Leiko Ikemura's monumental bronze sculpture, 'Usagi Kannon II' is among the selected works from more than twenty international artists on view at Frieze Sculpture 2019 in the English Gardens of Regent’s Park, London.

'Usagi Kannon II' (jap. Rabbit Madonna) - a figure with rabbit ears and a human face in tears  that symbolises universal mourning - is one of Ikemura’s most significant motifs. It goes back to 2011 when the Fukushima disaster and the subsequent birth defects in animals inspired the Japanese artist to create this sculpture. "Usagi Kannon II" is reminiscent of temple sculptures and its walk-in bell-shaped skirt becomes a protective shrine. 

A similar sculpture is part of the collection of Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst in Cologne, while another one is permanently installed at the Stein Egerta sculpture garden in Liechtenstein.

The National Art Center in Tokyo recently dedicated an extensive retrospective to Ikemura, where two versions of "Usagi Kannon" are installed, both indoors and outdoors. The exhibition runs through 1 April, 2019, after which, it will travel to the Kunstmuseum Basel later in the year.

The CCK is once again one of the venues of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America (BIENALSUR). In this edition, 'Infinitud' exhibition is presented, built in of a selection of videos on landscapes belonging to the Es Baluard Collection - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Palma, Spain. Twelve artists from different latitudes address the space - continuous, infinite, inescapable - which they take to underline, reinvent or intervene in search of diverse aesthetic and political readings.

The participating artists are Lida Abdul, Irene de Andrés, Robert Cahen, Bouchra Khalili, Marcellvs L, Michael Najjar, Bernardí Roig, Francisco Ruiz de Infante, Amparo Sard, Javier Vallhonrat, Marcelo Viquez, Wolf Vostell.

The exhibition «Infinitud. Colección Es Baluard» is made up of a selection belonging to the museum collection, made by Nekane Aramburu, its Director until March 17, 2019, and Diana Wechsler, Artistic – Academic Director of BIENALSUR.

'Human', a major exhibition of new figurative and sculptural works, alongside recent works by artist Sean Scully will open in Venice this May to coincide with La Biennale di Venezia. In response to San Giorgio Maggiore Irish-born abstract artist Sean Scully transforms the 16th-century Benedictine church, its adjacent buildings and gardens into a visual and spiritual meditation on the human condition with recent paintings, works on paper, and sculpture - including the premiere of the 10-metre high “Opulent Ascension” which rises to the basilica´s dome. Scully's unique vocabulary of horizontal and vertical stripes, combined with his recent return to figuration, brings together this interplay of artistic creation, architectural grandeur and sacred striving. 

'Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work‘ at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town covers over forty years of William Kentridge's artistic production (1976 – 2019) including early works, as well as newer pieces on view for the first time in South Africa. 

6:30 pm (Neubau)

Christian Boltanski’s installation ‘Animitas’ can be seen and heard at Sculpture Park Hellbrunn in Salzburg. The bell project was first shown in 2014 in the Chilean desert, subsequently in different locations in Japan, Scotland, Canada and Israel. The installation ‘Animitas’ in Salzburg consists of 120 Japanese chimes, each attached to spindly sticks – with each wind breeze producing a delicate sound, which Boltanski calls the “music of the souls”. Until now, these installations have been destroyed upon conclusion of a exhibition. However, the Salzburg version is expected to reside until September 2020, and appear in other locations after that.

Peabody Essex Museum presents the North American premiere of Kimsooja's major performative installation titled 'Archive of Mind', in which the artist invites the audience to participate and reflect on the act of making. Visitors are encouraged to sit at a 19-meter-long elliptical wooden table and sink into the experience of forming a lump of clay into sphere. The repetitive act of rolling clay introduces a polarity between the symmetrical forces of the participants' palms, transposing their state of mind into matter and matter into void. Through the course of the exhibition, thousands of clay spheres are generated through small, individual gestures that reveal the emotional traces of their makers and cumulatively generate a complex array of texture, scale, and tone. 'Archive of Mind' is part of Kimsooja's body of work in which everyday actions are transformed into moments of meditation or transcendence.

