Must-see exhibitions to catch this fall

MoMA PS1 in New York this fall celebrates the last decade of the work of Ralph Lemon (b. 1952), choreographer, writer, and visual artist. Lemon delves into the impact of postmodern dance in America and the ability to convey narratives through physical movement, viewing the body as a repository of feelings, work, and personal experiences. More than forty works are on display at the exhibition Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon, alongside a series of live performances.

New York's Whitney Museum hosts a great exhibition of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey (1931-1989). The first institutional retrospective dedicated to Ailey, combines visual art, live performance, music, archival materials and a multiscreen video installation exploring Ailey’s personal and creative life. The exhibition also includes works by more than eighty artists, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Faith Ringgold, and many others, arranged according to themes that influenced Ailey's life and work.

Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, and then in the 1990s, with the advent of Photoshop, image editing spread to many areas, opening up aesthetic and ethical debates on many levels. The exhibition Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at LACMA in Los Angeles examines with more than one hundred works on display the ways in which artists and engineers have interacted in dialogue with these innovations, considering different approaches.

Charles Atlas: About Time is the first museum retrospective in the United States devoted to the interdisciplinary artist Charles Atlas (b. 1949), spanning fifty years of his career. From his productions as a filmmaker for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, to groundbreaking collaborations with Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Leigh Bowery, and many others. This exhibition is conceived as a total environment with multichannel video installations, where visitors can move between suspended screens that transform the videos into immersive environments.

Frank Lloyd Wright bought a camera in the late 19th century and used it to capture landscapes, nature, loved ones, and the traditional architecture that inspired him during a trip to Japan in 1905. The exhibition at Driehaus Museum in Chicago is organized into thematic clusters considering the documentation collected over the decades by leading photographers who followed his career, and is enriched by the presence of photographs by Wright himself.

Pirelli HangarBicocca reopens to the public after its summer closure with the first solo exhibition in an Italian institution by Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova (1981). The Shed displays pieces that the artist has created over a span of more than ten years, including films and installations that carry a powerful sense of ancient and communal memories, as well as spiritual and ceremonial traditions from her native area, telling stories of cultural legacy, the portrayal of women, and opposition to the negative effects of human activity on nature.

Triennale Milano is honoring Elio Fiorucci (1935-2015), known as the “Duchamp of Italian fashion” according to Gillo Dorfles, with a significant exhibition which delves into the diverse range of activities undertaken by Fiorucci, extending beyond the realm of fashion to encompass architecture, design, music, and art. The opening of this retrospective will coincide with the launch of Triennale Milano's new fashion department, overseen by Marco Sammicheli and advised by Luca Stoppini.

More than one hundred and fifty works from one of the most visionary private collections of contemporary art in Italy, the Enea Righi Collection, are showcased in the exhibition Among the Invisible Joins. The title, inspired by Virginia Woolf, reflects the fluidity and uncertainties of human life. The selected works invite reflection on the transitions of contemporary existence, interweaving artistic expression and socio-political tensions, and present new narratives through everyday objects and urban architecture.

For My Best Family is the exhibition project by Meriem Bennani (1988) commissioned by Fondazione Prada, which will be hosted in the Podium spaces this fall-winter. The artist explores the potential of narrative through her art practice, amplifying reality with the use of magic realism and humor. The Milan exhibition will feature a large site-specific mechanical installation and an art film, co-directed with Orian Barki, and made with creative production by John Michael Boling and Jason Coombs.

The largest exhibition ever devoted to the work of Salvo (1947-2015), curated by Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti opens November 1 at the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, in conjunction with the 31st edition of Artissima. Produced in close collaboration with the Salvo Archive, this retrospective traces the work of the Sicilian-born artist, emphasizing how his painting developed in continuity with the early conceptual research of the 1960s.

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is hosting the first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands of Swiss artist Miriam Cahn (1949). Her oeuvre is rooted in feminist thought and activism, and addresses themes such as vulnerability, the human body, identity, and violence. The exhibition Miriam Cahn. Reading Dust is an emotional response to the destruction of past and present wars, the debasement of entire populations, and the death that pervades the human habitat.  

In conjunction with Frieze London, White Cube presents a major solo exhibition by British artist Tracey Emin (b. 1963). The exhibition I followed you to the end presents new works, including paintings and a bronze sculpture, that highlight her expressive and sometimes primal artistic approach. Her recent experience with illness has intensified the emotional charge of his works, which reflect on the fragility and resilience of the human body.

Arte Povera arrives in Paris this fall with a major exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev that traces the history of this movement, and its peculiarities and anomalies, through a wide selection of key works by the thirteen main artists. The exhibition will feature works from the Pinault Collection, the Castello di Rivoli Museum, the Fondazione per l'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, and from several other important private and public collections, including those of Arte Povera artists themselves.

DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam presents the largest institutional retrospective of artist Noah Davis (1983-2015) which gives a comprehensive overview of his career from his first exhibition in 2007 until his passing in 2015. Paintings, works on paper, and sculpture highlight Davis' interest in art history, the layered imagery of everyday life, and humanity. In 2012 he co-founded The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, an important institution for the black and Latino community.

The art group Die Brücke is Germany's major contribution to international modernism. Founded in Dresden in 1905, the group developed a painting style characterized by vivid colors and simplified forms to express inner feelings rather than an external reality. The exhibition presented by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, in collaboration with the Brücke Museum in Berlin, presents about two hundred works by the group, including paintings, woodcuts, works on paper and sculptures.

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa this fall will host Dancing With All: The Ecology of Empathy. Through the artists' sensitivity and observational skills, the exhibition presents the future resulting from an ecological theory that can consider the society and sentience of the living beings inhabiting the planet. Artists from five continents gather to share their wisdom on how to create a survival strategy for all living things.

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is featured in her first solo exhibition in Japan in twenty-seven years, the largest to date in a Japanese institution. The exhibition presents about one hundred works divided into three chapters, offering a comprehensive overview of the French artist's 70-year career. The subtitle of the exhibition, I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful, taken from one of the artist's works, reflects the fluctuations of her emotions and her black humor.

Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) is one of the most relevant painters of our times, and the exhibition curated by Peter Eleey in collaboration with the artist at UCCA Museum in Beijing, will be the first comprehensive presentation of his work in China. With about eighty works spanning the artist's entire career, including subjects related to Chinese culture, the exhibition highlights the Belgian artist's awareness of the role of images in shaping history and influencing memory.

The MMCA in Seoul this fall is hosting Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists, an international exhibition that focuses on the work of Asian women artists from the 1960s to the present from a perspective in which the body is at the center of the narrative. Aiming for a thematic presentation of the one hundred and thirty selected works, the exhibition seeks to give back a multidimensional exploration of the work of the sixty women artists involved in the project, from a transnational and contemporary cultural perspective.

Guo Pei, China's first haute couture artist, is known for her unique creations in which Chinese cultural heritage meets international elements. The exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong represents the first major exhibition of her work in China, with clothes from her core collections and several designs highlighting the link between Chinese imperial etiquette, European royal fashion, architecture and the botanical world.