Curated by Christophe Leribault, the exhibition Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence is hosted at Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the occasion of the 59th Biennale di Venezia.
For this new body of work, Wiley has expanded these core thematic elements to meditate on the deaths of young Black men slain all over the world. Technology allows viewers to witness these graphic depictions of violence against the Black body that were once silenced. Wiley states, “That is the archaeology I am unearthing: The spectre of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and Brown people all over the world.” In light of the current global conflicts, language concerning power struggles and inalienable human rights are more critical than ever.
Kehinde Wiley - An Archaeology of Silence
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Italy
From April 23 to July 24, 2022
With a new project, the MUDEC is offering an exhibition based on a critical look at the human soul, explored in its folds of pain, solitude, joys, passions and ideals. Man and his relationship to himself, man in his environment and in human society, man in Nature.
David LaChapelle - I Believe in Miracles
MUDEC, Italy
Through September 11, 2022
Combining visual arts and poetry, Jean-Michel Alberola presents a series of works, some of which are specially created for the Passage Sainte-Croix, notably two imposing wall paintings.Some thirty drawings and gouaches take up extracts from the texts of the Beat Generation and are inspired by their cut-up technique by randomly assembling fragments of poetry, colours and thoughts of the artist.
Jean-Michel Alberola - Hermès Baby
Passage Sainte-Croix, Nantes
From April 12 to June 11, 2022
This multi-sensory project approaches the human being as a tool of perception and a tracer of possibilities. Based on our natural perceptions represented by the 5 senses - sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste - the invited personalities from various disciplines reveal their perception of these senses by making it a rule not to stop at a specific medium: they are designers, visual artists, light designers, sound artists, textile designers, dancers and botanists.
Jeanne Vicerial - La Fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continue
Fondation d’entreprise Martell, Cognac
From April 7 to November 6, 2022
In Mirror Society, the artist presents a series of recent works uniquely collaged with canvas from previous paintings that has been slashed and reapplied to a mirrored surface. These composite arrangements deconstruct the figure into fragments of torsos, limbs, and faces violently intersecting with abstracted bursts of saturated color and the mirror’s fractal reflections. The viewer is confronted with half-hidden, half-bared images of beautiful youth as well as their own gaze, trapped in a voyeuristic feedback loop. With these works, Bisky comments on the narcissism of a society deeply engaged in the production and consumption of a dizzying onslaught of images in viral media, ambivalent to the violence and turmoil of global events.
Norbert Bisky - Mirror Society
SCAD Museum of Art, United States
Through August 1st, 2022
Omar Ba’s work is characterized by its enigmatic nature and its great poetic intensity. In contrast with a didactic narrative, he rather seeks to express his subconscious and his symbolic interpretation of reality. The artist deals with themes such as chaos, destruction, and dictatorship, draping his political discourse in a veil of poetry through a pictorial language that is entirely his own, both fierce and delicate.
Omar Ba - Focus
Fine Arts Museum, Belgium
From April 1st to August 7, 2022
This exhibition brings together the most representative works of his oeuvre, which, grouped by theme, pay homage to one of the most important contemporary colourists, whose abstract pictorial syntax is constantly being renewed while still identifiable among all the others through its serial imprints, its materiality, the nature of its support, its manufacture, the surface treatment and its presentation. A prolific and demanding artist, Claude Viallat, who was one of the founders of the Supports-Surfaces movement created in 1970, has been creating for more than 60 years a universe that explodes with colours, leaving traces of his universal poetry in space and time.
Claude Viallat - Libertad de Colores
MACBA, Buenos Aires
From March 4 to June 12, 2022
Claude Viallat's work is based on the conviction that "the object of painting is painting itself", in a movement of repetition and overcoming: "The notion of repetition, of series or repetitions, becomes a de facto necessity". The absence of subject matter allows him to concentrate on forms and structures, on the relationship between colours, on pictorial matter, generating a unique work on colour.
Claude Viallat - Eclectique
Bonisson Art Center, Aix-en-Provence
From February 26 to June 12, 2022
Featuring new works that include paintings, multimedia installations, drawings and site-specific interventions, the show reflects the artist’s profound deliberations on the interrelationship between the cosmic and the terrestrial. In ‘Order of Magnitude’, one finds a contemplation of overarching interconnectivity on the individual, universal, planetary and extra-terrestrial dimensions.
Image caption : Jitish Kallat, Postulates from a Restless Radius (2021). Acrylic, gesso, lacquer, charcoal and watercolour pencil on linen, 640 x 320 cm radius, 375 cm length. Image courtesy of the artist and Ishara Art Foundation. Photography by Ismail Noor/ Seeing Things.
Ishara Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates
From February 16 to July 1st, 2022
For the first time, French artistic duo Pierre et Gilles are exhibiting in Sweden. Inspired by the old maritime setting of the Museum of Spirits, they take as their starting point the romantic representation of the sea, the port and the sailors, which they compare with the overexploitation threatening today to exterminate marine life.
Spritmuseum
Djurgårdsstrand 9, 115 21 Stockholm, Suède
From February 10 to September 8, 2022
An exhibition imagined by Lola Gonzàlez at the invitation of Éric Mangion.
