Exhibitions not to be missed this summer

Two artists born in the same year, 1932, at opposite poles of the earth, who have never met: James Lee Byars (1932 - 1997) and Seung-Taek Lee (1932) come together in Venice, at Palazzo Loredan, home of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti. Curated by Allegra Pesenti, the exhibition brings together works made over the course of more than sixty years, emphasizing the singularity of these two great artists and the elements of formal and conceptual continuity in their respective practices. The carefully crafted layout fosters a dialogue of connections between the pieces and the beauty of the venue, elevating each other.

The Pecci Center in Prato this summer presents the first major solo exhibition in Italy by Chinese artist Yu Ji, with a site-specific project entitled Hide Me in Your Belly that carries on the research begun with her exhibition at CCA Berlin last year. Underlying her projects are the perceptions of everyday environments, where the natural merges with the constructed, and the line between what is living and what is lifeless is increasingly blurred. In this case, the artist engages with the context of the city of Prato and the spaces of the Pecci Center to create new works alongside pre-existing works.

MACRO rich schedule for summer 2024 presents the first major anthological exhibition dedicated to Elisabetta Benassi. Entitled Self-Portrait at Work and curated by Luca Lo Pinto, the exhibition showcases the more than two decades of work by the Roman artist, whose exploration has been evident through a range of languages, techniques, and images, all tied to the present day. As the title anticipates, the exhibition reflects on the meaning of retrospective and is realized as a true self-portrait of the artist, within an exhibition design where the works are immersed in a dialogue that creates a single great artistic intervention.

Magnificent Product is the first major institutional solo exhibition of Vaginal Davis, a queer artist who since the late 1970s, with the beginning of a multifaceted career in Los Angeles, has never neglected the political aspect in their work, making room for issues of gender, class and social equality.  Their pioneering and diverse work is a mix of styles and media, where punk meets glamour, queer activism meets racial justice, and resistance meets joy. The Stockholm exhibition is a total immersion in Vaginal Davis's practice, with three main spaces that let you look at this artist from the infinite range of perspectives presented by their work.

Studio Rex was a photography studio located in Marseille's working-class neighborhood, founded in 1933 by Assadour Keussayan, a survivor of the Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey who migrated to the French city. His studio, closed in 2018, was a meeting point for migrants from North and West Africa and other countries. French collector Jean-Marie Donat acquired a large part of Studio Rex's photographic archive, which will be on display at C/O Berlin from June 1, in an exhibition that is an invitation to dialogue between Africa and Europe, and to explore the collective memory of a very recent past that is never far from the present.

Climate change, digital revolution, growing national and global injustice, crisis of democracy and community: the age of polycrisis is the one we are living in, and art can be helpful in exploring the foundations of contemporary life. The project Survival in the 21st Century, developed by Georg Diez and Nicolaus Schafhausen in close collaboration with the Deichtorhallen, encompasses elemental issues of ecology, technology and spirituality through the vision of about forty artists. 

Children's games have been the subject of the last two decades of research by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, who has traveled the world to discover them, telling stories and cultural traditions that are far from each other but have in common the value that the moment of play can have for a child, regardless of the latitude of the place where he or she lives. Ricochets transforms the Barbican Centre's gallery into a kind of cinematic playground in the UK's first presentation of the Children's Games project, along with a series of animated films focused on games made with hands that intrigue and entertain children and adults alike.

Following the incredible exhibition dedicated to Mark Rothko last winter, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is hosting for the summer of 2024 the largest retrospective realized in the last 30 years on the work of Ellsworth Kelly. Paintings, sculptures, collages and photographs chronicling the multifaceted practice of the American artist, known for his exploration of the relationship between form, space, line and color. More than seventy works are presented, abstract compositions that transcend all trivial categorization and have become landmarks for succeeding generations of artists.

Like any other summer, the photography festival Les Rencontres de la Photographie d'Arles, founded in 1970 by photographer Lucien Clergue, writer Michel Tournier and historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette, returns to Arles. The 2024 program with the exhibition titled Encounters dedicates the place of honor to Mary Ellen Mark (1940-2015), an American photographer known for her portraits and work in advertising and photojournalism. The event includes a rich program of exhibitions in a variety of venues around the city, held in collaboration with several cultural institutions, including one on the history of graffiti entitled All in the Name of the Name, curated by Hugo Vitrani in collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Dal Zeitz MOCAA di Cape Town a Basilea, When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting curata da Koyo Kouoh sarà ospitata nelle sale del Kunstmuseum di Basilea: più di duecento dipinti e opere provenienti da ventisei paesi raccontano in che modo gli artisti del continente africano hanno trattato nella pittura l'esperienza del quotidiano, estendendo la ricerca all’ultimo secolo. Come suggerisce il titolo – una variante del titolo della serie tv del 2019 “When They See Us” diretta dalla regista Ava DuVernay - le opere in mostra operano uno slittamento della prospettiva che da esterno diventa interno, mettendo a fuoco la realtà vissuta degli artisti come soggetto della propria arte.

In the year marking the 50th anniversary of the Dia Art Foundation, a seminal New York institution for contemporary art history, the Beacon and Chelsea venues are hosting works by British artist and filmmaker Steve Mc Queen. A new work commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation in collaboration with the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, runs in the lower level of the Beacon building, entitled Bass, a complete environment composed of the structural elements of the moving image on film: light and sound.

MoMA PS1 through September 2, 2024 is hosting the first retrospective of artist Pacita Abad (1946-2004). Over thirty years of the artist’s career are chronicled with more than fifty works, most of which have never been shown to the public in the United States before. Largely self-taught, Abad is mostly known for her trapuntos, or quilted paintings that take on an almost sculptural three-dimensionality. Having moved to the United States in 1970 to escape political persecution by the authoritarian Marcos regime, Abad has sought through her works to give visibility to political refugees and oppressed peoples.

The visionary and powerful painting of Mickalene Thomas comes to The Broad with the exhibition All About Love, produced in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery in London and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Her art practice revolves around the concepts of femininity, beauty, sexuality and gender, focusing especially on black female representation, amplifying the potential of portraiture to communicate the subject’s lived experience, and ranging across techniques from collage to photography to installation.

Takahashi Ryutaro’s collection consists of more than three thousand works of art, and is one of the most important for Japanese contemporary art. The exhibition at the MOT in Tokyo is an opportunity that places side by side a personal reading of the art currents presented over the years by the Japanese institution, whose collection, in variety and type, is complementary to Takahashi Ryutaro’s. The exhibition is then a truly valuable overview of the instances of contemporary Japanese art.

The West Bund Museum in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou presents the exhibition I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake: Journeys in Sound, in which a core of fifteen works from the French museum’s new media collection is juxtaposed with audiovisual works and sound sculptures by Chinese artists. The idea of the exhibition is to delve into the expressive potential of sound, especially in its ability to move and establish relationships. This exhibition is part of the program of the 2024 edition of the Croisements 60 Festival, organized annually by the Institut Français in China.