September 23, 2004
Around town, around the world
Not too many gallery exhibitions open in the next few days, as most now have their September shows on view. Museums' schedules, however, are almost never aligned, and so there are plenty of openings worth mentioning. A big one that I failed to mention was last night's opening of a Boris Mikhailov retrospective, featuring 500 photographs, and a new Lucy McKenzie installation at the ICA Boston.
In New York, Iona Rozeal Brown opens her second solo exhibition tonight at Caren Golden Fine Art, which inaugurates its new space on West 23rd St. Also tonight, at 6:00, is a screening of "Alvaro Siza: Transforming Reality," a new documentary about the Portuguese architect. It takes place in the Parsons auditorium at 66 W. 12th St.
Turning elsewhere, tonight the traveling survey "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art" opens at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco and the Chapman Brothers talk at Tate Britain, London.
Tomorrow two big exhibitions open: the annual "Printemps du Septembre" in Toulouse, France, curated by Pascal Pique and artist Jean-Marc Bustamente, and "Nancy Spero: Weighing the Heart Against a Feather of Truth," the artist's first retrospective, at the Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. It is sad that Spero's husband, the artist Leon Golub, will be unable to share in her achievement, as he passed away in August at age 82. Elsewhere tomorrow Rosemarie Troeckel opens an exhibition at Tramway in Glasgow, "Kulturkammer," a solo exhibition of work by John Bock, opens at the ICA in London, and "Nothing Compared to This" opens at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The latter exhibition is marked by its lack of wall labels, its playing of ambient music in the exhibition space by musicians like Brian Eno, and its concept-driven 24x24" fold-out brochure designed by my friend David Reinfurt of the firm O-R-G. Friday also marks the 25th anniversary of my birth.
Saturday brings a couple of big-name openings: the touring Donald Judd retrospective, organized by Nicholas Serota for Tate Modern, lands at the Kunstmuseum Basel; the 26th Sao Paulo Biennial opens; and Althoff's mid-career survey opens at the MCA Chicago. I wrote about the Althoff's debut at the ICA Boston, where it was organized by new Chief Curator Nicholas Baume. What I didn't say then is that it is one of the two or three best solo exhibitions I have seen since I moved to New York over three years ago and began looking at art in earnest. To that end, I made a second pilgrimmage to Boston in August explicitly to see the exhibition a second time, and will be fortunate enough to see it twice more at its Chicago venue. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Elsewhere Saturday, "Fashination" opens at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm; "Power & Persuasion. Avant-garde European Graphic Design and Photo-montage" opens at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, "Real World: The Dissolving Space of Experience" (featuring Katy Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, and Hiroshi Sugito) opens at Modern Art Oxford; and John Neff and Sally-Ann Rowland (who has a solo show at ZieherSmith in New York right now) open at Western Exhibitions in Chicago. Last but not least, critic and curator Jan Avgikos speaks at 1pm on Hanne Darboven at Dia:Beacon.