of how influence is abused in the artworld and has contributed to a sea change in its power dynamics.

If institutional rhetoric around decolonising art history sometimes risks descending into the kind of platitude that disguises the absence of real change, the Chicago-based artist is among those putting the idea into practice. Marshall has been painting black bodies into history for nearly four decades, putting them at the centre of a pictorial tradition from which they have historically been excluded. In ‘attending to this absence of black representation in the historical narrative’, Marshall has established himself among the most influential as well as technically gifted living painters. In terms of exhibitions, it’s been a quieter year, notwithstanding a solo at David Zwirner, London, that concluded last November and the inclusion of his ‘epic comic’ Rythm Mastr (1999–ongoing) in the Carnegie International. But his influence extends beyond the museum: in November, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that a 1995 mural for the Chicago Public Library would be withdrawn from auction at Christie’s after the artist accused the city of ‘exploiting the work of artists’.

23

24 Marc Glimcher

Ai Weiwei

Gallerist American Last Year 29

Artist Chinese Last Year 5

With a recently opened eight-storey space on Manhattan’s 25th St – the newest addition to Pace’s seven-gallery global empire – Glimcher has gone all-in on the experience economy, building a space to further experiment with ticketed presentations by creative groups like teamLab and Random International. The gallerist has framed this as an extension of the experiential proposals of more traditionally Pace artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell, and the ‘multidisciplinary’ Pace Live programme.

All of this is a risk, despite the gallery continuing to invest in classicist shows like their recent Alexander Calder exhibit. But Glimcher, who once studied immunology, will hope that this appeal to the mass market immunises the family business against the vagaries of the art market.

There remain some things from which it can’t protect them: in July, the escalating trade war between the us and China was cited by Marc’s pa, Arne, as among the reasons for closing the gallery’s Beijing branch.

Ai has said and done plenty of controversial things, but telling a newspaper he was looking forward to arguing with Britons about Brexit might be the most farfetched. The formerly Berlin-based artist moved to the uk this year, citing shifting attitudes to immigration in Germany as one reason he packed his bags. That he remains so newsworthy in a year that’s been quieter than most on the exhibition front – aside from gallery shows, museum outings in just Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, Toronto and St Louis – is indicative that what happens in the studio is only half the story: more important is the celebrity voice he wields for causes dear. Ai spent the year supporting Hong Kong protesters on social media, collecting a gq Award and getting thrown out of Munich’s Haus der Kunst after voicing support for staff facing redundancy in the institution’s current ‘restructuring’. He was also the subject of Cheryl Haines’s awardwinning documentary Yours Truly (2019), ‘revealing how simple acts of kindness can change the world’.

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ArtReview

21 © Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ars), New York 22 © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 23 Photo: Kevin Sturman. Courtesy Pace Gallery 24 Photo: Gao Yuan

#MeToo

25

26

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

David Hammons

Collector Venezuelan Last Year 28

Artist American Last Year 14

25 Photo: Alex Iturralde 27 Photo: Roe Ethridge 28 Photo: Ari Marcopoulos

To be namechecked in a show inaugurating the expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York is no small thing. Then again, the collector (and moma board member) whose donations to the museum between 1997 and 2016 form this sweeping survey of Latin American art, Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction – The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift, is hardly your ordinary buyer. Her holdings, concentrating on art from Latin America, are constantly on loan, as well as increasingly being gifted directly to institutions. For example, the Reina Sofía in Madrid was given 45 works by 33 artists (all made since 1990) in March from the Phelps de Cisneros collection, a bequest that followed another donation of 202 works in January to Reína Sofia, moma and five other international museums. Hers is a name worth remembering for independent curators and scholars, too: Phelps de Cisneros is the purse behind various residencies and research fellowships, including the Independent Curators International’s annual travel grant.

Hammons dedicated a solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles – his first show in the city for over 45 years – to a pioneer of free jazz, Ornette Coleman. The artist was an acolyte of la’s jazz scene when he went to CalArts during the 1960s, and Hammons has also spent his life resisting conventions and improvising his own career trajectory.

So it is that an artist who disdains the artworld can show at a blue-chip commercial gallery (installing something akin to a homeless encampment of tents in view of Hauser & Wirth’s snazzy restaurant); how an artist whose most famous work involved selling snowballs on a New York sidewalk is now recreating in skeletal steel a warehouse that once stood on the Hudson River’s Pier 52. That permanent public artwork dedicated to community broke ground this year with one false note: Warren Kanders, the teargas manufacturer who resigned from the board of the Whitney after protests, is among its funders.

27

28 Larry Gagosian

Kara Walker

Gallerist American Last Year 22

Artist American Last Year 50

Business as usual for Gagosian: his business still turns over something like $1bn (he demurs at the figure) through 17 galleries girdling the globe and a programme ranging, in 2019, from autumn’s weirdo survey Domestic Horror on Park Avenue and a multivenue show of Richard Serra’s new work, to surveys of Australian art, a selection of rarely shown Francis Bacons and a London group show featuring a borrowed Rembrandt.

The megadealer did launch a new art-advisory firm in April (which will be ‘separate’ but also based in the gallery’s New York hq ), but compared to, say, Pace’s recent innovations, Gagosian seems in a groove established a decade ago, with marked resistance to live art or unusual models of showing or making. With gallery artists like Sterling Ruby diversifying into fashion, maybe he feels it isn’t his job; but one wonders what Gagosian would be up to if he felt competitive again.

‘Epic in scale and deep in blood’ was how Hilton Als characterised Walker’s work this year. The critic may have had an inkling of the artist’s commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – he curated a concurrent exhibition of her film work at London’s Sprüth Magers – but he was bang on the money. Founded with money from the sugar trade, inextricably linked to slavery and colonialism, the Tate provided a fitting context for Walker’s razor-sharp pastiche of the Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. Working on a grand scale, Walker created this 13-metre tall, faux-baroque and fully operational fountain as, in her own words, an ‘allegorical wonder’ in which histories of racist violence play out alongside scenes of black representation in art history. Walker’s older work continues to make a splash, and her steam-powered calliope – which plays African-American resistance songs – trundled up to the Whitney in New York this October.

November 2019

89

TO B0LSONARO

B*LL*CKS

1 January Brazil’s Ministry of Culture is dissolved by the country’s newly inaugurated president, Jair Bolsonaro. The decision is part of a raft of far-right policies, including a decree placing responsibility for ‘identification, delimitation, demarcation and registration of lands traditionally occupied by indigenous people’ with the Ministry of Agriculture instead of the agency responsible for indigenous affairs, funai. The management of public forests also goes to the agriculture ministry, which is controlled by the agribusiness lobby.

On 13 January, Rio de Janeiro’s contemporary art space Casa França-Brasil is shut down by the authorities. The event was to include a performance by collective És Uma Maluca featuring two naked women delivering a script about torture under the dictatorship. Curator Alvaro Figueiredo claims that the intervention was requested

by Wilson Witzel, the new governor of Rio and a close ally of President Bolsonaro

29 January The Florida-born, London-based artist Susan Hiller dies. Her work with installations, multiscreen videos and audioworks – notably on occult and esoteric themes – was recognised in a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2011

23 January Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who fled the Nazis for the United States in 1944 and became one of the most influential members of the New York avant-garde, dies aged 96

Deaths

SEP 1961

female models, white, slender, young

WANTED

CLASSIFIEDS

… pop star finally reveals new face tattoo … missing gospel reveals ‘amazing story’ of messiah’s childhood … mayan calendar warns

January 2019

18 January Bulawayo Biennial is postponed. Organisers of the

15 January British parliament rejects Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal by 432 votes to 202, the worst defeat in the country’s modern political history.

She nonetheless survives a noconfidence vote in her leadership the following day

Christian minority argue that the sculpture of a crucified Ronald McDonald is blasphemous

22 January us Supreme Court allows, by a 5–4 vote, a Trump administration policy that prohibits transgender persons from serving in the military

exhibition in Zimbabwe’s second city cite disruption caused by nationwide protests, and the economic unrest caused by escalating fuel prices. The brainchild of artist and curator Sithabile Mlotshwa, the biennial is rescheduled to open in October 2020 29 January Elmgreen & Dragset’s Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism in Berlin’s Tiergarten is vandalised. The public sculpture was defaced using black paint

28 January New York’s El Museo del Barrio cancels planned Alejandro Jodorowsky retrospective following an investigation into the Chilean filmmaker and artist’s apparent confession that he raped his co-star during the filming of his 1970 film El Topo

26 January Director of the British Museum sparks anger by suggesting removal of Parthenon marbles by Lord Elgin could be understood as ‘a creative act’. Hartwig Fischer makes remarks in interview with Greek newspaper Ta Nea in which he rules out restitution of sculptures to Greece

25 January The longest us government shutdown in history comes to an end after 35 days. The failure to agree on funding for the 2019 fiscal year forced nine government departments employing 800,000 people to close partially or in full, costing the economy $11 billion. The director of the Smithsonian Museums in Washington, dc claims that the shutdown cost the organisation $1 million per week

LOSING THEIR MARBLES

24 January London’s Tate and South Korea’s Hyundai announce new research initiative.

Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational aims to ‘redefine [the Tate’s] existing collection …

23 January Activist collective w.a.g.e. issues open letter urging 2019 Whitney Biennial participants to demand ‘payment for the content they provide’; staffers hope the union will help to address grievances such as low pay and long hours

16 January A little over a week prior to the scheduled opening of Art Stage Singapore, its founder announces its cancellation in an email to exhibitors. Lorenzo Rudolf apologises for the late notice, citing poor local sales and ‘unfair competition’ from a rival fair situated in the city’s Gillman Barracks art quarter

31 January Youn Bummo confirmed as new director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (mmca) in Seoul. Begins his three-year term the following day

24 January Apichatpong Weerasethakul announced as winner of £40,000 Artes Mundi 8 prize. Thai artist selected from a shortlist also including Trevor Paglen, Bouchra Khalili, Otobong Nkanga and Anna Boghiguian

and offer new perspectives on global art histories’

Open Letter (extract)

In a few months, more than 70 artists will be contracted by the Whitney Museum of American Art to supply the content for its 2019 Biennial exhibition. In the capacity of temporary workers, these artists will be permitted, and even encouraged, to publicly dissent, openly question, and politically engage with visitors through their participation.

If you are one of these artists, this invitation from w.a.g.e. is for you. We invite you to use your exceptional status as a worker who can claim both the freedom to dissent and the right to be paid to withhold your labor in solidarity with Whitney staff who cannot.

We invite you to put your exceptionality to work. […]

Unlike artists, from whom dissent is expected, dissent by museum workers is carefully managed and in the case of visitor-facing staff might easily lead to dismissal. It is in solidarity with these workers, and on behalf of their demands, that w.a.g.e. invites artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial to do two things: demand to be paid for the content they provide and withhold that content until the demands of Whitney staff are met.

Invitation to Artists Participating in THE 2019 WHITNEY BIENNIAL

ROMANCE or SHOWMANCE?

11 January Protesters storm an exhibition of Finnish artist Jani Leinonen’s McJesus (2015) at the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel. Members of Israel’s Arab

10 January Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is sworn in for a second term despite domestic unrest and criticism from the United States. His rival Juan Guaidó attempts later in the month to claim the presidency, but fails to win the support of the Venezuelan military

Real/World

29

30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Museum Director American Last Year 19

Philosopher Indian Last Year 42

Tricky year for Weinberg. At the end of 2018, the forthcoming Whitney Biennial – at the museum he’s directed since 2003 – became a flashpoint for controversy when employees demanded the removal of board member Warren B. Kanders over his involvement with teargas manufacturer Safariland. This after the 2017 biennial had been embroiled in a war of words over its inclusion of a painting accused of sensationalising racist violence. This time around, Weinberg dithered, artists quit the biennial and Kanders eventually resigned. One sensed damage-control when, in September, the institution broke ground on David Hammons’s monumental public project Day’s End and Weinberg described the installation as representing ‘our commitment to community and civic good’. Meanwhile, the Whitney continued to settle into its downtown home, with a big Warhol retrospective and an emphasis on shows for artists of colour (Pope.L, Kevin Beasley, Derek Fordjour). How much reputational damage the biennial hullabaloo has caused in the long term remains to be seen.

As calls to decolonise the artworld have grown louder, so the postcolonial thinker’s influence has increased. The only Indian winner of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy has devoted her career to the principles and practicalities of decentring power and giving voice to marginal populations, specifically those of the Global South. Nor is she shy of putting theory into practice, with a recent lecture at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow taking Rasheed Araeen’s work as a starting point for how thinkers can ‘supplement’ (a key word in Spivak’s work) explicitly activist art. Spivak might not be so regularly quoted in press releases as other contemporary philosophers with one foot in the artworld – her writing does not generally lend itself to soundbites – but there are few whose influence is so pervasive. At a time when artists are protesting, and institutions are reappraising, the narratives that have framed racist and colonialist histories of art, Spivak’s writing is there to assist them.

31

32 Michael Govan

Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi

Museum Director American Last Year 15

Curator Emirati Last Year 37

Given his current responsibilities, Govan might have been better off studying for an mba than his degree in Art History and Fine Art. For to be the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art involves a lot of fundraising and a head for figures. These are likely prefixed by dollar signs and suffixed by ‘million’: the $650m needed to complete lacma’s teardown-and-rebuild capital project; the $117.5m Govan secured from la County in April. Or they might refer to missing square metres, after it emerged that Peter Zumthor’s design will include 10 percent less area than the planned 36,000sqm. Or be attached to the deal with Budi Tek’s Yuz Museum, with which lacma will partner on a jointly owned foundation managing 90 percent of the Indonesian-Chinese entrepreneur’s collection.

Govan knows that making art accessible in California requires an unholy alliance of number crunching and celebrity: hence roping in Kanye West to donate $10m to James Turrell’s decades-awaited Roden Crater.

To head up one biennial is work, but two, well, that takes stamina.

