For arts and culture, 2021 represented – at least in part – a year of recovery after a discouraging 2020 marked by cancelled or postponed events and exhibitions. Museums are back to welcoming visitors from all over the world, and art fairs are once again a meeting point for collectors and art enthusiasts. However, the situation is not the same in all countries: in Austria, at the end of November, a national lockdown forced museums and galleries to stop for a month, reassured this time by a pre-established date for the restart. New lockdowns have recently been announced in other countries, both in Europe and elsewhere.
Eleven exhibitions not to miss in 2022
From Tate Modern in London to MAXXI in Rome, from Lugano to New York to Paris: the are the art shows you should absolutely visit in 2022.
Image: Barbara Kruger. Untitled (Forever), 2017. Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2017–18. Amorepacific Museum of Art (APMA), Seoul. Photo by Timo Ohler and courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
Image: Oberon (1. Orthodoxer Salon 64 – E. Neijsvestnij) Oil on canvas 250 × 200 cm Städel Museum, Francfort-sur-le-Main Acquired in 2010 thanks to a donation from Dorette Hildebrand-Staab © Georg Baselitz 2021 Photo © Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Image: Courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
Image: Francis Bacon, Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969, Oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5cm, Private collection, © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Image: James Barnor, Sick-Hagemeyer shop assistant with bottles, taken as a colour guide, Accra, 1971, C-Type print © James Barnor/Autograph ABP, London
Image: installation view of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 29, 2021-February 13, 2022). From left to right: Three Flags, 1958; Map, 1961; Flag on Orange Field, 1957. Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Image: David LaChapelle (American, born 1963).Andy Warhol: Last Sitting, November 22, 1986. Chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist
Image: Sharon Lockhart, Untitled, 2010. Chromogenic print, 37 × 49 in. (94 × 124.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Helen Kornblum in honor of Roxana Marcoci. © 2021 Sharon Lockhart.
Image: Leonora Carrington Self-portrait c.1937–38. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002 © 2021 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Image: MAXXI CAO FEI, Nova, 2019 Video Still Courtesy: Cao Fei e Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Oriental Poppies, 1927, Oil on canvas, 76.7 x 102.1 cm, Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, museum purchase 1937 © 2021, ProLitteris, Zurich.
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- Clara Rodorigo
- 29 December 2021
The spectre of the Omicron variant looms over a sector already plagued by the pandemic. The hope is that 2022 will in any case be a year of growth for cultural institutions. From the Tate Modern in London, where the exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders”, previously staged at the MET in New York, will be shown, to the MAXXI in Rome with the exhibition “Cao Fei. Supernova”, dedicated to the movies of the Chinese artist, acclaimed by the international public. In short, the options are many. We have prepared a list with eleven exhibitions to visit in 2022.
Opening image: MAXXI, CAO FEI, Nova, 2019 Video Still Courtesy: Cao Fei and Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
Opening last September 19 and on view through January 24, 2022, “THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.” traces the entire career and artistic production of Barbara Kruger, from the “pasteups” to the digital productions of the last decades, as well as works on vinyl, site-specific installations, animations and multi-channel video installations. Kruger herself has personally collaborated on what cannot be defined as a retrospective but as a new, unprecedented work of art.
Opened last October 20, the exhibition "Baselitz: La Rétrospective" will be on view until March 7, 2022 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The artist himself has contributed to the organization of the retrospective, dedicated to over sixty years of artistic production and articulated along a chronological path that traces the most significant moments of the artist’s life, ranging from figurative art to abstraction and conceptual art.
Opened last November 20, the exhibition “Maurizio Cattelan: The Last Judgement,” curated by Francesco Bonami, will be on view until February 20, 2022 at UCCA Beijing. The title quotes Michelangelo’s fresco inside the Sistine Chapel in Rome. The exhibition presents for the first time in China more than thirty years of “provocative, mocking and joking” artistic production.
"Francis Bacon, Man and Beast" will be on view from next January 29 until April 17, 2022 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition will retrace 50 years of the artist’s career, focusing on his fascination with the animal kingdom, as evidenced by Bacon’s approach to the human body, which is distorted and deformed assuming brutal, animalistic appearances.
From March 13 to July 31, 2022 MASI Lugano will present “James Barnor, Accra/London – A Retrospective”, the largest retrospective ever dedicated to the Ghanaian photographer. An exhibition realized by the Serpentine Galleries, London, displaying studio portraits, journalistic reportages, fashion editorials and street photography, testifying to how Barnor’s career has ranged across multiple photographic genres.
Opening last September 29, “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” will be on view through February 13, 2022. It is an exhibition that inhabits, at the same time, two institutions that have always been linked to Johns’ work: The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It represents the most extensive retrospective ever dedicated to the artist. The focus, hence the title, is on Johns’ profound fascination for mirroring and for the double, enhanced by the choice of the double location.
From November 19, 2021, to June 19, 2022, the Brooklyn Museum in New York presents “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” an exhibition dedicated to the impact the Byzantine Catholic tradition had on the life of one of the most famous artists of all time, Andy Warhol. The exhibition testifies to how much the artist experimented with styles and symbolism from Catholic art, reformulating and recontextualizing it within the framework of pop culture.
The exhibition “Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum” will open at MoMA in New York on April 16 and will be on view through October 2, 2022. The exhibition will feature over 100 years of photography and stands as “a tribute to the generosity of collector Helen Kornblum.” It will showcase the contributions of women in portraiture, photojournalism, avant-garde experimentation, advertising and performance art.
"Surrealism Beyond Borders” opens on February 24 and will be on view until August 29, 2022. The long-awaited exhibition, first held at the MET in New York, will soon be hosted by the Tate Modern in London. It will present the history of the revolutionary Surrealist movement in a new light, focusing on the artists and groups that were inspired by it, from Buenos Aires to Cairo, from Lisbon to Mexico City, Prague, Seoul and Tokyo.
From December 16, 2021 to May 8, 2022, MAXXI in Rome presents “Cao Fei. Supernova”, curated by Hou Hanru and Monia Trombetta. The exhibition features the acclaimed films “Haze and Fog”, (2013) and “La Town”, (2014), along with the artist’s latest works: the science fiction film “Nova”, (2019), the virtual reality work “The Eternal Wave”, (2020) and “Isle of Instability”, (2020), a film that explores the psychological repercussions and effects of the pandemic.
From 23 January until 22 May 2022, the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Canton Basel, Switzerland, presents its first exhibition for 2022: a retrospective devoted to the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, a major figure in American modern art and one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. The exhibition provides an overview of the artist's career, from abstraction to her famous depictions of flowers, focusing on O'Keeffe's highly personal ability to represent her particular point of view on her surroundings.