"Winter 2020, there is the discovery of the universe of Mariana Enriquez, a slap. The title of her book haunts me "What we lost in the fire".
November 2021, I have just finished her latest novel "Our share of the night", I am stunned and deeply touched by the power of her writing. So I borrowed her words for the title of this collective exhibition, a way for me to invite Mariana among us and a way for me to invite Mariana among us and to pay her a tribute.
Villa Arson, Nice
From February 5 to April 17, 2022
The exhibition sheds light on a selection of recent works, objects made of rope with a vernacular rusticity, but also on fabrics painted with repeated motif, which became his signature. An always-renewed shape while the artist plays on the diversity of the materials and appropriates the raw support for a sound and rhythmic colourism transcending the simplicity of the motif.
Claude Viallat - Kitchissime
Fondation GGL Helenis, Montpellier
Through May 30, 2022
Using samples of vibrant silk, the artist hand sews sprightly embroideries who take inspiration from contemporary life scenes.
Tomorrow is a Different Day spotlights art and design from the collection, from 1980 to the present, by international artists and designers who are helping to shape the changes of today and tomorrow. They challenge the status quo and offer alternative perspectives.
Stedelijk Museum
Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ, Amsterdam
On Going
In Roping, 2019-2020, Cotton switches treats for a surprising encounter between a triumphant cowboy and his fantastic steed which is none other than a pink unicorn. The mythical animal comes here to challenge the norms of the conquest of territories by men. The latter loses its virility in a wonderful world made of softness in which seems to dive a desacralized cowboy who is not without evoking a Queer update of that created in 1989 by the artist Richard Prince.
Musée des Abattoirs
76 All. Charles de Fitte, Toulouse
From October 30, 2021 to January 16, 2022
The Lambert Collection invites Abdelkader Benchamma to take over the entire first floor of the Hôtel de Montfaucon. Entitled 'Rayon Fossile', the exhibition is organized around an initiatory journey through possible worlds, past, imaginary, future, written or dreamed, assembled in a narrative that unfolds slowly in the rooms of the museum.
Rayon Fossile
Collection Lambert, 5 Rue Violette, 84000 Avignon, France
October 29, 2021 through February 20, 2022
For his first collaboration with a major UK gallery, The National Gallery, Wiley will depart from portraiture to explore artistic conventions and modes of representation in the European landscape tradition through the media of film and painting. Wiley’s first film installation, Narrenschiff (2017), was a contemporary response to the Ship of Fools theme, popular in European culture from the late 15th century. It featured a group of young Black men at sea, struggling to reach the land – a metaphor for both historical and contemporary histories of migration and social dislocation. Building on these themes at the National Gallery, Wiley will explore European Romanticism and its focus on epic scenes of oceans and mountains, and humankind’s relationship with nature. The film included in this project will feature Black Londoners that Wiley met and cast for the film on the streets around the National Gallery.
Winter 2021
The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London
The UNAM Biennale gathers around forty artists who illustrate with originality and talent their vision of "Moi, Je" and its present and future challenges in the mutations of an obviously dangerous society and withdrawal into oneself.
Biennale de l’UNAM (Union Méditerranéenne pour l’Art Moderne)
Château-Musée Grimaldi, Haut-de-Cagnes – Place du Château, Cagnes-sur-Mer
From June 12, 2021 to January 3, 2022
The exhibition “Time on my side” presents a selection of masterful works by Berlin-based artist René Wirths that shows some realistically painted patterns from the everyday life, which are larger than life, in front of a neutral white background. In his practice, René Wirths asks himself the most important question, the question of our own existence. Wirths' work alternates between the objectivity of the things depicted and the subjectivity of the artist's or viewer's perception.
In his reproductions, the artist does not use a photographic model or projection technique but paints the objects as he sees them in his studio.
Museum in Kleihues-Bau
Stuttgarter Str. 93, Kornwestheim
From July to January 23, 2022
Mary Magdalen is a woman of extremes and has given rise to a multiplicity of interpretations: a wealth of representations, conspiracy theories and controversies. This special exhibition will introduce the visitor to the rich, paradoxical and constantly evolving imagery surrounding this mysterious biblical figure. From the time of the New Testament to the present day, Mary Magdalen has proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for artists.
Museum Catharijne Convent, Utrecht, Netherlands
From June 24, 2021 to January 9, 2022
Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald’s portrait of Mrs. Michelle Obama unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in February 2018 will travel to five cities across the U.S as part of The Obama Portraits Tour organized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
In addition to the artworks themselves, the tour will feature audiovisual elements, educational workshops, curatorial presentations, and a richly illustrated book The Obama Portraits (2020) co-published by the National Portrait Gallery and Princeton University Press and select merchandise will also be available. This special presentation will exchange the conversations surrounding the power of portraiture and its potential to engage communities.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago: from June 18 to August 15, 2021
Brooklyn Museum, New-York: from August 27 to October 24, 2021
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles: from November 5, 2021 to January 2, 2022
High Museum of Art, Atlanta: from January 14 to March 13, 2022
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: from March 27 to May 30, 2022