Which, fortunately, Hoor seems to have in abundance. This year, as well as overseeing the 14th edition of the Sharjah Biennial alongside guest curators Zoe Butt, Omar Kholeif and Claire Tancons, the sheikha has had the Lahore Biennale to contend with. She was named curator of the second edition, which will take place next year. Meanwhile, her Africa Institute – founded last year to advance research into African and AfroArab history – organised its first international event, a three-day conference at Tate Modern in London discussing 1960s and 70s liberation movements (Hoor has good relations with Western institutions: she’s on the board of moma ps1 in New York and kw Institute in Berlin, as well as Ashkal Alwan in Beirut). And, as if this wasn’t enough, she took over as creative director of her late brother’s fashion label this year.

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ArtReview

29 Photo: Scott Rudd 30 Courtesy Columbia University, New York 31 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe 32 Photo: Sebastian Böettcher

Adam D. Weinberg

33

34

33 Photo: Hugo Rittson-Thomas 34 Photo: Robert Hamacher 35 Pamela Joyner seated in front of William T. Williams’s Eastern Star, 1971. Photo: Nathanael Turner

Jay Jopling

Arthur Jafa

Gallerist British Last Year 39

Artist American Last Year 87

You don’t get more British than Jopling. The Young British Artists pioneer and owner of White Cube has tended to concentrate on Blighty, eschewing the multigallery expansionism of his peers. His Hong Kong branch is dwarfed by the two London spaces, but Brexit changes everything, and this year Jopling announced a Paris gallery (while maintaining it definitely wasn’t to do with Brexit). That said, Jopling left the parochialism of the 1990s behind long ago, internationalising his roster to the point that White Cube could boast more artists at the Venice Biennale than any other dealer (a London-based curator at the helm no doubt helped): Michael Armitage, Christian Marclay, Julie Mehretu, Danh Vo and Liu Wei were in the main show, with Ibrahim Mahama and He Xiangyu representing, respectively, Ghana and China. As a survey of Dóra Maurer opened at Tate Modern in London, Jopling was on hand to announce that the Hungarian icon was now on his books. His wings continue to spread.

‘I’m for the abolition of whiteness, but oftentimes, people conflate or confuse it with being anti-white. It’s not that at all… I’m for the abolition of systematic whiteness.’ Jafa emerged as something akin to the conscience of the American artworld with his 2016 video Love is the Message, the Message is Death (shown this year in Chicago, Liverpool and Sydney, now on view in Turin), an emotionally charged seven-minute montage of found footage charting the African-American experience, soundtracked

by Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam (Jafa has directed music videos for Solange and Beyoncé Knowles). This year the artist flipped the coin: The White Album, which debuted at California’s Berkeley Art Museum before going on to score the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, was a powerful portrayal of white people as both perpetrators and victims of indoctrinated white supremacy. These videoworks’ outsize influence is apparent in the work of a new generation of artists addressing race and representation, notably Kahlil Joseph and Martine Syms.

35

36 Pamela Joyner

Haegue Yang

Collector American Last Year 36

Artist Korean Last Year 73

‘She has set her sights on nothing less than a reordering of the canon,’ sfmoma’s director Neal Benezra has said of the collector who uses her considerable wealth (made in finance) to support African-American artists. Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, a survey of the collection built with her husband Fred J. Giuffrida, has been travelling since 2016. It visited the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago in January before moving to the Baltimore Museum of Art, vastly expanded and with the new title Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art. That stop was marked by Joyner’s donation of seven works to the institution. She also chairs the Tate Americas Foundation, sits on the boards of the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Trust and, most recently, sfmoma, and hosts artists at her home in California. Guests are advised to smarten up: Joyner was this year named on Vanity Fair’s Best-Dressed List.

Yang’s near-ubiquitous presence at the world’s major institutions might get tiring if her art wasn’t so seductive. Given the job of filling the vast atrium of moma in New York for its reopening in October, she hung reflective mobiles from the ceiling and introduced performers who wheeled geometric copper sculptures around the gallery to a choreography inspired by the teaching of Armenian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. For some artists this might be enough, yet Yang also had a solo at the South London Gallery (she will return to the uk in 2020 for an exhibition at Tate St Ives), was included in numerous groups shows (including Homo Faber at the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, which emphasised the craft inherent to her practice) and kept up with her teaching responsibilities at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. All of which might help to explain the title of her installation at the Istanbul Biennial in September: Incubation and Exhaustion.

November 2019

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5 February German government sets up €1.9 million fund to research provenance of artefacts that entered museum collections during the colonial era.

A committee including Bénédicte Savoy, co-author of an influential report urging

15 February President Trump declares a ‘national emergency’ at the United States’ southern border

15 February Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returns the gilded coffin of Nedjemankh to Egypt after having learned that it was looted in 2011. The museum had purchased the coffin from

28 February Pakistan returns captured military pilot to India.

The extravagantly moustachioed

a Parisian dealer in July 2017 and only uncovered its history during an investigation. It claimed to have been a ‘victim of fraud’

French government to repatriate artefacts without proper provenance, will oversee the allocation of grants to museums

Abhinandan Varthaman became a national hero after a film was released of his sipping tea after his capture. On release, he praised his treatment by Pakistani forces and criticised the Indian press for escalating tensions. The release comes two weeks after a suicide attack against Indian police forces in Pulwama, and a retaliatory bombing campaign, had brought the countries close to war

FOREIGNERS OUT!

… not a princess during spat with tile company … is it a good idea to micro-needle at home? … william shatner debuts country songs at …

February 2019

19 February Karl Lagerfeld dies. Credited with reinventing the Chanel and Fendi brands, Lagerfeld was among the most iconic of all fashion designers

12 February Bisi Silva dies. The Nigerian curator was founder and artistic director of the Centre of Contemporary Art, Lagos and artistic director of the 10th Rencontres de Bamako in 2015

8 February Robert Ryman, the American artist often credited with bridging abstract expressionism and minimalism, dies

Deaths

22 February Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa is announced as the first Asian artistic director of Documenta. ruangrupa, whose name in

13 February Prada recruits Theaster Gates and director Ava DuVernay to lead its new ‘diversity and inclusion council’.

The Italian fashion house has recently suffered a backlash over its attitudes to race, notably when releasing a line of ‘Pradamalia’ collectible toys that resembled racist caricatures. The council will have a focus on hiring people of colour

27 February In advance of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Decolonize This Place announces plans to stage ‘Nine Weeks of Action’, a series of protests against the continued presence of Warren B. Kanders on its board. Two days earlier, it had been announced that Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz had refused his invitation to participate 16 February Ai Weiwei claims in an Instagram post that his contribution to the film Berlin, I Love You was removed from the final cut for fear that it would fall foul of the Chinese authorities and jeopardise the project’s distribution to that market 16 February Largescale demonstration at the British Museum protests the insti-

tution’s links to oil companies.

Event is timed to coincide with opening of an exhibition, sponsored by bp, featuring artefacts from modern-day Iraq would refuse a retrospective of her work at London’s National Portrait Gallery if the museum accepted a donation of £1 million from the Sackler family

$

and a half years in jail for tax evasion. The veteran gallerist was convicted of evading tax to the value of $3 million. The government’s attorney, who clearly enjoys a pun, describes Boone’s personal tax returns as ‘more a work of impressionism than realism’ and says that ‘the picture Boone painted of her expenses was, upon closer inspection, a palette of lies and misrepresentations mixed together’. Announcing the closure of her galleries, Boone describes herself as ‘the Martha Stewart of the artworld’ and pledges to treat her conviction and imprisonment as ‘a learning experience’

14 February New York dealer Mary Boone is sentenced to two

ACCOUNTING

CREATIVE

MONEY WALKS

9 February Nan Goldin, alongside the activist group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which the photographer founded to protest the opioid crisis, stage a protest at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Brandishing signs reading ‘Shame on Sackler’ and ‘Greed Kills’, the action highlights the institution’s patronage by the owners of Purdue Pharma, which manufactures the prescription opioid Oxycontin.

On 17 February, Goldin states in an interview with the Observer newspaper that she

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22 February New York’s Volta art fair is cancelled less than two weeks prior to its opening.

Joining forces with Quang Bao and collector Peter Hort, David Zwirner offers to house stranded galleries in two Chelsea spaces; Art on Paper fair takes in nine exhibitors. Hort describes the initiative as an example of ‘the art community trying to help the art community’

Bahasa Indonesian translates loosely as ‘space for art’, will also be the first artist collective to curate Documenta when the next edition opens in 2022

Art/World

FEB 1962

THE FIRST ART SHOW TO BE STAGED IN A LONDON BUTCHER’S SHOP

Sam Barrett, of 8 South Hill Park is presenting

CLASSIFIEDS

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38 Curator German Last Year 53

Art Fair Director French-American Last Year 24

At Berlin’s hkw, Franke has developed a modus operandi of sprawling shows that slide between political history, anthropology, sociology and art. Yet the German curator is not interested in academic research for its own sake, but as a means of illuminating the present and lighting a path to the future. Take his big show this year, curated with Diedrich Diederichsen, which looked back on the work of German novelist Hubert Fichte in order to, in the curators’ words, ask ‘questions of representation and restitution’ while aiming at the ‘dissolution of boundaries and canonization, and updating colonial power relations’ – a hot topic in Germany and beyond. Among the artists reversing or subverting the colonial gaze in Love and Ethnology. The Colonial Dialectic of Sensitivity were Kader Attia, Miguel Rio Branco and Lili Reynaud-Dewar. While the trend among museums has recently been to accommodate shortening attention spans and venerate accessibility, Franke’s shows both demand and reward our time.

mch, the parent company of Spiegler’s Art Basel, might be scaling back on its financial commitments to other ventures, but it remains committed to the main attraction. While mch has divested its stakes in art fairs in India and Singapore, the Art Basel brand continued to move beyond its core offerings – fairs in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami – by announcing a three-day event in partnership with Abu Dhabi. While details remain sketchy (as they did for Art Basel’s 2018 foray into Buenos Aires, in a consultancy detail it extended this year), ‘highly immersive’ installations are promised, open to the public. Spiegler was seen padding around the booths of Frieze London, shoring up gallery commitment to Art Basel Hong Kong amid the ongoing unrest. Meanwhile, this year’s Art Basel Miami will be the second of the brand’s events to roll out sliding exhibitor fees, a move pioneered last year in Basel to support the participation of smaller galleries.

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40

Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers

Stefan Kalmár Curator German Last Year 47

Gallerists German Last Year 21 Since the early days in 1980s Cologne, Sprüth and Magers have practised Deutsche Amerikanische freundschaft. Their 60-something roster divides broadly between figures like Rosemarie Trockel, Bernd & Hilla Becher and Andreas Gursky, and transatlantic heavy-hitters such as Jenny Holzer, Ed Ruscha and Cindy Sherman, while also finding room for recent comets such as Ryan Trecartin and Analia Saban. (Oh, and Kraftwerk.) The gallery hasn’t made a major move since expanding to Los Angeles in 2016 and revamping its London branch in 2017, but it has continued to put up admirable shows in those and in Berlin, from Kara Walker to Reinhard Mucha. While some galleries become unrecognisable boutiques over their lifespans, Sprüth Magers retains a steady, serious, curatorial vibe.

Whether that’ll work forever is another question, especially as its rivals turn themselves into event-friendly funhouses, but it’s working for now.

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His appointment as cocurator of the roving European biennial Manifesta took him to Marseille this year (it opens in 2020), but Kalmár’s Institute of Contemporary Arts continues to set the conversation in London. The recent Kathy Acker exhibition, in which the writer and feminist icon’s own work was put into dialogue with contemporary artists, is a case in point.

It might have split the critics – ArtReview’s writer challenged its ‘hagiography’, The Guardian thought it ‘wild and wonderful’ – but it certainly got people talking. Kalmár has also pursued the ica’s historic focus on integrating art and life by taking the postshow wind-down to another level: in March Rirkrit Tiravanija installed a permanent sake bar. But it’s not all about kicking back. ‘We are in a time of crisis,’ Kalmár explained in reference to Brexit and the rise of populism. When, in September, Wolfgang Tillmans was announced as chair of the board, Kalmár stated that ‘these are times for artists to lead’.

ArtReview

38 Courtesy Art Basel 39 Photo: Claudia Lucia 40 Photo: Calla Henkel

Marc Spiegler

37 Photo: Silke Briel / hkw

Anselm Franke

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41 Photos: Philippe Migeat (Blistène) and jc Planchet (Macel) 42 © Photo: Michael Goodman 43 Photo: Inez and Vinoodh 44 Photo: Scott Rudd. Courtesy New Museum, New York

Bernard Blistène & Christine Macel

Marian Goodman

Museum Director/Curator French Reentry (18 in 2016)/Last Year 33

Since 1977, when, after an early foray into multiples, she opened her New York gallery with a show by Marcel Broodthaers, Goodman has dedicated her considerable energies to promoting exchange between the American and European artworlds. She’s made good on that for four decades since, opening further spaces in Paris in 1995, London in 2014 and yet another project space/bookshop in Paris in 2016. Her rhythms are relatively slow, steady, circumspect; she’s not seeking a foothold in Asia, she’s developing the dream lineup she already has, from Gerhard Richter to Pierre Huyghe, Steve McQueen (subject of a major Tate retrospective next year) to Tacita Dean. In 2019 her galleries bodied forth shows by William Kentridge, John Baldessari, Annette Messager and more, while her most noted London schedule might have been Danh Vo’s ambitious wood workshop using, of course, historically significant wood (from the McNamara family timber company). His gallerist, too, remains a beacon for considered creativity in the present tense.

Gallerist American Last Year 27

Centre Pompidou, of which Blistène and Macel are director and chief curator respectively, is no longer just a French institution. An array of new satellite spaces either opened or were announced this year, including a wing of Shanghai’s West Bund Art Museum called Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, which opens in November. As controversy over a slated Brussels outpost rumbles on (in Belgium’s domestic politics, at least), the museum’s temporary project space in Málaga has been extended by five years. Back in France, the museum announced a 22,000sqm ‘art factory’ in the city’s suburbs while in February the museum’s original foray outside the fourth arrondissement, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, staged a Lee Ufan show. In Paris, the mothership this summer hosted an exhibition of new works by Cao Fei, making her – right on time – the first Chinese artist to hold a solo show at the institution.

