While in London next week for Frieze, don’t forget to get out of the fair tents and explore the many exhibitions on view at galleries and museums around town. Here is a non-exhaustive but selective list that should keep you busy.
DONNA HUANCA: SCAR CYMBALS at the Zabludowicz Collection in Chalk Farm
September 29-December 18
This first performance-led commission in the Zabludowicz Collection’s space will also be the American artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.K. Donna Huanca’s work focuses on the body, and in particular, the skin. For the Zabludowicz’s annual commission, Huanca has orchestrated daily performances by painted models that will activate a series of new site-responsive architectural and sculptural installations in the former 19th-century Methodist Chapel.
1952
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE at the Tate Modern in Southbank
July 6-October 30
This is the largest retrospective dedicated to the career of Georgia O’Keeffe outside of America. Spanning the six most prolific decades of O’Keeffe’s life, this show charts the progression of her oeuvre aiming to dispel the clichés that persist about the artist. Attention is given to O’Keeffe’s complex relationship with her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, notably through a selection of intimate photos by him of the artist and their circle of friends.
NEO RAUCH at David Zwirner in Mayfair
October 5-November 12
The gallery will show new paintings by Neo Rauch in the artist’s debut solo presentation in the U.K. Rauch creates figurative, surrealist paintings on both the large-scale and smaller scales. The figures and scenes he paints instinctively, set in a background of suburban architecture or anonymous interiors, evoke complex and imaginative narratives. Rauch employs a very distinct palette of colors, both organic and surprising. Some have related his oeuvre to Old Master painting, but what is certain is his work, and the mysterious mythologies he inspires, are all his own.
Willow, 2014
WILLIAM EGGLESTON PORTRAITS at The National Portrait Gallery in Covent Garden
July 21-October 23
This show brings together over 100 works by Eggleston—the American photographer who legitimized color photography’s presence in the art world. This is the first London museum retrospective dedicated to the artist since 2002, and the most comprehensive of his portraits to date. It will feature unseen portraits of Joe Strummer and Dennis Hopper, and rare images of Eggleston’s own close relations. It is a unique window into the artist’s home life, and it shows how public and private portraiture came together in Eggleston’s work.
NIGEL COOKE: ROMAN WILLOW at Pace Gallery in Mayfair
September 21-October 22
This exhibition of new paintings by Nigel Cooke departs from the traditional nihilistic imagery developed as recognizable trademark of his practice, rather pursuing a more poetic sensibility founded in the impressionistic and sensorial worlds. Cooke takes inspiration from places like Córdoba, Formentera, Rome, and the Italian Alps. The show also coincides with the release of a major new monograph published by Phaidon.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM at The Royal Academy in Mayfair
September 24-January 2, 2017
The Royal Academy of Arts is presenting the first major exhibition on Abstract Expressionism to be held in the U.K. in almost six decades. With over 150 paintings, sculptures, and photographs from public and private collections across the world, this exhibition encompasses masterpieces by artists like Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Motherwell.
MARC CAMILLE CHAIMOWICZ at Serpentine Galleries in Kensington
September 29-November 20
Increasingly influential for younger generations of artists, Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s work explores the space between public and private, design and art, and includes painting, sculpture and photography with prototypes for everyday objects, furnishings and wallpapers. Chaimowicz views the domestic interior as an environment heavily invested with cultural, literary and biographical references. This retrospective, “An Autumn Lexicon”, draws upon ideas of memory and place in a new installation that includes a re-staging of the immersive and groundbreaking work Enough Tiranny, which was first presented at the Serpentine in 1972.
© The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016
JEAN-PAUL KELLY: THAT ENDS THAT MATTER at Delfina Foundation in Westminster
September 29-November 26
Jean-Paul Kelly’s new show, “That ends that matter,” focuses on documentary practices in U.K. courtrooms. The exhibition follows Kelly’s residency at Delfina Foundation in 2015, during which he visited the City of London Magistrates’ Court for eight weeks as a visitor, and was particularly intrigued by the fact that the U.K. Criminal Justice Act forbids all recording and sketching in court. The show’s main piece, an eight-minute three-channel video, is a re-enactment of actual events that the artist witnessed in court.
LYGIA PAPE at Hauser & Wirth in Mayfair
September 23-November 19
Brazilian artist Lygia Pape was a central figure of the Neo-Concrete movement who initiated a unique approach to abstraction. This show focuses on Pape’s early Desenho and Tecelares creations, as well as the later iconic Ttéia installations. The works on view span over 30 years, mapping the way in which Pape transformed Concrete art’s geometric shapes into three-dimensional objects designed to be manipulated by participants and experienced in a sensorial manner.
Georgia O’Keeffe
TONY CRAGG at Lisson Gallery in Marylebone
October 1-November 5
Spanning both London venues, this show features the latest works in Cragg’s career-long pursuit of developing specific groups of sculptural themes and forms that explore different materials and ways of reshaping the world around us. The exhibition offers several new departures, including works entitled Industrial Nature, which result from the collision and fusion of organic and artificial elements within and without contained volumes.
VIRGINIA OVERTON at White Cube in Bermondsey
September 30-November 6
White Cube will show a new site-specific installation by Overton, whose practice has an intuitive approach that acts as a direct response to her physical presence in a particular space. Infused with an ethos of economy, the artist favors elemental materials and frequently recycled objects found on site—a process that welcomes trial and error. This exhibition follows “Sculpture Gardens,” which was her recent commissioned project for The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
TOBY ZIEGLER: POST-HUMAN PARADISE at Simon Lee in Mayfair
October 5-November 12
London-based artist Toby Ziegler is notorious for digitally distorting or pixelating classical compositions, such as Flemish Old Master paintings or Victorian England’s Staffordshire kitsch dog figurines. This time, it’s Matisse’s 1936 Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude), who’s been numerically twisted. Being drawn to the painting’s embodiment of shift from figuration to abstraction, Ziegler created a new series of paintings and a new two-channel video work to show at Simon Lee Gallery.
NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY at Victoria Miro Gallery in Islington
October 4-November 5
This is Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s first major solo exhibition in Europe. The Nigerian artist’s paintings welcome a sort of voyeurism by amalgamating images of personal everyday domestic life with public imagery derived from Nigerian pop culture and politics. These combinations are densely layered in figurative compositions, and are complicated in order to counter generalizations about African or diaspora-related experience.
To read more about Frieze London 2016, pick up the latest copy of Whitewaller in London next week.