'Christian Boltanski – Lifetime' is among the artist's largest retrospectives ever held in Japan. The exhibition encompasses 46 works spanning Boltanski's 50-year career and functions as a unified installation designed by the artist, who described himself as an “artist of space“. After making short films in the late 1960s, Boltanski worked extensively with photography in the 1970s, gaining attention for works dealing with his own memories and those of others. In the 1980s Boltanski began producing installations with light, including the Monuments series – altar-like constructions made out of photographic portraits of anonymous children lit by small light bulbs .Since then, he has continued exhibiting worldwide with the themes of history, memory, and the vestiges of human existence.

In more than three decades, William Kentridge (*28. April 1955, Johannesburg), visual artist, filmmaker, and stage director has built a sizable oeuvre that spans a broad range of media including animated film, prints and drawings, theatre productions, and sculpture.  'A Poem That is Not our Own' at Kunstmuseum Basel showcases early graphic art and films from the 1980s and 1990s as well as examples of Kentridge’s more recent output, including the first adaptations for museum presentation of the play 'The Head & The Load', which premiered last summer at the Tate Modern, London. In his early films and drawings, the artist directly tackled South Africa’s and Europe’s social and ethnic conflicts. In the 1970s and 1980s, he created posters, drawings, and plays that sharply criticized his native country’s Apartheid regime. The play Sophiatown (1986–1989), produced in collaboration with the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, dramatised the forced removal of the residents of the Johannesburg neighborhood of Sophiatown in 1955. Among the the major video installations on view are 'More Sweetly Play the Dance' and 'Shadow Procession' with selections from Kentridge’s graphic oeuvre. 

Sean Scully 'Eleuthera' series (2016–2017) is being given its first-ever presentation at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. Absent of the artist's trademark abstract paintings - colourful grids of stripes and squares - , the exhibition presents Sean Scully from a unfamiliar side: figurative paintings of his seven-year-old son Oisín playing on the beach of Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas. This exhibition features the complete 'Eleuthera' series consisting of twenty-three large-format oil paintings as well as smaller pastels, drawings, and photographic works. 

The twelfth edition of the Blickachsen Sculpture Biennale in the historic park landscapes of Bad Homburg brings together site specific works by thirty-one international artists. In five further locations in the Rhine-Main region, visitors will have the opportunity to experience a broad spectrum of contemporary sculpture and installations curated by Christian K. Scheffel together with Elisabeth Millqvist and Mattias Givell, thejoint directors of this year’s partner museum, Wanås Konst from Sweden. 

Among the participating artists are Leiko Ikemura, Sean Scully, Hanneke Beaumont, Claudia Comte, Jacob Dahlgren, My Ekman, Elmgreen & Dragset, William Forsythe, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Jeppe Hein, Satch Hoyt, Sofia Hultén, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Per Kirkeby, Ruud Kuijer, Alicja Kwade, Arik Levy, Katarina Löfström, Ohad Meromi, Nandipha Mntambo, Sirous Namazi, Yoko Ono, A.R. Penck, Leunora Salihu, Anne Thulin, James Webb, Winter/Hoerbelt, Fredrik Wretman, David Zink Yi.

The exhibition 'Elger Esser: Morgenland‘ at the Fondation Fernet Branca in Saint-Louis presents photographs from the artist’s series 'Morgenland‘ made between 2004 and 2015, a period during which Elger Esser travelled across Lebanon, Egypt and Israel.

Water landscapes and nature are central themes in Elger Esser's complete photographic works. Inspired by romantic painting and photography from the 19th century, Elger Esser chooses predominantly monochrome and muted shades for his large format landscapes. Through the use of traditional photographic and mechanical techniques, he achieves an extraordinary luminosity and depth, as well as a sense of timelessness and the infinite in his images.

In the Morgenland series Esser, with his analogue camera,  captures traditional Feluccas and Dahabieh sailing boats palm-lined along riverbanks between Luxor and Aswan, the Lebanese coasts, as well as significant locations in Israel such as Acre, the Sea of Galilee, or Jisr az-Zarqa. Like many of his compositions, these works are dominated by water and far horizons emphasising an expansive sky, conveying silence and the sublime. They stand in stark contrast to the poverty and bloody conflicts, which the media conveys on these regions.

The exhibition 'Sean Scully: The Mexico Years' at the Instituto Cultural de Cabañas in the Unesco World Heritage Site in Guadalajara revisits the artist’s long relationship with Mexico. During his travels around the country in the eighties and early nineties, Sean Scully made a series of watercolours that set the stage for Wall of Light, one of his most celebrated series today. This series of approximately sixty watercolours produced in Mexico between 1981 and 1992 is exhibited together with oil paintings that Scully created in more recent years and demonstrate his ongoing relationship with the country. 