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Maja Hoffmann

Massimiliano Gioni

Collector Swiss Last Year 38

Curator Italian Last Year 25

Hoffmann’s new arts complex in Arles – the ‘crumpled drinks can’, in local parlance – is scheduled to open in the spring, yet programming is well underway in the former sncf railyard. Kiluanji Kia Henda, winner of the 2017 Frieze Artist Award, was in residence this spring, and in July the exhibition spaces showed 50 years of Martin Parr’s photobooks, a collection Hoffmann acquired in collaboration with the Tate in 2017, alongside an installation by Rachel Rose, produced in collaboration with New York’s Park Avenue Armory (whose former curatorial adviser, Tom Eccles, also sits on Hoffmann’s advisory board, alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno). Obrist was also on hand to help with programming, this time at Hoffmann’s Zürich gallery, where he curated part two of a pro-eu show titled It’s Urgent! Needless to say, with this kind of money, and friends like these, Hoffmann’s continued presence on the boards of institutions in the us and Europe is assured.

Now in his mid-forties and some years on from his wunderkind peak – youngest curator of the Venice Biennale for a century in 2013, etc – Gioni is settling into his second act. While leaning into his primary roles as artistic director of the New Museum, New York, and longstanding director of Milan’s Nicola Trussardi Foundation, he’s continuing to spin off freelance projects, such as this year’s Marcel Duchamp/Jeff Koons doubleheader at Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Promoting that show, he ribbed Duchamp as a ‘sellout’ and appears to relish the bitchy soundbite, saying on an art podcast that he wants to “do away with quality”. Asked about the staff of the New Museum’s decision to unionise in a dispute over pay, however, he reverted to suave diplomacy. Whether in reaction to that debacle or not, he’s currently overseeing the first us retrospective for institutional critique’s Hans Haacke in over 30 years, while next year’s highlights include a showcase for outré painter Peter Saul.

November 2019

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Real/World

15 March 51 people are killed when a gunman opens fire at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. Within a week of the mass shooting – the first in the country for more than two decades – the New Zealand government passes a sweeping

cyclone, which also strikes Malawi and Zimbabwe, results in the deaths of at least 1,300 people

20 March World’s most lucrative art prize announced. The Nomura Art Award, sponsored by Japanese company Nomura Holdings, will award $1 million to ‘an artist who has created a body of work of major cultural significance’ to realise an ‘ambitious new project’.

Two $100,000 grants will be given to emerging artists

ban on semi-automatics and assault rifles

Deaths 7 March Carolee Schneemann, who explored sex29 March Cinema mourns the death of Agnès uality, gender and the body in a number of pioneerVarda, who emerged as a key figure in the New ing works of performance and video from the midWave of the 1950s and 60s and went on to make 1960s onwards, dies one of the great bodies of cinematic work

14 March Cyclone Idai makes landfall in Mozambique. The

5 March Public conversation between Indian novelist Arundhati Roy and Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam in Dhaka goes ahead in new venue after police revoke original licence.

Alam was released from prison in November 2018 after having served three months in prison for ‘provocative’ statements

(1963–2019)

Okwui Enwezor

“inappropriate shots” … rapper with “bare honeys” jailed for scamming pensioners … video of little girl levitating in the woods goes

March 2019

5 March Koyo Kouoh announced as executive director and chief curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. She succeeds Mark Coetzee, who stepped down amid accusations of professional

5 March Arata Isozaki awarded 2019 Pritzker Prize. The Japanese architect responsible for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Shanghai Symphony Hall, among other projects, is the 46th recipient of the most prestigious award in architecture

12 March Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum announces that it is in talks with representatives from Sri Lanka and Indonesia about returning items in its collection that might have been stolen during the colonial era. It comes after a decision by the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures to publish guidelines for countries seeking to reclaim looted art, and amidst wider discussions around restitution

misconduct, at the largest contemporary art museum on the continent

Art/World

18 March Ishara Art Foundation opens in Dubai. The new space on Alserkal Avenue is the first non-profit institution in the United Arab Emirates dedicated to art from South Asia

14 March Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala named artistic directors of the 13th Gwangju Biennale, scheduled to open in September 2020. Ginwala states that the biennial will explore ‘swarm intelligence … strategies of revolutionary activity, and the pushback unleashed through the surveillance state and machinic warfare’

25 March The Sackler Trust suspends all of its charitable activities in the uk. London’s National Portrait Gallery was the first major art institution to refuse a grant from the Sackler family, some members of which are currently in a legal battle in the us over the activities of Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the powerful opioid Oxycontin.

A spokesperson for the gallery announced that it had ‘jointly agreed’ that it would ‘not proceed at this time’ with a £1 million donation. The statement comes a month after the photographer Nan Goldin – who has staged repeated protests at museums to raise awareness of the opioid epidemic that claims tens of thousands of lives each year in the us alone – announced that she would refuse a retrospective of her work at London’s National Portrait Gallery if it accepted the donation.

On 21 March, the Tate had announced that ‘in the present circumstances we do not think it right to seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers’, with the Guggenheim in New York following suit the next day

NAN’S ARMY

VICTORY FOR

FEB 1966

one male, one female

REQUIRES TWO WELL-PROPORTIONED MODELS

commencing work on Greek Gods

ARTIST

CLASSIFIEDS

15 March Okwui Enwezor, the celebrated curator and critic, dies after a long battle with cancer.

Enwezor was only the second person (after Harald Szeemann) to have curated both Documenta and the Venice Biennale, and the only African to have taken the reins of either.

After moving to New York from Nigeria to study political science, Enwezor came to art through poetry and cofounded Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art. In 1998 he was named as the first non-European curator of Documenta – creating a 2002 edition hailed as ‘one of the most radically conceived events in the history of postcolonial art practice’ – before overseeing the 7th Gwangju Biennale and the 2015 Venice Biennale, titled All the World’s Futures. Tributes pour in for a curator who changed the landscape of contemporary art

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46 Philippe Parreno Artist French Last Year 45

Gallerists British Last Year 32

First impressions matter, so it made sense that Parreno was tapped to work on the lobby of the revamped moma this year. There he installed a marquee in which rows of lightbulbs glow from a triangular frame.

On venturing further into the New York museum, the Frenchman’s typically disconcerting installation continues with approximately 120 moving lamps. Parreno has long been interested in questions of interaction, and another gig this year was at Espace Louis Vuitton in Venice: a show that featured a computer programme which activated, in sequence, a marquee, a mechanical mirrored shutter and phosphorescent wallpaper. The marquee is a sculptural form he’s returned to since 2006, inspired by the luminous signs that welcomed punters to American cinemas in the 1950s. So it should be no surprise that Parreno’s second feature film, titled No More Reality Whatsoever, which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in February, was described by its maker as a ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’.

Most members of the London artworld have never known a time without Lisson Gallery. Logsdail & son is as old as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, still on the same street as in 1967 and comfortably into at least its third phase. Since highlighting Minimalism and Conceptualism and the ‘Lisson Sculptors’ during the 80s, the gallery has gradually become a more unpredictable beast, home to less-definable figures such as Laure Prouvost, Cory Arcangel and Wael Shawky as well as playful neoconceptualists like Ryan Gander. Interviewed two years ago, overseer of the New York outpost Alex Logsdail said sanguinely that Lisson was ‘not a megagallery’, and indeed, despite having branches in Manhattan and Shanghai, their focus remains on nurturing artists rather than real estate.

At the time of writing, their New York shows are of luminaries they helped pin to the firmament decades ago: Art & Language and Anish Kapoor. Some things you can depend on.

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48

Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani, Diana Campbell Betancourt

Gavin Brown Gallerist British Last Year 26

Collectors/Curator Bangladeshi/American Last Year 63/NEW If the international artworld’s denizens are familiar with Bangladesh’s current art scene, that’s down to Nadia Samdani, husband Rajeeb and their foundation’s artistic director, Diana Campbell Betancourt. Last year 368,000 people attended their biennial Dhaka Art Summit. This year, the Samdanis were busy completing Srihatta, a vast arts complex they’ve built in the northeast of the country, which might replace the summit altogether when the 40-hectare sculpture park, 465sqm gallery and 930sqm artist and writer residency facilities do eventually open. Meanwhile, the foundation collaborated with Alserkal Avenue to host a show of Bangladeshi, South Asian and Southeast Asian artists in Dubai (curated by Campbell Betancourt), and with Asia Art Archive on a new research project connecting South and Southeastern Asian and African art histories.

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Brown this year closed his space in New York’s Chinatown, which he’s operated since 2014; in July, his longtime director Thor Shannon moved to David Zwirner. That loss is not always a bad thing was perhaps the message of Brian Belott, the self-proclaimed ‘Master of Discard’, who closed the gallery with his thrift-store assemblages. Nor is Brown likely to mope: he had four artists in the international exhibition at the Venice Biennale – Ed Atkins, Frida Orupabo, Avery Singer and Golden Lion winner Arthur Jafa – with Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys representing Belgium. There were also shows for Alex Katz and Ella Kruglyanskaya in his Harlem space and Charlemagne Palestine and Laura Owens at his Rome outpost, while Karl Holmqvist joined the restaurant/gallery that Brown and Rirkrit Tiravanija run in upstate New York. This autumn there was a trip to Paris to stage a show at Galerie Patrick Seguin.

ArtReview

45 Photo: Andrea Rossetti 46 Courtesy Lisson Gallery 47 Courtesy Noor Photoface 48 Arthur Jafa, The White Album (still), 2018

Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty

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49 Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. © 2016 Olafur Eliasson 50 Photo: Todd Eberle 51 Photo: Merwelene van der Merwe 52 © afp / Joel Saget

Olafur Eliasson

Bernard Arnault

Artist Danish-Icelandic Reentry (63 in 2017)

Collector French Last Year 31

It’s unlikely that the Icelandic artist will ever match the popular impact of his Weather Project at Tate Modern, visited by two million people in 2000, although this year’s retrospective at the same institution received solid reviews. Its final room was packed with research material on climate change: newspaper clippings and scientific articles, sketches and diagrams, all of which fuel the artist’s public-pleasing sculpture and installation, most of which stays on the right side of spectacle. In December, in London, Eliasson restaged a project in which he transported giant ice blocks from Greenland to Paris to melt during the 2015 un Climate Summit; in September he was appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the un Development Programme. That recognition is due in part to the success of Little Sun, a solar energy company he has run since 2012, but also for his use of contemporary art as a platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis. It’s a model many others have taken up.

The ‘wolf in cashmere’ recently became the third richest person in the world. As chairman and ceo of luxury group lvmh, a little bit of his Bloomberg-estimated $97.3bn fortune goes to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. This year the private museum gave over its galleries to Gilbert & George, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Courtauld’s hallowed collection of Impressionism. The foundation’s smaller ‘espaces’ in Venice and Tokyo, meanwhile, hosted shows by Philippe Parreno and Christian Boltanski respectively. Yet it was an even more spectacular brand of philanthropy that put Arnault and his family in the spotlight this year, after they publicly announced a €200m donation to Notre-Dame while the cathedral was still smouldering (conveniently overshadowing the €100m earlier pledged by his nemesis François Pinault). Sceptics suggested that Arnault would benefit from a tax break (he says not), and sniping over this and other megadonations was only partially quelled when, in September, they were eventually signed off.

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52 William Kentridge

Emmanuel Perrotin

Artist South African Last Year 56

Gallerist French Last Year 54

‘In many ways, Johannesburg is a terrible city, so the fact that I’m still there’, said the artist this year, ‘has to do with what it is to work on the margins.’ His work continues to interrogate South Africa’s history as a pariah state, and the long shadows still cast by apartheid. Yet for all the solemnity of its historical themes, Kentridge is an artist with market clout to match his impressive institutional record. A survey of his work was held at the Kunstmuseum Basel during the prestigious slot coinciding with the city’s art fair, a precursor to a double-whammy institutional outing that opened this summer in Cape Town: a show at the Norval Foundation focuses on Kentridge’s sculpture from 1984, while Zeitz mocaa is exhibiting his drawings, printmaking, films and tapestries. A show, as curator Azu Nwagbogu succinctly puts it, both ‘humongous and momentous’. To top that, the artist landed Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in September, with its 15 million yen honorarium.

In 2020 Perrotin will celebrate 30 years since he opened his first gallery in Paris. He now has six more, stretching across New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai: a whopping 7,000sqm of combined exhibition space, overseen by 145 employees. Yet Perrotin’s starry roster demands it, ranging from Maurizio Cattelan, Elmgreen & Dragset and Sophie Calle to pricey creators like jr, kaws and Daniel Arsham who speak to audiences outside the artworld. Now over fifty, and despite his longstanding night-owl image and his galleries being described by The New York Times as ‘Instagram-friendly party spaces’, Perrotin evidently wants the world. He launched three spaces in Asia between 2016 and 2018, reflecting the fact that about a fifth of his roster is Asian; he’s talked lately of the increasing importance of Africa to the art ecosystem; and he avows he’d be happy to merge with, say, Gagosian or Zwirner.

At this rate, he may not need to.

November 2019

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5 April New York-based press Verso Books delivers open letter signed by Douglas

3 April Berlin’s Jewish museum becomes latest institution to announce that it will refuse all further donations from Sackler family. On 10 April, Hito Steyerl used the opening of her exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London to liken the artworld’s relationship with the Sackler family to being ‘married to a serial killer and wanting a divorce’

27 April Climate protest group Extinction Rebellion stages ‘die-in’ outside London’s Tate Modern. Protest aims to raise awareness of collapsing bee population and its implications for the wider ecosystem

Crimp, Andrea Fraser, Lucy Lippard and Fred Moten, among others, calling for removal of Safariland ceo Warren B. Kanders from his position on board of the Whitney. Decolonize This Place continues its protests against the museum

KILLER!

