January is a great month to reboot after fall art world madness and end of year holiday, family drama. As you settle into the slow months (and using your gym membership), be sure to update your calendar with these important and historic museum exhibitions taking place in New York this year. Our top six exhibitions run the gamut from the über hip “NYC 1993” at New Museum to the tight lipped mega Robert Irwin show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Ed Atkins, MoMA PS1
January 20–April 8, 2013
Known for his high-definition videos that defy standard narrative conventions, Ed Atkins works with filmic and text-based forms in technological transition. The artist considers HD technology deathlike because of its virtualized form, and he deploys this bodiless movie format to highlight the conflicted intimacies that contemporary mechanisms of cultural production represent and allow us to achieve.
Afrum I (White), 1967
“NYC 1993”: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, New Museum
February 13–June 26, 2013
NYC 1993 looks at art made and exhibited in New York over the course of one year, providing a synchronic panorama in which established artists and emerging figures of the time are presented alongside the work of authors whose influence has since faded from the discussion.
Projects 100: Akram Zaatari, The Museum of Modern Art
June 4–September 23, 2013
Akram Zaatari is a Beirut-based artist who uses photography, video, and performance to explore issues pertinent to the Lebanese postwar condition, and specifically the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars though television and media. Zaatari collects and examines a wide range of documents that testify to the cultural and political conditions of Lebanon’s postwar society.
Untitled (Conrans I), 1992–93
Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art
June 18–September 22, 2013
This long overdue retrospective, the first major museum exhibition of Ken Price’s work in New York, will trace the development of his ceramic sculptures with approximately sixty-five examples from 1959 to the present. In addition to the sculptures, there will be a small group of Price’s landscape drawings from the past ten years. The artist’s close friend, the architect Frank Gehry, will collaborate on the design of the exhibition.
James Turrell, Guggenheim Museum
June 21–September 25, 2013
James Turrell’s first exhibition in a New York museum since 1980 focuses on the artist’s groundbreaking explorations of perception, light, color, and space, with a special focus on the role of site-specificity in his practice. At its core is a major new project that recasts the Guggenheim rotunda as an enormous volume filled with shifting artificial and natural light.
Robert Irwin, The Whitney Museum of American Art
June 27–September 1
We’re not actually sure what this show will entail, as details are not available, but given his oeuvre and intense commitment to artistic practice and ideas, we’re sure it’ll be nothing short of amazing.
Christopher Wool, Guggenheim Museum
October 25, 2013–January 22, 2014
At the heart of Christopher Wool’s creative project, which spans three decades of rigorous and highly focused practice, is the question of how a picture can be conceived, realized, and experienced today. Engaging the complexities of painting as a medium, as well as the anxious rhythms of the urban environment and a wide range of cultural references, his agile, largely monochrome works propose an open-ended series of responses to this central problem.