'Jannis Kounellis', curated by Germano Celant, is the major retrospective dedicated to the artist following his death in 2017. Developed in collaboration with Archivio Kounellis, the project brings together more 60 works from 1959 to 2015, from both Italian and international museums, as well as from important private collections both in Italy and abroad. The show explores the artistic and exhibition history of Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus 1936 – Rome 2017), establishing a dialogue between his works and the eighteenth-century spaces of Calle Corner della Regina.

'Rothko in Lampedusa' is an independent exhibition in partnership with UNHCR taking place during the 58. Venice Biennale. The exhibition reflects upon the migrant crisis utilising a poignant artistic language. The common thread weaving throughout the exhibition is Mark Rothko, the artist who escaped from the repressive regime of the Russian Empire in the beginning of the 20th century. If this particular refugee had not been able to explore his artistic potential in his host country, we would not have his extraordinary artworks today. The exhibition therefore intends to create a dialogue between established contemporary artists and five younger refugee artists, who will be hosted in residency in the city of Venice. Amongst them are Adel Abdessemed, Majid Adin, Ai Weiwei, Christian Boltanski, Rasha Deeb, Mohamed Keita, Dihn Q. Lê, Nalini Malani, Abu Bakarr Mansaray, Richard Mosse, Bnar Sardar Sdiq, Ali WakWak, Hassan Yare and Artur Żmijewski.

Curated by Walter Vanhaerents and Vincent Verbist, 'The Death of James Lee Byars' on view at the church of the Santa Maria della Visitazione features works by James Lee Byars and Zad Moultaka. The show allows the public to reconnect with one of James Lee Byars’ most iconic installations, which the artist created in Brussels exactly 25 years ago and which has been part of the Collection since 1996. In addition, the audience is invited to discover the creation by Lebanese artist and composer Zad Moultaka that directly engages with Byars’ work and has been specifically commissioned for this occasion.

Presenting drawings, paintings, and sculptures, the exhibition 'Nach neuen Meeren | Toward New Seas' is a focused retrospective, mounted in consultation with Leiko Ikemura and in cooperation with the National Art Center, Tokyo.

The Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura first caused a stir in Switzerland in the early 1980s with expressive and confrontational compositions that associated her with the Neue Wilde. She later rose to international renown with girlish figures unmoored from reality and cosmic landscapes populated by fabulous chimerical creatures. Japanese audiences celebrate her as an artist who wholeheartedly embraced Western art only to grow aware of her cultural roots and eventually forged a singular synthesis of both cultures.

A stay in Grisons in 1989 inspired Ikemura to develop a novel visual vocabulary that ultimately led her to a fusion of body and landscape in the “Alpine Indians.” Then followed vaguely archaic hybrid creatures, which the artist increasingly also rendered in sculptures, and, in the 1990s, female figures hovering weightlessly at the horizon between earth and heaven, past and future, vulnerable and untouchable at once. In her most recent works, Ikemura conveys the melancholy yearning for an indivisible union between humankind and nature in oneiric landscapes of the soul. The phenomena of emergent form and metamorphosis gesture back toward the artist’s early oeuvre.

Through an insistent reflection on her life amid an alien culture, on solitude and the assimilation of new languages, Ikemura has staked out a domain of her own that allowed her to devise a personal and authentic synthesis of Japanese and European cultures. 

Works by Bernardi Roig are on view in the sixth edition of 'Glasstress'. 'Glasstress' is a project by Adriano Berengo to further his mission of marrying contemporary art and glass. Artists of all disciplines from sculptors to musicians have been invited to collaborate with the maestros in creating art in glass. Launched in 2009 as an official collateral event of the Biennale di Venezia, today it is the world’s leading showcase of this collaboration of craft and creativity, forging a new trajectory for glass and a new path for contemporary artists. 

Curated by Vik Muniz & Koen Vanmechelen 'Glasstress' brings together leading contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America, India, and China in an exhibition exploring the endless creative possibilities of glass. To celebrate 10 years of 'Glasstress' and 30 years of Berengo Studio, the exhibition goes back to its historical roots on the island of Murano. 