MARRIED A SERIAL 29 April Asia Society confirms that first Triennial of Asia will open in New York in Spring 2020. First edition will ‘bring together around forty artists with scientists, historians, policy analysts, and thought leaders’ for an exhibition and live programme

$50,000 Rabkin Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to art journalism

24 April Cologne District Court fines man caught stealing sketches from Gerhard Richter’s dustbin. The forty-nine-yearold defendant attempted to consign the works to an auction house in Munich, which agreed to accept them only if they were

authenticated by the artist. Judge Katharina Potthoff rules that Richter ‘handed them over to a disposal company for the purpose of disposal’ and that they thus remained the artist’s property while intact. The defendant maintains that he is not a thief

CAPITALIST REALISM

9 April The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wins

4 April Venice Biennale announces that American artist Jimmie Durham will be awarded Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

3 April Lee Bul named laureate for South Korea’s 2019 Ho-Am Prize for the Arts. She receives a gold medal and krw 300million

Art/World

NOV 1980

now working in complete seclusion in England seeks reputable, competent Agent…

(abstract – somewhere onwards from Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and beyond)

MAJOR CONTINENTAL ARTIST WITH UNIQUE STYLE

CLASSIFIEDS

… young farmer (20) responds to ‘ vegan uprising ’ … carjacker fatally shot, sergeant ’ s head ‘ grazed ’ … washington sexting bill aims to …

April 2019

11 April Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir ousted in a military coup.

10 April Artist Coco Fusco is denied entry to Cuba on the eve of 13th Havana Biennial. Authorities did not provide her with a reason 11 April Julian Assange is arrested in London after seven years of refuge in the Ecuadorean

His overthrow comes after months of protests over worsening living conditions in the country

that will force thousands of large buildings – including major arts institutions – to reduce their emissions or face significant fines 21 April A series of bomb attacks at churches, hotels and a housing

17 April New York City Council adopts Green New Deal Plan

21 April Volodymyr Zelensky is elected president of Ukraine.

The comedian and tv personality secures over 73 percent of the vote

complex on Easter Sunday kill more than 250 people in Colombo

20 April Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian dies in Tehran. The artist, who mixed minimalist abstraction with art and crafts, was among the most influential Iranian artists of her generation

Deaths

restoration of cathedral from French businesspeople – notably art collectors François Pinault and Bernard Arnault, who pledged a combined €300m (backed by President Macron’s assurances that such donations would be tax-deductible) – spark debate around the ethics of spectacular philanthropy

Embassy. He faces federal conspiracy charges in the us for exposing government secrets through WikiLeaks

Real/World

15 April A dramatic fire breaks out at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, destroying the building’s nineteenth-century spire and much of its wooden roof. The worst fears for the building are allayed over the coming days, with confirmation that the altar, two pipe organs and three famous rose windows had survived the blaze. Major donations towards the

CRÈME, BRÛLÉED

ARCHITECTURAL

53

54 Eugene Tan

Vincent Worms

Museum Director Singaporean Last Year 95

Collector French Reentry (78 in 2016)

55

Worms, whose day job is in seed investment in the tech industry, founded Kadist in 2001 to facilitate residencies and to collect and exhibit art.

This year, at its gallery in Paris, an exhibition by Sabih Ahmed and Taus Makhacheva recounted superhero sightings from testimonies gathered during a residency funded by the nonprofit organisation. Kadist’s exhibition space in San Francisco was occupied by Mercer Union, the Torontobased artist-run centre. Elsewhere, the organisation’s three-year pan-Latin American project with artists Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Carla Zaccagnini and Rometti Costales continued with events in Guatemala City, Mexico City, Medellín and Santiago. Artist Ho Tzu Nyen, meanwhile, initiated a new research programme into the notion of ‘tradition’ within the context of Asian colonialism. Worms’s global project, which cites the intersection of art and political histories as its main interest, also supported Hsu Chia-Wei’s video installation at this year’s Singapore Biennale.

56 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

Koyo Kouoh Curator Cameroonian Last Year 72

Collector Italian Last Year 61 ‘Buy what you like’ was Nicholas Logsdail’s advice to Sandretto Re Rebaudengo when she started collecting. ‘Italy’s Peggy Guggenheim’, as cnn dubbed her, has evidently liked a lot of what she has seen, amassing a 1,500-strong collection in 25 years. Like Guggenheim, an acknowledged inspiration, she makes her collection public: her foundation in Turin, where there were solos this year for Tai Shani and Michael Armitage, is soon to be joined by a new centre in Madrid. She also found time to stage a group show dedicated to Don Quixote in Catania, as well as a new installation by Alicja Kwade, and supported various pavilions at the Venice Biennale, including Lithuania’s Golden Lion-winner. Re Rebaudengo is now focused on younger artists, recently commissioning work by Martine Syms in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art to be shown in 2020. No wonder Independent Curators International gave her their Leo Award in April.

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Kouoh, who this year was appointed chief curator of Zeitz mocaa in Cape Town, was already established as a promoter of African art on the international stage. Her reputation was built as founding director of Dakar’s raw Material Company: a destination for both its shows (Danish artist Christian Danielewitz this year staged his research into the global mining industry) and its talks programme (which featured Rick Lowe, moma ps1 director Kate Fowle and discussions ranging from Central American art to the Bengal Delta). She was, then, an obvious choice when the world’s largest museum of contemporary African art started looking for a new head. It’s too early to gauge her impact – Kouoh took the helm in May – but the new gig will surely diminish her (omni)presence on international curatorial teams and juries. Yet in South Africa she gets the money (the museum is bankrolled by former Puma ceo Jochen Zeitz) and a Thomas Heatherwick-designed building within which to experiment.

ArtReview

53 Courtesy National Gallery Singapore 54 Courtesy Kadist, Paris & San Francisco 55 Photo: Andrea Basile 56 Courtesy Zeitz mocaa, Cape Town

The director of the National Gallery Singapore got a new job this year.

But Tan won’t be leaving his office on St Andrew’s Road anytime soon, because he combines his new role as director of Singapore Art Museum in March with the one he’s held since 2013. While the more contemporary institution is halfway through a four-year, $90m refurbishment described by the museum’s website as ‘part Marie Kondo, part Extreme Makeover’, taking the sam job puts Tan in charge of the Singapore Biennale. Curator Patrick D. Flores had already been selected for the edition opening this November when Tan took over, but he’ll be able to put his stamp on the 2022 exhibition (‘biennale’ is a loose term, it seems). At the National Gallery, Tan oversaw Awakenings, a survey show around how artists ‘acted as catalysts for change during Asia’s most turbulent decades’, and his own influence on the Southeast Asia artworld (and beyond) continues to increase.

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57 Photo: Marco Riebler. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris & Salzburg 58 Photo: Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores 59 Photo: Pia Riverola 60 Photo: Penn Studio. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul

Thaddaeus Ropac

Manuel Borja-Villel

Gallerist Austrian Last Year 62

Museum Director Spanish Last Year 51 (with João Fernandes)

In May, Ropac’s London gallery hosted United Artists for Europe, an exhibition of thirty works sold to raise money to support European cultural projects. If that event was a rejoinder to the populism spreading on the continent, then the gallerist’s main programme this year was Pop in a more positive sense, with exhibitions for James Rosenquist in London and Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein in Salzburg (Ropac also has two galleries in Paris which, among shows by twentieth-century greats such as John Cage and Donald Judd, exhibited the more contemporary Imran Qureshi and Oliver Beer). Pop art is, of course, recycled imagery from the mass media, and recycling is something Ropac has been thinking about a lot: in October, the gallerist bought a warehouse in Paris to store empty art crates so he might reuse them and, to further burnish his green credentials, promised to cut down on air shipping.

Last year, Borja-Villel renewed his contract at the Reina Sofía for another five years – to add to the decade he’s spent there already. Under his tenure the Madrid museum has developed an exhibition programme out of step with the blockbuster fare pumped out by its equivalents across the world. This year, that pattern continued with shows by conceptualist Luis Camnitzer, purveyor of weird pop H.C. Westermann and surrealist Tetsuya Ishida. While the programme pays scant regard to gender balance – completing the calendar were Mario Merz, Charles Ray, David Wojnarowicz, Richard Serra and, thankfully, Swiss artist Miriam Cahn – it is certainly intellectual. While Borja-Villel lost deputy director João Fernandes to São Paulo’s Instituto Moreira Salles, he gained $300,000 to collect Latin American art from Miami-based property developer Jorge M. Pérez, along with $200,000 to spend on artists from Spain and 50 works

by Spanish artists from Pérez’s personal collection.

59

60

José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

Hyun-Sook Lee

Gallerists Mexican/Colombian Last Year 34

Gallerist Korean Last Year 68

On the retirement of Juan Gaitán as director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, one critic bemoaned that of the 348 acquisitions of contemporary art made during his tenure, 59 percent came from the Kurimanzutto stable.

If Kuri and Manzutto’s gallery, which celebrated 20 years in 2019, has an outsize influence on the Mexican art scene, then the counter is that their list of artists warrants it: 2019 saw institutional shows for Jimmie Durham (in Porto, Lisbon and Milan; he also received the lifetime achievement award in Venice), Leonor Antunes (also in Venice, representing Portugal) and José’s brother Gabriel Kuri (solos in New York and Brussels), not to mention a collaboration with the San Francisco Art Institute to show Patti Smith’s photographs of Mexico. Their more experimental New York space bedded down with exhibitions by Mariana Castillo Deball and Tarek Atoui, while in Mexico City, besides a birthday survey, there were solos for Abraham Cruzvillegas and Gabriel Serra.

This year Haegue Yang celebrated her debut exhibition with Kukje Gallery in style, transforming Hyun-Sook Lee’s Seoul space into a futuristic landscape complete with a soundtrack: ad 2000 by the Korean singer Hae-kyung Min. Signing Yang was something of a coup for the gallery, given the artist’s current ubiquity (not least opening the new moma in New York with her dancing sculptures), but then it’s not as if Lee isn’t used to managing global art stars. In August, Danish collective Superflex took over her Busan outpost, while Ugo Rondinone exhibited in Seoul in May. Joining Yang on the gallery’s artist list were Elmgreen & Dragset, who in March graced the Seoul galleries with a giant sculpture of a human tailbone and a series of abstract paintings created using road-marking paint; while in January, in a demonstration of Lee’s range, the veteran Korean painter Min Joung-Ki exhibited 14 new paintings and 21 examples of his early work.

November 2019

105

SUN, SEA &

opens to the public. The international exhibition, curated by Ralph Rugoff and titled May You Live in Interesting Times, receives mixed reviews.

Much attention focuses on Christoph Büchel’s display of the rusting hulk of a fishing boat that was shipwrecked off the coast of Libya in 2015, resulting in the death of more than 800 migrants aboard.

The opening of the Venezuelan Pavilion was delayed due to the political upheaval in the country and an economic blockade imposed by the European Union.

The coveted Golden Lion for the Best National

11 May 58th Venice Biennale

named their son archie after her beloved cat who ended up fat after she fed him frozen grapes, friends say … d-day hero, 90...

BEACH BUMS WIN AWARD

May 2019

photographer Susan Meiselas wins 2019 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. The £30,000 award is announced at Photographers’ Gallery, London

17 May American documentary

sex marriage, becoming the first state in Asia to do so after a landmark constitutional court ruling in 2017

JULY 1981

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firm of uk-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, to design new home for Kiran Nadar Museum

9 May Adjaye Associates, the

artist Jelili Atiku is detained in Lagos during a public performance. In 2016 the artist, whose work addresses issues of human rights, was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace. Pressure group Artists at Risk reports that other activists were arrested alongside Atiku

2 May Nigerian performance

second term as India’s prime minister in landslide victory

23 May Narendra Modi wins

is in talks to return a number of religious artefacts to Ethiopia.

The law prohibits the British Museum from deaccessioning the sacred Christian plaques (removed from Ethiopia after the Battle of Maqdala in 1868), with a ‘long-term loan’ seen as a possible solution. Germany’s culture minister Monika Grüetters announces the return to Namibia of a fifteenthcentury stone cross removed in 1893. Namibia’s ambassador to Germany, welcomes the gesture as ‘step for us to reconcile with our colonial past’

Vajiralongkorn promotes General Suthida Vajiralongkorn Na Ayudhya, the deputy head of his personal security detail, to Queen Suthida. It marks the first time that a Thai king has married a commoner

17 May Taiwan legalises same-

20 May British Museum says it

1 May King of Thailand Maha

great modernist architects, dies at 102 years old

16 May I.M. Pei, one of the

elusive, pseudonymous artist known for her neoconceptual works, dies in New York

10 May Five executives leave their posts at Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District Authority after delays to the inauguration of two arts venues. M+ Museum was originally scheduled to open in 2017, but has now been set back to 2021; The Box at Freespace missed its scheduled opening in April

of Art in New Delhi. The privately-funded museum has a 6,000-strong collection of art from the subcontinent

Institution in Washington, dc announces Lonnie G. Bunch as its new secretary.

The founding director of the National Museum of African

28 May The Smithsonian

Maria Lassnig Prize 2019, awarded biennially by the Maria Lassnig Foundation and the Lenbachhaus Munich to a midcareer artist. She receives €50,000 and a solo exhibition at the Lenbachhaus in March 2020

14 May Sheela Gowda wins

Art/World

Foundation (aif), a Beirutbased non-profit dedicated to the collection, conservation and study of archival images from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora, launches online platform releasing over 25,000 photographs from its 600,000strong archive

30 May Arab Image

American History and Culture becomes the first African American to be appointed as head of the institution

BUS-TED!

2 May Turner Contemporary and Tate announce cancellation of sponsorship deal for 2019 Turner Prize by the British bus company Stagecoach. The decision comes after it was revealed that the company’s chairman Brian Souter campaigned against gay rights and donated £1 million to back a ban on teaching lgbt issues in 2000

14 May Lutz Bacher, the

Deaths

Participation is awarded to the Lithuanian Pavilion for Sun & Sea (Marina), a ‘beach opera’

by Rugile· Barzdžiukaite·, Vaiva Grainyte· and Lina Lapelyte· and curated by Lucia Pietroiusti

NO SEX

61

62 Paul B. Preciado

Museum Director British NEW

Philosopher Spanish Last Year 23

Macgregor’s first job in the arts was driving a bus, packed into which was an exhibition, to remote communities in Scotland. The visitor figures for that could probably be counted on two hands, which makes it even more remarkable that as director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art she now attracts more than a million people a year to her shows.

Visitors this year (including those attending the museum’s under-18sonly evenings) enjoyed a six-decade survey of South African photographer David Goldblatt’s career and The National: New Australian Art, a six-year collaboration with two other Sydney institutions. Macgregor, whose term as president of cimam ends this year, is a member of the nsw Australia Day Advisory Council, as well as numerous other quangos. She has also made strides to address Australia’s colonial legacy: visitors to the institution’s website are informed that the mca stands on land and water traditionally owned by the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.

‘A work of art is not a work of art if it cannot be destroyed,’ wrote Paul B. Preciado in a response to the Notre-Dame fire in April for Artforum.

The curator, theorist and trans activist’s textual iconoclasm, in which he called for the gutted cathedral to be left unrestored as a ‘punk monument’, is in sync with his project to rewrite and queer how we approach culture.

In December Preciado republished Countersexual Manifesto in English, a call to ‘overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body’, a radicalism that its author has found kinship with in the work of twentieth-century artist Lorenza Böttner, a survey of whose photography he curated at wkv, Stuttgart, in February. (Böttner was also included in 2017’s Documenta 14, where Preciado served as public programme curator.) In summer, at the Venice Biennale, he took charge of the Taiwanese Pavilion, presenting a solo show of Shu Lea Cheang, and in September he joined the team behind Bergen Assembly.

63

64 Kader Attia

François Pinault

Artist French-Algerian Last Year 64

Collector French Last Year 35

‘“Why are you working on colonialism?”, I remember some curators asking me. “These African countries have their independence, it’s over.”’

Attia was decolonising art long before decolonisation colonised art’s discourse, and he delivers his politics with subtle humour and aesthetic aplomb. Take, for example, the poster for Attia’s survey show this year at the Hayward Gallery, which featured his 2013 work Measure and Control, a taxidermy cheetah next to an African mask: it came, he says, from a desire to demonstrate ‘the obsession of the Western modern mind to organise the universe’. Nor does that interest only play out in his shows – speaking of which, he also had solos this year at Lehmann Maupin in New York and, on the other coast, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive – but also through La Colonie, his artspace in an outer Parisian suburb whose programme has ranged, of late, from a film screening by Palestinian artist Khaled Jarra to open portfolio reviews.

108

France’s second-richest man turned his attention slightly away from art this year, with his most visible contribution to culture being the €100m he and his son pledged towards restoring Notre-Dame. But he’s also been busy with a major architectural project of his own. It was recently announced that the luxury-goods magnate’s long-promised, Tadao Ando-designed private museum will open next summer in the Bourse de Commerce, just around the corner from the Louvre. Having absorbed €170m in construction costs, Pinault’s new location in the French capital will showcase some of the highlights from a billion-euro collection. The exhibition programme is still under wraps, but it will undoubtedly strengthen Paris’s reputation as a renascent art centre and Pinault’s position as an artworld kingpin, both as a megacollector and majority shareholder in the world’s leading auction house, Christie’s. For now, however, the owner of two Andodesigned museums in Venice remains in something of a holding pattern.

ArtReview

61 Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 62 Photo: Léa Crespi 63 Photo: Camille Millerand 64 Photo: Matteo De Fina

Elizabeth Ann Macgregor

65

66

66 Photo: Studio Paglen 67 Photo: Felix Brüggemann 68 Photo: Gilbert Hage / Rain Treer

Eli & Edythe Broad

Trevor Paglen

Collectors American Last Year 59

Artist American Reentry (87 in 2017)

The Broads have long been the couple in West Coast philanthropy, with major donations to the arts, education and scientific research. Their private museum, The Broad, in downtown Los Angeles, is one of the most important such institutions in the us, and while the couple have not historically been so adventurous in the nature of their acquisitions, they make up for this conservatism in sheer dollar spend. Their holdings include works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol, and they estimate they’ve made 8,500 loans to over 500 institutions around the world in their lifetimes. This year The Broad was bolder, making a statement by staging a new retrospective of Shirin Neshat. While highly decorated, the Iranian artist has never had a show on such a scale – opening in October, this vast survey includes approximately 230 photographs and eight videoworks – so the Broads can be credited with offering a corrective.

Paglen’s year started badly but ended in victory (admittedly a relative term when your work trains its sights on the omniscient surveillance society).

The artist’s mission to space ended in disaster when the partially deployed $1.5m satellite-sculpture Orbital Reflector was lost during the Trumpenforced us government shutdown. That ten years of work was thus sacrificed has a certain poignancy, given that Paglen’s practice is a study of the relationship between aesthetics and power. In September, however, and working with researcher Kate Crawford, he garnered virallike coverage when he revealed that ImageNet, a dataset that trains artificial intelligence systems in visual recognition, was packed with racist bias and assumption. As a result, 600,000 images were removed. A flurry of exhibitions followed: a solo show in the Barbican’s Curve in London; Training Humans, a show by Crawford and Paglen at the Fondazione Prada in Milan; and Paglen’s Nam June Paik Prize presentation in South Korea.

67

68 Esther Schipper

Christine Tohmé

Gallerist French Last Year 52

Curator Lebanese Last Year 55

‘Maybe the human thing is over,’ posited the artist Julia Scher on restaging her 1998 installation Wonderland at Esther Schipper’s Berlin gallery in December. That work is a prescient take on the power of tech, and Schipper’s taste chimes with our increasing awareness of technological and ecological crisis. She works with Hito Steyerl (whose Serpentine Gallery show this year focused on ai), Pierre Huyghe (curator of an Okayama Art Summit that foregrounded nonhuman intelligences), Philippe Parreno (who created an ‘autopoetic automaton’ for the refurbished moma, New York), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tomás Saraceno. Those two collaborated on a show spread across the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and tba21 in Madrid this year that, its curator claimed, posed ‘questions surrounding technologies, artificial intelligence, the collective minds of animals, and the power and attraction of the unknown’. If the future is posthuman, then Schipper has it covered.

The central mission of Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese artist association Tohmé founded 25 years ago, is ‘cultivating friendships and networks of solidarity’, the curator noted this year. The organisation’s 2,000sqm warehouse on the outskirts of Beirut now hosts two auditoriums, a library, editing suites, a coffee shop and artist studios. The association offers free schooling to between ten and fifteen artists each year on a curriculum devised by Tohmé alongside a committee of luminaries (currently Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Iman Issa, Joe Namy, Walid Raad and curator Zeynep Öz). To celebrate the association’s quarter century, Tohmé launched a video-art-streaming platform that features a rotating selection of works from its rich archive. Practising its stated commitment to ‘reimagining social relations’ and ‘designing alternative blueprints for society’, the association suspended programming for ten days in midOctober to support widening protests against the Lebanese government.

November 2019

109

dirty shoes indoors is good for your health … timbers aim for bounceback … trump ’ s diary suggests golf trip possible …

June 2019

11 June Tate signs memorandum of understanding with Shanghai’s Pudong Museum of Art, which is due to open in 2021. The agreement, signed with the state-owned developer Shanghai Lujiazui Group, confirms that Tate will act as consultant, and lend items from its collection, to the riverside museum

11 June Art Review Ltd and Modern Media Holdings Ltd announce the latter’s acquisition of a majority shareholding in ArtReview, ArtReview Asia and artreview.com

6 June Omar Kholeif appointed director of collections and senior curator at Sharjah Art Foundation. He will work with director Hoor Al Qasimi towards the opening of the foundation’s new Jurainah Art Space, scheduled to open in 2022

28 June British rapper Stormzy plays a headline set at Glastonbury wearing a Union Jack stab-proof vest designed by street artist Banksy. The politically charged performance touches on knife crime and racism

26 June Kate Fowle appointed director of New York’s moma ps1. She joins from Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

20 June Singapore art fair Art sg postpones its first edition, due to open in November 2019. Cofounder Magnus Renfrew states that the decision to put the fair back by a year was made in ‘in the interests of presenting the best possible line up’. The following month, Independent art fair cancels its satellite in Brussels after three editions

Art/World

14 June Director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Peter Schäfer, resigns. It comes after criticism from individuals and organisations including the Central Council of Jews in Germany for a tweet on 6 June linking to a newspaper article arguing that the German parliament should not pass a resolution against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Jewish Museum said that Schäfer had resigned to ‘prevent further damage’

10 June Tehran-based photojournalist Newsha Tavakolian has been barred from working by the Iranian authorities, The New York Times reveals. Her husband, the Times journalist Thomas Erdbrink, has also had his credentials withdrawn. The news comes amidst rising tensions between Iran and the us

18 June Yana Peel resigns as ceo of the Serpentine Galleries, London, and gives up her position on the board of Para Site, Hong Kong, after revelations in The Guardian linking her husband’s investment company, Novalpina Capital Management International, to the Israeli cyber intelligence firm nso Group.

Blaming ‘a concerted lobbying campaign against my husband’s recent investment’, Peel stated that ‘the world of art is about free expression. But it is not about bullying and intimidation’. nso manufactures spyware used by state intelligence services to intercept individuals’ communications by hacking their mobile phones and has been linked to cases including the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government

SEP 1993

£180 FULL BOARD INCLUDING WINE

Large Studios and accommodation in 13th century château.

in the South of France.

SCULPTURE HOLIDAYS

CLASSIFIEDS

30 June South African artist David Koloane dies in Johannesburg aged 81. He was among the most influential artists to emerge in South Africa after the end of apartheid

Deaths

9 June An estimated one million people take to the streets of Hong Kong to protest proposed legislation that allows extradition to mainland China to stand trial. The demonstration is the beginning of months of unrest in the sar, with protests continuing beyond the formal withdrawal of the extradition bill in September

7 June Theresa May formally resigns as British prime minister over stalled Brexit negotiations. She remains the prime minister until the party elects a new leader in July

Real/World

the site of the World Trade Center. The deaccessioning was undertaken with the explicit aim of diversifying the museum’s collection and giving space to under-represented artists. Christopher Bedford, the bma’s director, defended the move by saying that ‘museums are entering a new era of heightened consciousness of incomplete histories and biases’ which it was their responsibility to correct

FREE EXPRESSION

money generated by the sale of works by white male artists from its collection. The deaccessioning of work by artists including Andy Warhol and Franz Kline were used to purchase new acquisitions including work by Amy Sherald and Wangechi Mutu, alongside Jack Whitten’s 9.11.01, a monumental mosaic realised in ash recovered from

26 JUNE Baltimore Museum of Art announces the acquisition of seven artworks using

BALTIMORE BANG FOR THE BUCK

69

70 Daniel Buchholz

Sadie Coles

Gallerist German Last Year 48

Gallerist British Last Year 43

71

72 Liam Gillick

Claire Hsu

Artist British Last Year 71

Curator Austrian-Chinese Last Year 76

In 2017 the artist worked on a concert with New Order; this year a documentary film of the collaboration was released alongside a live album.

Times change, but Gillick keeps his eye trained on the intersection of aesthetics and capital, as he has done for the past two decades. While his output ranges from architectural installation to sculpture, his videoworks took centre stage at the Madre Museum in Naples this summer. If his work affects the corporate aesthetic – his exhibition at Maureen Paley, London, in September consisted of slick architectural interventions and more films – then visitors to Kunsthalle Wien in July would have been reassured that Gillick puts his heart and soul into his work, as they witnessed the production of a feature film he is making with Austrian collective Gelitin. He is equally influential behind closed doors, sitting on the steering committee of Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation. With such consistent success, Gillick’s blue Mondays should be few and far between.

112

In September Sadie Coles hq opened two painting shows – a posthumous survey for atmospheric Dutch oddball Co Westerik and a hyperbright display by Venezuelan-born Alvaro Barrington – that spoke both to the gallerist’s unpredictability and her market savvy. (Figurative painting is extremely in.) The details may change, but Coles’s gallery has been on the money in every sense for over 20 years now. Earlier this year, she gave over her main space to modish writer/critic Charlie Fox, who filled it with a spooked, spacey group show orbiting around monstrosity, while elsewhere the gallery gave real estate to brash New York multimedia artist Borna Sammak and recent signee and rising digital-art star Lawrence Lek, while also finding space for trad blue-chipper Elizabeth Peyton (ahead of her National Portrait Gallery retrospective in London). Meanwhile, stalwarts like Sarah Lucas, Helen Marten and Matthew Barney continued to mop up the institutional shows and demonstrate Coles’s ability to keep different bases covered.

As countries in Asia look to establish and substantiate their own art histories independently from Western narratives, the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong performs a lowkey but indispensable role in collecting and sharing information. This vital resource for scholars and art historians, cofounded 19 years ago by Claire Hsu, now has over 80,000 records in its collections, stretching from exhibition catalogues and materials to artist’s personal archives. But it’s not all about art history for the nonprofit organisation, which also responds to the times and looks to set the agenda through talks, residencies and research that complement its ever-expanding library. In March, for example, it held an exhibition of the late Singaporean performance artist Lee Wen’s sketchbooks and plans to celebrate its 20th anniversary next year with a busy programme.

One highlight of which is a collaboration with Jakarta-based educational project Gudskul for Art Basel Hong Kong.

ArtReview

69 Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans 70 Photo: Andrew Davidson. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London 72 Photo: Dave Choi

If you were looking for the cool kids this year then you could have found them in one of Buchholz’s galleries in Cologne, Berlin and New York.

In September the achingly hip Anne Imhof had a show in Berlin; in February Heji Shin showed her portraits of Kanye West (fresh from their outing earlier this year at Kunsthalle Zürich). The cool middle-aged people were represented there, too: an exhibition of Michael Krebber’s austere works in May ‘still managed to piss people off’, reported Artforum.

But it was a dead cool person who really stole the limelight in 2019.

In the early 1950s, Andy Warhol collaborated with author Ralph Thomas (‘Corkie’) Ward on a series of self-published books. The first of these, A Is an Alphabet, a collection of 26 loose pages that feature Warhol’s cute illustrations and Ward’s weird rhymes – ‘a surreal, horny fairytale’, as Interview succinctly described it – went on show in Berlin before travelling to New York.