The sixth edition of GLASSTRESS brings together leading contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America, India, and China in an exhibition exploring the endless creative possibilities of glass. To celebrate 10 years of GLASSTRESS and 30 years of Berengo Studio, the exhibition goes back to its historical roots on the island of Murano. It will be the third time that Ilya & Emlia Kabakov participate with an impressive installation in the former glass furnace. 

Sean Scully’s exhibition 'Long Light‘ at the Villa e Collezione Panza in Varese brings together over 60 works from the early seventies to the present day: from acrylics to the black monochromes, up to the Madonna and Landline series of the last few years. 

'Sea Star' presents new work by Sean Scully inspired by the collection of the National Gallery, particularly by J.M.W. Turner. 

In his new paintings Scully takes William Turner’s atmospheric landscape 'The Evening Star' as his point of departure. A boy on the shore sets off for home as the sky and sea darken. For Scully, this melancholic picture is one of Turner’s most profound works, to which he feels a deep connection. 

The exhibition reflects Scully's deep admiration for colour, composition, and the power of painting. Poignant and poetic, Scully's abstract works are constructed from panels painted in oil, often with thickly applied paint to create rich, textured surfaces. Using the motif of the stripe or chequerboards, the artist evokes landscapes and architecture, horizons, fields, and coastlines; his contemplative forms become reminders of personal experiences and distinctive moments.

Using filtered light and mirrors, Kimsooja transforms the historic chapel of Yorkshire Sculpture Park and blurs the boundaries between inside and outside.

Diffraction film on all windows splits the entering light into its spectrums to create countless rainbows across the space. These are reflected by the floor, covered with a mirrored surface, providing an entirely new way of seeing.

Responsive to the natural environment, the installation changes according to the light quality and intensity, making every experience different and unique. A soundtrack of the artist breathing accompanies the visually spectacular yet meditative installation.

In the Lower Park, Kimsooja's 14-metre-high sculpture 'A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir' (2014) can be seen. It was developed with scientists at Cornell University, NY, who formulated a nanotechnology film applied to the acrylic windowpanes of this elegant spire, closely mimicking the iridescence of butterfly wings.

Elger Esser's solo exhibition "De Giverny à Sérignan" at Tour 46 addresses one of the consequences of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, namely the opening up to the world effectuating new cultural exchanges.

Elger Esser, born in Stuttgart in 1967, traveled across many countries photographing timeless landscapes and places of everyday life. Inspired by writings of Proust, Maupassant or Flaubert, Esser traveled through France in search for places anchored in history, such as Combray or Monet's garden at Giverny. Printed in very large formats, his photographs, while navigating between history and memory, bring the viewer into a poetic journey of aesthetic beauty. 

The exhibition is organised in partnership with the Fernet-Branca Foundation of Saint-Louis, which will present another facet of Elger Esser's work from 26 May to 30 September, 2019. 

On March 1, the 7th Annual Award of The Art Newspaper Russia took place. 2018 winners in categories “Museum of the Year”, “Exhibition of the Year”, “Book of the Year”, “Restoration of the Year” and “Personal Contribution” were announced at the Gostiny Dvor. 

The annual award of The Art Newspaper Russia is one of the most anticipated events in the art world, an acknowledgment of outstanding achievements in the field. The award highlights the past year's most significant events in Russian art both in Russia and abroad, as well as the work of patrons of the art in developing and preserving cultural heritage. The choice of winners was determined by both public response and the professional community's feedback. 

EXHIBITION OF THE YEAR - “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. “Not everyone will be taken into the future.” Tate Modern (London). The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg). The State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow).

The exhibition of Ilya Kabakov and his wife and co-author from the late 1980s onwards, Emilia Kabakova, is an inspiring example of international cultural cooperation. From the very beginning, the project was intended for three museums: Tate Modern, the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery (with the support of Novatek). The organizers state that this exhibition is the first large-scale retrospective of the founder of Moscow conceptualism, who became famous in the world as the one who invented the “total” installation. The exhibition includes works created by Ilya Kabakov during the last 60 years, from the 1960s to today.

The name of the project refers both to the mid-1970s text by Kabakov and to the installation of the same name and encourages the viewer to discuss the role and place of art in our life. At each museum, the exhibition had its own structure, since space was a key concept for Kabakov. The artists had several hundred exhibitions at leading museums around the world, while in Moscow and St. Petersburg there had been shows of separate installations. But the project “Not everyone will be taken into the future,” where the artist's evolution was examined from an academic and comprehensive perspective, strengthened Ilya Kabakov’ status of a classic of contemporary art.