73

74

73 Courtesy k11 Art Foundation 74 Photo: Bec Lorrimer. Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery 75 Photo: Alessandro Wang 76 Photo: Liam Gillick

Adrian Cheng

Almine Rech

Collector Hong Konger Last Year 46

Gallerist French Last Year 86

Cheng, heir to a $17.2bn family fortune and general manager of New World Development, stuck this year to a formula that works. k11 Musea, which opened in August, was the final part of the jigsaw that is his $2.6bn retail, hotel and property development on Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. It’s modelled on the collector’s ‘art malls’ in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang and Wuhan (with more to come), which for 17 years have seen exhibitions programmed in sizeable gallery spaces nestled among luxury outlets. This new development is on a different scale, showcasing a collection including Paola Pivi’s bears and Samson Young’s minigolf course, and this autumn it was announced that the Cannes Film Festival would screen a selection of films in the new complex. Cheng also sits on boards and committees including London’s Tate and Royal Academy, the Pompidou in Paris and, in New York, the Metropolitan Museum, moma ps1 and Public Art Fund.

Rech, who already has galleries in Paris, Brussels, London and New York, set up in Shanghai in July. The new space opened with a group show including work by Günther Förg, John M. Armleder, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet and Sylvie Fleury, a ‘sister’ exhibition, Rech said, to another show of her artists at the Song Art Museum in Beijing. Her list is not (yet) well stocked with artists from the region, so Irish painter Genieve Figgis and James Turrell took the next slots in the programme. Back west, the fruits of a trip Miquel Barceló made through West Africa during the 1980s were shown in Brussels, Farah Atassi made her gallery debut in New York and Rech staged the first Jannis Kounellis show in the uk since the artist’s death, a tie-in to the retrospective Germano Celant curated at Fondazione Prada in Venice. The floating city also hosted a Förg exhibition in time for the Biennale, at which Rech’s stable was represented by Ryoji Ikeda and George Condo.

75

76 Lorenz Helbling

Tom Eccles

Gallerist Swiss Last Year 57

School Director British-American Last Year 75

Helbling once said that his strength lay less in promoting artists than in his ability to ‘find good talents and then not to get desperate when things need time’. Having survived for 23 years as one of China’s most influential galleries by discovering mainland artists and developing them, it’s no surprise that the founder of Shanghart favours the long game. It has been a solid if unspectacular year, with business-as-usual showcases of the gallery’s A-listers, including multimedia artist Sun Xun. There was evidence of an increased focus on Southeast Asia in the signing of Indonesian performance artist Melati Suryodarmo and Thai multidisciplinary artist Arin Rungjang, but Helbling’s taste remains eclectic, as shown by the decision to show American filmmaker Lynn Hershman solo at the Armory Show, New York. As the economy slows, plans to expand on Shanghart’s existing four branches might be on hold, but the gallery in Shanghai’s m50 district reopened after a major refurbishment with a show by Liu Yue.

‘Working in a museum can sometimes seem like a service industry for the wealthy,’ Eccles told The New York Times this year. Sage advice for the plethora of curatorial talent that passes through the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where Eccles is executive director. Of course, there is wealthy and wealthy, and Eccles was on hand during the weeklong Qatar Creates forum in March, alongside frequent collaborators Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno (with both of whom he advises Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation), to mediate discussions marking the opening of the National Museum of Qatar, by the royal family. Eccles’s big curatorial gig this year however was back in the us, where he is visual arts curator at the Avenue Park Armory, staging an extensive survey of Hito Steyerl’s work, including a new video installation taking aim at America’s gun culture. Which goes to show that, while a realist, Eccles knows art can engage with greater concerns too.

November 2019

113

BEANS MEANS

17 July Ai Weiwei wins his lawsuit against Skandinavisk Motor Company, the manufacturer of Volkswagen, for infringement of copyright. Ai’s Soleil Levant, which comprised 3,500 lifejackets previously worn by migrants displayed in the windows of Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg, featured in the background of a television ad for an orange Volkswagen Polo

1 July Nan Goldin and activist group p.a.i.n. protest at entrance to the Louvre, Paris

1 July Seven people arrested in Chicago when Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (a public sculpture popularly known as ‘The Bean’) is found covered in graffiti

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BEAN AND GONE

July 2019

30 July London-based contemporary art dealer Karsten Schubert dies

19 July Marisa Merz, a key member of the Arte Povera movement that revolutionised European contemporary art, dies

Deaths

22 July Emma Lavigne announced as new director of Palais de Tokyo, Paris

16 July Novelist Ahdaf Soueif resigns her position on the board of the British Museum over its links to bp, its failure to enter into discussion about the restitution of cultural artefacts and its reluctance to address issues around access and privilege. The museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, had the previous week confirmed that the institution would continue its relationship with bp

12 July Artists are among those evicted from Luomahu Art District in northeast Beijing by police in advance of its surprise demolition. Earlier in the week, police moved artists from Huantie Art District for the same reason

Art/World

19 July Korakrit Arunanondchai, Meriem Bennani, Nicole Eisenman and Nicholas Galanin publish a letter in Artforum requesting the withdrawal of their work from the Whitney Biennial. They are joined the following day by Eddie Arroyo, Forensic Architecture, Christine Sun Kim and Agustina Woodgate

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18 July An arson attack at Kyoto Animation Studio in Japan leaves 36 people dead.

Eyewitnesses state the perpetrator shouted accusations of ‘plagiarism’ against the animation studio. He is later found

8 July American financier Jeffrey Epstein is charged with sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York.

On 9 August he is found dead in his jail cell

JOB

24 July Boris Johnson takes office as prime minister of the United Kingdom. Immediately promises to deliver Brexit ‘come what may’

20 July President Bolsonaro announces relocation of Brazil’s film agency Ancine to Brasilia.

The president had complained of public money being used to finance ‘activism’, singling out Bruna Surfistinha, a 2011 drama chronicling the life of a sex worker

to have unsuccessfully submitted a novel for consideration and to have a history of mental illness

Real/World

him had ‘threatened to undermine the important work of the Whitney’. It is reported that the hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin initially resigned from the board in solidarity with Kanders, but was persuaded to remain

... & UNRESIGNS

25 July Warren B. Kanders steps down as vice chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art following months of protests over his company’s sale of teargas.

In his letter of resignation, he states that the ‘targeted campaign of attacks’ against

KANDERS QUITS ALLY RESIGNS...

31 July Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Bethanien criticised for a group exhibition inspired by Afrofuturism that contains no black artists. Named after the Sun Ra Arkestra album Space is the Place, show links the movement to Elon Musk’s space exploration. Activist group Soup du Jour submits an open letter attacking its ‘white muskulinity’

11 July David Zwirner announces that it will open a new space in Paris. Pace and White Cube follow suit as uncertainty over Brexit hits the European art scene. Zwirner tells the Financial Times that ‘Brexit changes the game.

After October, my London gallery will be a British gallery, not a European one’

5 July Tania Bruguera announces that her institution in Cuba will support an investigative journalism initiative

CLASSIFIEDS

22 July International Council of Museums (icom) announces a new definition of museums as ‘democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the past and the future’. The controversial move meets significant resistance, and at icom’s general assembly in September members elect to postpone a vote that would ratify the rewording

8 July Pace closes its Beijing gallery, founded in 2008, blaming escalating trade war between China and the us.

‘It’s impossible to do business in mainland China right now and it has been for a while,’ founder Arne Glimcher states in an interview. On 14 August, the megagallery opens a new $100m hq in New York (surpassing the New Museum’s $89m expansion budget), its third location in the city

BACK TO THE FUTURE

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78 Sunjung Kim

Ute Meta Bauer

Curator Korean Last Year 66

Curator German Last Year 81

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As institutions around the world look to integrate talks programmes, residencies and long-term research initiatives into their exhibition programmes, the German curator can claim to have been ahead of the curve.

As founding director of the Centre for Contemporary Art (cca) at Nanyang Technological University (ntu), her approach to connecting artists and curators from Southeast Asia with their global peers was exemplified by Arus Balik – From below the wind to above the wind and back again, an ‘exhibition project’ that sprang from a conversation between curator Philippe Pirotte and Jakarta-based artist Ade Darmawan, and ended in a sprawling group show. Her interest in ecological themes, archival practices and collaborative models was, meanwhile, reflected in an exhibition of the late Jef Geys’s work. It was no surprise then that Bauer was among the ‘search committee’ that in February announced the appointment of Indonesian collective ruangrupa as curator of the next Documenta.

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Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian

Ralph Rugoff

Collectors Chinese Last Year 92

Curator American Last Year 40

Celebrated for his lavish spending on artworks (most famously the $170.4 million for Modigliani’s 1917–18 Nu Couché), billionaire collector Liu Yiqian was opening up about the other costs of his fetish for cultural artefacts in Kejia Wu’s art market report on China, commissioned for tefaf. Liu put the annual loss at the West Bund outpost of his Long Museum (one of two in Shanghai, curated by his wife Wang Wei) at a cool $6m. Relatively nothing then. The private museum continues to display works from the couple’s extensive holdings – numbering over 2,000 works – of traditional and contemporary Chinese and international art. Notably this year, the Long Museum hosted a first Chinese institutional show for American superstar Mark Bradford, whose exhibition Los Angeles went down a storm in Shanghai.

The California-born naturalised Brit made two significant gestures with his Venice Biennale, slimming the number of artists down to 83 (from 120 in 2017) and asking each of them to present works in both the Arsenale and Giardini. May You Live in Interesting Times was too Western-centric for some – almost a third of the artists were based in the us – but the overall critical consensus was a pretty solid ‘B’. ‘Intermittent bursts of urgency and the occasional surprise’ was the verdict of Adrian Searle in The Guardian, while Jason Farago admired the artist list in The New York Times but felt that Rugoff had nonetheless played it ‘safe’. Meanwhile, Zoé Whitley joined Rugoff’s Hayward Gallery from the Tate (curating the summer show, a survey dealing with gender identity titled Kiss My Genders).

Whatever the critics thought of Venice, Rugoff can count on one fan: in June, he was awarded an obe by the queen.

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ArtReview

77 Courtesy Gwangju Biennale 78 Photo: Christine Fenzl 80 Photo: Andrea Avezzu. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Following the megadisplay at last year’s Gwangju Biennale, which involved seven thematic exhibitions organised by 11 curators and featuring 165 artists, the president of the biennale’s foundation, Sunjung Kim, appears to have had a quiet year. That is, if you don’t count planning for next year’s edition and the numerous major international prize juries she sits on (Samdani Art Award, Hugo Boss Asia Art, Venice Biennale, to mention a few), but really you should, as her word clearly counts.

Besides appointing Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala to curate next year’s biennale, Kim has also continued working with the Real dmz Project (which she founded in 2012), an art and research project centred around the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea, which this year brought the group exhibition Negotiating Borders at London’s Korean Cultural Centre. Kim still earns points for busting down the walls.

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82 Brook Andrew

Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong

Artist Australian NEW

Museum Director/Curator Australian/Korean Last Year 69

81 Photo: Trent Walter 82 Courtesy wkcda 83 Photo: Tim Bowditch 84 Luisa Strina with a painting by Cildo Meireles, part of his Cinza exhibition, 1986

Andrew’s year was a story of three biennials. The first was Kochi-Muziris, where he exhibited a trademark installation of paintings, collaged found photographs and sculpture (in this case, inflatable orbs) reflecting on postcolonial identity and the long hangover of imperialism; the second was the Honolulu Biennial, which opened in March; the third has yet to happen, but has likely taken up a good deal of the artist’s time over the past 12 months. Andrew will curate next year’s Biennale of Sydney, the first artist and first indigenous person to do so. Taking the title nirin, which means ‘edge’ in Wiradjuri, the language of his mother’s people, it will feature 98 artists, researchers and activists from 47 countries spread out across six venues in the city and show, he says, ‘how all those edges come together to make a centre’. In doing so he – and the biennial’s organisers – hope he can revitalise an institution whose recent editions have been dogged by protest.

Who was it that said the first sign of insanity is to repeat an action over and over expecting different results? Here we have Raffel and Chong, again, whose M+ Museum is now promised to open publicly (after multiple delays) in 2020–21. Aside from five executives quitting the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in May, Raffel and Chong have been busy building international partnerships (with, for example, Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and the Sydney Opera House) in a bid to secure the museum’s position as a major world player. In addition to this, the pair have been maintaining a programme of exhibitions at the M+ Pavilion, copresenting the Hong Kong pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, announcing the shortlist for the inaugural Sigg Prize and squirreling away even more acquisitions of works by 14 artists, architects and designers, including the entire body of work, past and future, of digital art pioneer Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

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84 Aaron Cezar

Luisa Strina

Curator American Last Year 78 (with Delfina Entrecanales)

Gallerist Brazilian Last Year 79

Cezar’s energy spreads far beyond the London hq of Delfina Foundation, the philanthropic outfit founded by Delfina Entrecanales, of which he is director. It’s apparent in the programming of the ‘proyectos’ section of Bogotá’s ArtBo fair, and in his position on the jury of the newly founded Absolut Creative Competition (won by Lebanese artist Sarah Saroufim).

This year it was mostly concentrated, however, in Venice, where Cezar worked alongside Ralph Rugoff to devise the Biennale’s inaugural performance programme. Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, Boychild and Zadie Xa were among those to stage performances on the opening weekend, with Vivian Caccuri, Cooking Sections, Invernomuto, Nkisi (Paul Maheke and Melika Ngombe Kolongo) and Vivien Sansour scheduled to close the exhibition. In London, meanwhile, there were shows at Delfina for Nasser Al Salem and former resident Asunción Molinos Gordo, as well as numerous of the organisation’s signature ‘family lunches’.

Strina has been in the game for 45 years, so isn’t easily fazed. Which is good, because what with Brazil’s political situation and the fact that a third edition of her boutique art fair did not materialise this year, she has had a lot to take in her stride. More positively, she had her work cut out with the many museum shows for the artists represented by her São Paulo-based gallery. In September the largest show of Cildo Meireles’s work ever staged in Latin America took over the galleries of Sesc Pompeia, showing the artist at both his most spectacular and subtly political.

The six-decade survey of Anna Maria Maiolino’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (complemented by a show back home in Strina’s Jardins space) was similarly comprehensive. Leonor Antunes, another of her artists to have a stellar year, represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale and won the Zurich Art Prize 2019.

November 2019

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10 August Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is arrested outside the Museum of Dissidence in Havana. The artist was wearing the national flag in protest against a new law regulating the display of national symbols

26 August Singer Denise Ho and Chinese-Australian political cartoonist Badiucao accuse National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne of censorship after institution declines to host a panel about art and resistance in Hong Kong

19 August Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who is working as the lawyer for us President Donald Trump, says during a televised interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that “Truth isn’t truth”

19 August Protests erupt across Indonesian Papua after 43 Papuan students are arrested for allegedly disrespecting the Indonesian flag. Over 30 people are killed as clashes with police escalate

21 August Brazil’s special secretary of culture Henrique Medeiros Pires resigns in protest of the government’s censorship of lgbtq television productions. Pires warns against the erosion of free speech in the country

INTERESTING TIMES

8 August A reported nuclear explosion at the Nyonoksa weapons-testing site in Russia kills five people, with radiation levels 20 times above normal

5 August African Art Space Project announces it will commission an artist from Africa to create an image, to be applied to the nose cone of a rocket launcher.

Blasting off in 2021, it will collect meteorological data about how Africa is being affected by global warming

5 August India revokes the part of its constitution that gives Indian-administered Kashmir special autonomous status

4 August Six-year-old boy is thrown from the viewing platform of Tate Modern, sustaining major injuries.

A teenager is later charged with attempted murder

1 August Report by Polar Portal shows dramatic increase in melting of Greenland’s ice. On 18 August, activists, officials and citizens in Iceland hold a funeral for the melted Okjokull glacier

Real/World

… ate my gringo hamster on the full moon … ‘ smart tattoos ’ warn of diabetes danger … sounders try to contain zlatan …

August 2019

30 August k11 Musea, founded by businessman and collector Adrian Cheng, opens.Cheng states his ambition to establish

21 August Los Angeles’s Institute of Contemporary Art launches a Kickstarter campaign to become the first entirely solarpowered institution in the us

31 August Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis says he will allow loan of Greek artefacts to London in exchange for return of Parthenon marbles to Athens

the arts space and retail destination on Victoria Dockside as Hong Kong’s ‘Silicon Valley of Culture’

Art/World

31 August Bangkok Art and Culture Centre fires director Pawit Mahasarinand. Pawit claims his contract was terminated after he publicly criticised the local municipality’s decision to cut funding

Deaths

9 August Takis, the Greek pioneer of kinetic art, dies aged 93

7 August Nancy Kienholz, the self-taught American artist who had recently begun to gain proper recognition for her collaborations with her husband, Ed Kienholz, dies

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CLASSIFIEDS

The mayor of Nagoya, Takashi Kawamura, raises accusations of censorship when demanding the statue be withdrawn because it ‘tramples on Japanese people’s feelings’. On 12 August, participating artists including Tania Bruguera, Pia Camil, Regina José Galindo, Minouk Lim, Park Chan-kyong and Javier Téllez sign an open letter demanding their work be pulled from the triennale until the show is reopened, as ‘a public gesture of solidarity with the censored artists’, a statement supported the following week by the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art

for bicentennial independence celebrations in 2021

3 August The Aichi Triennale comes under fire for closing the exhibition After ‘Freedom of Expression’? after only three days. Organisers say the decision came after they received a flurry of complaints over the inclusion of a sculpture of a ‘comfort woman’ by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. Statue of a Girl of Peace refers to the Korean women who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Army during the Second World War. An anonymous threat to set fire to the exhibition is cited as a particular concern in the wake of the previous month’s arson attack on Kyoto Animation Studio.

TRAMPLES

LADY AND THE

28 August Show by Drag Syndrome, a collective of drag artists with Down’s syndrome, is cancelled

by Michigan Republican candidate for us Congress Peter Meijer. Meijer, who owns the intended venue, calls the performers ‘ special souls’ who needed to be ‘protected’

26 August Maria Farmer, one of the accusers of Jeffrey Epstein, calls the New York Academy of Art out for ‘enabling’ the convicted sex offender. On 7 September, mit Media Lab director Joichi Ito steps down after a New Yorker investigation reveals he tried to conceal major donations from the multimillionaire to the institute

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Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

Museum Director American Last Year 90

Curator Cameroonian Reentry (96 in 2017)

87

Ndikung described Miracle Workers Collective, the artist group he cofounded last year and which represented Finland at the Venice Biennale, as a ‘a space of negotiation and reconciliation, a space for frictions and rehabilitation, a space in which aesthetics and ethics co-exist’. It might also serve as the curator’s mission statement for a body of work that encompasses Savvy Contemporary, the nonprofit he set up in Berlin in 2009, his role as artistic director of the 2019 Bamako Encounters Photography Biennial (opening in December) and his recent position as guest professor in curatorial studies and sound art at the Städelschule, Frankfurt. His approach interrogates established systems of thought and imagines new ones: this year’s Spinning Triangles at Savvy sought to retell a design history in which an African narrative held sway. Among the other events organised through Savvy was Shadow Circus, a group exhibition addressing Tibet’s struggle against Chinese and cia intervention in the 1950s.

88

Zhang Wei & Hu Fang

Patrick D. Flores

Gallerists Chinese Last Year 60

Curator Filipino Last Year 97

Positioned somewhere between independent space and commercial gallery, Zhang and Hu’s Vitamin Creative Space continues to plough its own furrow (their Mirrored Gardens complex outside Guangzhou promotes ‘a kind of farming-oriented life practice’; a Beijing research hub and social space, meanwhile, is dedicated to ‘the issue of awareness and energy’). Gallery artist Cao Fei this summer became the first Chinese artist to have a solo show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, while Vitamin’s commitment to finding new ways of living as much as selling was reiterated when Hu turned up at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in April to discuss ‘alternative conditions for living together’. Similar sentiments were expressed in Danh Vo’s solo exhibition at the Mirrored Gardens, ‘a space grown out of anything the artist has chanced upon or anything that has found its way to the artist’, and a long-awaited solo show by Chu Yun opened this month.

Every Step in the Right Direction, the title Flores has given the Singapore Biennale 2019 (of which he is the artistic director), is taken from the revolutionary fighter Salud Algabre, who resisted us occupation of the Philippines. Flores has described the biennial as an opportunity to extend the process of reimagining Southeast Asia independently of its construction by colonial powers. The Filipino curator certainly isn’t resting on his laurels, combining his responsibilities as curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center of the University of the Philippines in Manila, where he is also a professor, with a role as adjunct curator at the National Gallery Singapore. In his work at the latter institution, as at the biennial, he has resisted the trends towards spectacular gestures in favour of an idea of lasting change as effected through ‘time, patience and sustained commitment’. Which combination of positive mental attitude and elbow grease might explain why he’s moving in the right direction on this list.

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ArtReview

85 Photo: Giorgio Perottino 86 © Nathalie Mazeas 87 Courtesy Hu Fang 88 Courtesy Singapore Art Museum

She might have won the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from Bard College this year, but Christov-Bakargiev has no truck with the job title. She ‘drafts’ shows like a draughtswoman, she says; ‘you curate pork to make prosciutto’. Either way, there was no filler this year at Turin’s Castello di Rivoli, of which she is director, and Cerruti Villa, which put its $600m collection of modern art on display for the first time. The former hosted exhibitions by artist Michael Rakowitz and Anri Sala. Yet the bulk of Christov-Bakargiev’s energy has this year been devoted to preparing the Cerruti collection – amassed by entrepreneur Francesco Federico Cerruti from the late 1960s to 2014 – for its big public reveal in April. Through a body of work ranging from Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War (1863) to Medardo Rosso’s The Jewish Child (1892), as well as more recent paintings by Francis Bacon, Alberto Burri and Pablo Picasso, the collection didn’t need much hyping.

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90

89 Photo: Shveta Sarda 90 Courtesy 80wse / New York University 91 Courtesy Domus Collection, New York 92 Photo: Joginte· Bučinskaite·

Pablo León de la Barra

Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta Artists Indian Reentry (39 in 2017) ‘The distant future can seem more familiar than the deep present,’ the trio behind Raqs Media Collective wrote in their curatorial blurb to last year’s In the Open or in Stealth. This show at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona featured work by artists including Rosa Barba, Charles Lim and Tito Zungu in the kind of collision and collusion that is the collective’s trademark. The multilayered present, and how narratives overlap and conjoin, has been driving Raqs’s work since its formation in 1992.

Having appeared in over 20 biennials and festivals, the trio have recently moved into curating: the Shanghai Biennale in 2016, and, it was announced in late 2018, the Yokohama Triennial in 2020. Which hasn’t stopped them from making their own work: this year featured a museum solo show at Mathaf in Doha and an outing at Frith Street in London.

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Curator Mexican Last Year 88 Commanding mac Niteroi, his spaceshiplike museum across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, León de la Barra has programmed a stream of eye-catching shows, not least a weekly takeover by gold-cloaked aliens (aka a performance work by Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro). The curator has long been regarded as a conduit to the South American art scene – he is the Guggenheim’s curator-at-large for Latin America and is courted for his inside knowledge by third parties (including RollsRoyce, who tapped him up to nominate an artist for their ‘Muse’ commissioning programme). This year he’s been focusing on Central American and Caribbean art: notably by cofounding, from the ashes of the Davidoff Art Initiative, the nonprofit Caribbean Art Initiative to support artistic exchanges and cultural programmes in the region. In September, meanwhile, Federico Herrera covered the interior walls of León de la Barra’s Oscar Niemeyer-designed institution with his colourful murals.

92 Richard Chang

Lucia Pietroiusti Curator Italian

Collector Chinese-American Last Year 83 American artist Rashid Johnson and Russian collector Dasha Zhukova were the unlikely bedfellows to be jointly honoured at Performa’s annual gala this year. Picking up the bill to the glam event – a fundraiser for the long-running New York performance biennial – was Chang, the founder of the Beijing-based Domus Collection (and collector of Johnson’s work).

Live art is an expensive business, with little in the way of a market to help it along, and Chang, as president of Performa’s board, has been a major backer. Yet it’s not just cutting-edge work that attracts Chang: he’s a (heavily involved) trustee at the Royal Academy in London, as well as vice chair of the International Council at Tate. Of course this is just the public face of Chang’s patronage. As an avid collector, he is searching out, he once told ArtReview, works that have ‘truth and beauty’; when Chang favours an artist, he becomes a supporter in more ways than one.

NEW

As curator of live programmes at London’s Serpentine Galleries, Pietroiusti is the convener of the ‘cross-organisational, multi-disciplinary, crossmedia research project’ called General Ecology. Effectively a think tank supported by an art institution, its exploration into the intersection of ecology, interspecies communication and artificial consciousness was showcased this year in a symposium (coorganised with Filipa Ramos) at the London Zoo featuring artists, theorists, botanists and ecologists.

But the undoubted highlight of Pietrouisti’s research into humanity’s entanglement in the natural world – a hot-button topic in the artworld – came when she curated the Golden Lion-winning Lithuanian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. This sprawling (and vastly expensive) opera ˙ ˙ ˙ by artists and musicians Rugile Barzdžiukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina ˙ Lapelyte addressed climate change and loss by staging an artificial beach in a military complex. Which begs the question of what she plans to do next.

November 2019

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14 September Maurizio Cattelan’s America, a solid gold toilet, is stolen from a retrospective of the artist’s work at Blenheim Palace in the uk

6 September Dario Franceschini returns as Italy’s culture minister. Centre-left politician was responsible for allowing foreign nationals to take director positions in the country’s museums, a move that many worried would be reversed in the event of a populist government

4 September Michael Rakowitz wins the $100,000 Nasher Prize

4 September Metropolitan Museum in New York announces it is hiring its first curator of Native American art

Art/World

LEADERS’ RESPONSE

20 September

Millions of people across the world take to the streets to demand action to address the climate crisis. Timed to coincide with the United Nations Climate Summit in New York, a series of strikes and protests take place over seven days dubbed the ‘Global Week for the Future’.

Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old who has become a figurehead for climate protesters, uses her speech at the un General Assembly to condemn the assembled world leaders for their ‘betrayal’ of younger generations. She predicts, accurately, that the summit will not achieve any significant breakthroughs towards reducing the heating of the earth’s atmosphere, although there are crumbs of comfort as Russia belatedly adopts the Paris Agreement from which the United States and others have withdrawn. A video clip of Thunberg giving us President Trump a good, hard stare goes viral.

… had a dead squirrel on his head … footballer in mexico to look into gender selection treatment … how does dementia affect australians? …

THE GRETA GOOD

September 2019

24 September us House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces a formal impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump over allegations that he improperly sought help from foreign governments to advance his personal and political interests

24 September The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously rules that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament for five weeks is unlawful and void

23 September ImageNet announces the removal of 600,000 images of people stored on its database after a project by artist Trevor Paglen and researcher Kate Crawford exposed racial bias in its ai.

Founded in 2009, the database is one of the most widely used sources for training ai machine-learning technologies in facial recognition

Real/World

25 September Artists Mel Chin, Jeffrey Gibson and Cameron Rowland are among the 26 recipients of the 2019 MacArthur Genius Grants, each receiving an unrestricted $625,000 award

19 September Mami Kataoka is appointed director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum

17 September Mona Hatoum receives the ¥15m Praemium Imperiale prize for sculpture

17 September The Getty Trust launches a $100m initiative, to be invested in the coming years to preserve global cultural heritage through conservation efforts as well as exhibitions, scholarships and education programme

4 September In the wake of the Aichi Triennale controversy over a work by Korean artists Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung addressing ‘comfort women’, 370 artists and cultural workers, including Candice Breitz, Leung Chi Wo and Koki Tanaka, sign an open letter protesting gender discrimination in Japan

4 September Speaking at a business conference in London, v&a Museum director Tristram Hunt defends sponsorship from fossilfuel companies, arguing that they can be ‘part of the solution’ to climate change

12 September Nan Goldin and her activist group p.a.i.n. storm Purdue Pharma’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, to protest the settlement proposed by the company to settle outstanding litigation. Goldin describes deal as ‘cynical’ and calls for case to go to trial

7 September Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov walks free after an exchange of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine.

Sentsov was charged with plotting terrorist acts after speaking out against Russia’s annexation of Crimea

30 September Palais de Tokyo fires Bernard Chenebault as president of the Friends of Palais de Tokyo after he calls climate activist Greta Thunberg a ‘madwoman’ on social media and expresses the hope that she will be killed

13 September Austria’s far-right afp calls on protesters to destroy an artwork by Klaus Littmann.

The installation features 299 trees installed in a stadium in Klagenfurt; the afp claims falsely that the project was funded by taxpayers and calls on supporters to storm the site with chainsaws

WITH SOLUTIONS LIKE THESE WHO NEEDS PROBLEMS!

1 September Dai Zhikang, founder of the finance and real estate conglomerate Zendai Group and of Shanghai’s Himalayas Museum, hands himself over to the police during investigation for illegal fundraising

5 September Sotheby’s shareholders vote in favour of the company’s acquisition by BidFair usa, owned by the French Israeli telecom magnate Patrick Drahi, for $3.7bn. The company had been traded publicly for over 30 years prior to the acquisition

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CLASSIFIEDS

9 September Robert Frank, the photographer best known for his series The Americans, made during two years of roadtrips across the country, and for Cocksucker Blues, a tour film for the Rolling Stones, dies

Deaths

In a move not likely to satisfy Thunberg’s demands for meaningful change over convenient gestures, Olafur Eliasson is appointed un Goodwill Ambassador for Climate Action

‘FUCKOFF’ REVEALS SOURCE

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Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo

Art Fair Directors American/British/British/British Last Year 99

Gallerists Italian Last Year 82

It’s been a rocky year for Emanuel’s Endeavor, the talent and live-events group that owns Frieze, the art fair franchise set up by Sharp and Slotover and managed by Siddall. In September Endeavor pulled the plug on a stock market launch just hours before the bell (believing it to be undervalued), and in March it returned a $400m cash injection from the Saudi Arabian government’s investment fund following the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It emerged, meanwhile, that while Sharp and Slotover retain a 30 percent share in Frieze, they have the option to cash in next year. Yet this corporate wrangling didn’t affect action in the aisles: while the New York event hasn’t recaptured the excitement attending its debut, it did avoid the weather calamities that have blighted recent editions; London sales were reportedly brisk; and the celeb-filled inaugural venture into Los Angeles was judged successful.

95

‘You have to be tactical in Cuba.’ In December, Fiaschi was one of Havana’s arts community negotiating with the Cuban government to make alterations to Decree 349, a censorial law described by Amnesty International as ‘dystopian’. Continua, the gallery run by the trio, has been in Cuba for four years and, while their collaboration with the regime has drawn criticism, there is no doubting their commitment to making shows where others fear to tread. The Beijing gallery (they’re one of the few Western galleries to have made their base in China there rather than in Shanghai) gave the late French-Moroccan photographer Leila Alaoui her first show in China, while sustaining their activity in San Gimignano (with shows for Nikhil Chopra, Giovanni Ozzola, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov and Nari Ward) and Les Moulins, outside of Paris (Ahmed Mater, Nedko Solakov, and a group show about power). A year of consolidation, then, but, given their innate sense of adventure, one assumes that plans are afoot.

96

Massimo De Carlo

Artist Singaporean NEW

Gallerist Italian Last Year 91

Ho mixes fact and fiction in his explorations of Southeast Asia’s cultural histories, a genre-defying approach befitting an artist who is also a curator and theatre director. The Singaporean artist’s ongoing magnum opus is The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, an online database of texts, music and images that provides an alternative A to Z to the region, and several of his projects are offshoots or elaborations of the Dictionary. These erudite interrogations into how power, history and myth are entangled have recently made him a shoo-in for international surveys with an intellectual bent, notably the Sharjah Biennial and Aichi Triennale this year. Switching hats, Ho co-curated the Asian Art Biennial in Taichung with Taiwanese artist Hsu Chia-Wei, and directed The Mysterious Lai Teck at Singapore International Festival of Arts. As testament to his rising stock, this year saw his first solo at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, titled R for Rhombicuboctahedron.

Climbing the external spiral staircase to the Milan headquarters of De Carlo’s four-site operation, a newly restored 1930s Piero Portaluppidesigned apartment that opened in March, visitors were treated to a group show featuring the likes of Rudolf Stingel, Richard Prince, Felix GonzalezTorres and Yan Pei-Ming. Curated by the gallerist and Francesco Bonami, the exhibition, like the architecture housing it, sought to ‘fuse elements of historicism with modernity’. Yan was the subject of a solo show at De Carlo’s second Milanese gallery in September, while fellow painter Jamian Juliano-Villani (pictures of Amy Winehouse, goats wearing Ugg boots, a dog waving a knife), took over the London space over the summer. She was followed by the more minimal, abstract canvases of McArthur Binion (who also exhibited, earlier this year, in De Carlo’s Hong Kong gallery), described by the Financial Times as ‘some of the finest and most thoughtprovoking contemporary paintings to be seen in Europe right now’.

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ArtReview

96 Photo: Pasquale Abbattista

Ho Tzu Nyen

93 Photo: Jonathan Hökklo (Siddall) 94 Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith 95 Photo: Matthew Teo

Ari Emanuel, Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp & Victoria Siddall

97

98 Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood Gallerists Brazilian/Brazilian/American Last Year 98 97 Courtesy Paulo Nazareth 98 Photo: Myriam Boulos 99 Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation

There were plenty of new faces this year at Mendes Wood dm’s three spaces. The Egyptian-Canadian artist Anna Boghiguian exhibited for the first time with the gallery at its original location in São Paulo; Giangiacomo Rossetti has a solo show at its Brussels townhouse in November, where he will also curate a selection of work by Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (the gallery debuted the twentieth-century Brazilian painter’s landscapes at its New York gallery in January). Sticking with painting, Caracas-born, Grenada-raised Alvaro Barrington and American Henry Taylor also joined the gallery this year in something like a swap deal: Mendes Wood DM’s Paloma Bosquê will return the favour with a show at Barrington and Taylor’s North American representatives Blum and Poe next year. The trio’s commitment to creating new networks was equally apparent in their takeover of Thomas Dane’s Naples outpost in September.

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Artist Lebanese-British NEW In common with Forensic Architecture, the collective with which Abu Hamdan has several times collaborated (he studied under its founder, Eyal Weizman), the Lebanese-British artist is committed to art as a form of political activism or, to use his own words, ‘truth production’. He differs from it in seeming to be as committed to the demands of making art as to the ethical responsibilities of bearing witness. Styling himself as a ‘private ear’, a term he says allows him to combine the role of artist and investigator, he has this year shown his investigations into sound in art fairs (in the Parcours section of Art Basel), commercial galleries (shows at Maureen Paley in London and Sfeir-Semler in Beirut), biennials (Venice and Sharjah) and museums (a solo at Witte de With Center, Rotterdam). He also follows Forensic Architecture in being nominated for the Turner Prize this year, for a work made in collaboration with Amnesty International that maps a Syrian prison through prisoners’ recollections of the sounds they heard.

100

Bose Krishnamachari & Shubigi Rao

David Kordansky Gallerist American NEW

Art Fair Director/Artist Indian Last Year 80 ‘Biennales are sometimes floating cities that are unmoored from their locality or regionality,’ noted Shubigi Rao on her appointment as artistic director for the 2020 edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In an age swarming with biennials (in which governments and councils have also cottoned on to them as exercises in soft power) the curator’s comments bode well for the fifth edition of the kmb, a biennial that has set its roots in Kerala, remains India’s largest art exhibition and fosters dialogue between local and international artists. Founder/artist Bose Krishnamachari has also been keen to point out that the appointment of Rao ‘is in keeping with the Biennale’s tradition of having an artist as the curator’. That this artist/ curator is pursuing an ongoing project titled Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, which combines film, publishing and visual art to explore the history of book destruction, adds to the intrigue.

‘Artists want to see their gallery put their money where their mouth is,’ Kordansky said in an interview as he announced he would be doubling the space of his Los Angeles gallery. Since setting up shop in 2003, after studying performance art at CalArts, Kordansky has become one of the most influential presences on la’s art scene, with an intergenerational roster ranging from rising artists such as Simone Leigh and Tala Madani, to veterans Fred Eversley and Sam Gilliam. (Recent keen interest in the latter’s work, which included the sale of a painting for $2.2m at Christie’s last year, was arguably kickstarted when Gilliam joined the gallery five years ago.) Kordansky’s Mid City space is set in 2020 to occupy the entire block, with an added 400sqm of exhibition space and a courtyard for readings, talks and performances further accommodating his and his artists’ growing ambitions.

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The 2019 Power 100 1 Glenn D. Lowry

36 Haegue Yang

69 Daniel Buchholz

2 Nan Goldin

37 Anselm Franke

70 Sadie Coles

3 Iwan & Manuela Wirth

38 Marc Spiegler

71 Liam Gillick

4 Hito Steyerl

39 Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers

72 Claire Hsu

5 David Zwirner

40 Stefan Kalmár

73 Adrian Cheng

6 Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy

41 Bernard Blistène & Christine Macel

74 Almine Rech

7 Thelma Golden 8 Yayoi Kusama 9 Maria Balshaw 10 ruangrupa 11 Miuccia Prada 12 Hans Ulrich Obrist 13 Pierre Huyghe

42 Marian Goodman 43 Maja Hoffmann 44 Massimiliano Gioni 45 Philippe Parreno 46 Nicholas Logsdail, Alex Logsdail & Greg Hilty

75 Lorenz Helbling 76 Tom Eccles 77 Sunjung Kim 78 Ute Meta Bauer 79 Wang Wei & Liu Yiqian 80 Ralph Rugoff 81 Brook Andrew

14 Banksy

47 Nadia & Rajeeb Samdani, Diana Campbell Betancourt

82 Suhanya Raffel & Doryun Chong

15 Wolfgang Tillmans

48 Gavin Brown

83 Aaron Cezar

16 Fred Moten

49 Olafur Eliasson

84 Luisa Strina

17 Cao Fei

50 Bernard Arnault

85 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

18 Eyal Weizman

51 William Kentridge

86 Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

19 Decolonize This Place

52 Emmanuel Perrotin

87 Zhang Wei & Hu Fang

20 Theaster Gates

53 Eugene Tan

88 Patrick D. Flores

21 #MeToo

54 Vincent Worms

22 Kerry James Marshall

55 Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

89 Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta

23 Marc Glimcher

56 Koyo Kouoh

90 Pablo León de la Barra

24 Ai Weiwei

57 Thaddaeus Ropac

91 Richard Chang

25 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

58 Manuel Borja-Villel

92 Lucia Pietrouisti

26 David Hammons

59 José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

27 Larry Gagosian

60 Hyun-Sook Lee

93 Ari Emanuel, Matthew Slotover, Amanda Sharp & Victoria Siddall

28 Kara Walker

61 Elizabeth Ann Macgregor

94 Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo

29 Adam D. Weinberg

62 Paul B. Preciado

95 Ho Tzu Nyen

30 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

63 Kader Attia

31 Michael Govan

64 François Pinault

32 Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi

65 Eli & Edythe Broad

97 Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood

33 Jay Jopling

66 Trevor Paglen

98 Lawrence Abu Hamdan

34 Arthur Jafa

67 Esther Schipper

99 Bose Krishnamachari & Shubigi Rao

35 Pamela Joyner

68 Christine Tohmé

96 Massimo De Carlo

100 David Kordansky

WED 29 APRIL

A K L W AT E R F R O N T

OPENING NIGHT

THE CLOUD /

VIP PREVIEW &

Image Credits

each from top to bottom pp 78–79 (October) Sotheby’s unveils Banksy’s newly-titled Love is in the Bin at Sotheby’s London, 12 October 2018, photo: Tristan Fewings / Getty Images for Sotheby’s. pp 82–83 (November) Naf Naf adverstisement, 1985, art directed by Franck Davidovici; David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972, acrylic on canvas, 216 × 305 cm, © the artist, courtesy Christie’s. pp 86–87 (December) Activists protest and demand the removal of Warren B. Kanders at the Whitney Museum, New York, 9 December 2018, photo: Erik McGregor / Pacific Press / Alamy Live News. pp 90–91 (January) És Uma Maluca performs outside Casa França-Brasil cultural centre in Rio de Janeiro, 14 January 2019, photo: Pilar Olivares / Reuters. pp 94–95 (February) Lid of the coffin of the priest of Heryshef, Nedjemankh, 150–50 bc, Metropolitan Museum Collection, image licensed to public domain. pp 98–99 (March) Carolee Schneemann, Eye Body #11, 1963, courtesy the estate of the artist, Galerie Lelong and Co, Hales Gallery and p.p.o.w. Gallery, New York; Agnès Varda at the 2019 Berlinale, photo: Martin Kraft (photo.martinkraft.com), licensed under cc by-sa 4.0; Cyclone Idai approaching the Sofala province of Mozambique, 14 March 2019, modis image captured by nasa’s Aqua satellite, image licensed to public domain; Okwui Enwezor, photo: Maximilian Geuter.

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pp 102–03 (April) A fire breaks out at Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, 15 April 2019, photo: Hubert Hitier / afp / Getty Images. pp 106–07 (May) Rugile Barzdžiukaite· , Vaiva Grainyte· and Lina Lapelyte· , Sun & Sea Marina, 2019, installation and performance at the Lithuanian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, photo: Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. pp 110–11 (June) Faith Ringgold, Judson 3, 1970, © the artist, courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art. pp 114–15 (July) Anish Kapoor, Cloud Gate, 2006, installed at Millennium Park, Chicago, photo: Adam Jones, image licensed to public domain. pp 118–19 (August) One version of Kim Seokyung and Kim Eun-sung’s Statue of a Girl of Peace, 2011, in Sokcho, South Korea, image licensed to public domain. pp 122–23 (September) Greta Thunberg protests outside the Swedish parliament, with a sign that reads ‘school strike for climate’ in Swedish, 27 August 2018, photo: Anders Hellberg, licensed under Creative Commons; Klaus Littmann, for forest – The Unending Attraction of Nature, 2019, installation at Wörthersee Stadium, Klagenfurt, photo: Gerhard Maurer.

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Power in Numbers

Less than a general revolt 133

134

ARTISTS GALLERISTS CURATORS COLLECTORS MUSEUM DIRECTORS ART FAIR DIRECTORS PHILOSOPHERS ACADEMICS ACTIVIST MOVEMENTS ARCHITECT SCHOOL DIRECTOR

* totals exceed 100 due to shared entries

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