The most famous “born in the USSR” artist in the world, Kabakov seriously influenced the post-Soviet art evolution. The fact that his works have been extensively shown to Russian viewer, is especially important today when the society dramatically rethinks the Soviet experience, which received a universal existentialist interpretation in Kabakov’s oeuvre. Commemorating the exhibition, the creative couple donated Ilya Kabakov's Moscow workshop at Sretensky Boulevard to the Tretyakov gallery. The artist used to work there from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. Now it will be a museum devoted to the emergence of Moscow conceptualism and its heroes.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art presents “Sean Scully: Landlines“. The painting series embodies a radical shift in the visual vocabulary of the acclaimed Irish-born artist, known for merging European aesthetics with American abstraction. Stemming from observing nature during his time in Ireland, “Landline“ evokes emotional landscapes through large brushstrokes. Scully’s rich palette reaches beyond abstraction to unfold a fascinating dimension of experience and memory.

The exhibition presents fifty oil paintings, pastels, watercolors, and photographs, as well as two sculptures. In advance of the exhibition, a large-scale sculpture has been installed on the museum’s Main Street lawn since June last year.

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presents 'Pavel Pepperstein: The Human as a Frame for the Landscape‘, a large scale solo exhibition by Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein (b. 1966, Moscow). The retrospective features about eighty works from different periods in the artist's career, including twenty new works in a wide range of mediums such as graphics, videos and installations.

Pepperstein, artist, writer, filmmaker, musician, and art theorist, is one of the leading representatives of the younger generation of Moscow Conceptualism. Together with Sergeji Anufriev and Yuri Leiderman he founded the group of artists 'Inspection Medical Hermeneutics' (1987), inventing diverse systems, universes, languages, cities, and political projects. As the son of the painter Viktor Pivovarov, Pepperstein grew up around the Moscow conceptualists, Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov, who stayed afloat in the Soviet era as children's book illustrators. The fairytales and drawings Pepperstein grew up with, today reverberate in his surreal narratives, interplays of text and image, and allusions to the art of the suprematist avant-garde such as El Lissitzky or Kasimir Malevich.

Each room of the exhibition presents a “landscape system", recalling one of the key myths he has created since the 1970s: “supremas”— multi-colored geometric forms borrowed from various suprematist painters, imaginary countries and parallel universes, utopian and dystopian visions of the future. Drawings and albums that Pepperstein created as a teenager will be exhibited for the first time.

Сurated by Katya Inozemtseva, Garage Senior Curator.

The solo exhibition 'Leiko Ikemura - Metamorphoses' at the Nordic Watercolour Museum | Nordiska Akvarellmuseet in Skärhamn, Sweden presents a comprehensive survey of Leiko Ikemura’s watercolours, tempera paintings and ceramic sculptures. 

Atmospherically, Leiko Ikemura’s art is naturally reminiscent of surrealist Odilon Redon, German expressionists and Louise Bourgeois’ trendsetting work. But Ikemura has found her own magical style – dreamy, poetic and vibrating with subtle metamorphoses as if nothing were fixed, as if all things were constantly in the process of becoming, of transforming. Over time she began to return to her Japanese roots, where the soul of nature thrives in daylight and the darkness of night. Ikemura’s enigmatic work portrays strange beings, animals, plants, minerals and architectural details that melt together and gradually morph as the image emerges. Figures with ethereal bodies evolve in a dreamy, nature-filled setting. People become plants. Plants become animals. Animals become amorphous figures and abstractions. From abstractions, new life is born, and everything begins again. A characteristic Japanese sense of the spirit of nature, which inspires everything, echoes throughout Ikemura’s artistic world. Transformations are a primary focus in everything she creates. 

Encompassing everything from the artist's earliest pieces to his most recent work, the exhibition 'Christian Boltanski - Lifetime', jointly organized by the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, is the first full-scale retrospective of Boltanski's career to be presented in Japan. While looking back at a variety of Boltanski's efforts from the '70s to the present, the retrospective is based on the artist's idea of creating an installation for a space - or he suggests, "presenting an exhibition as a single work of art." The exhibition will serve as an introduction to Boltanski's magnificent world of art, which he began making over 50 years ago and continues to create today.

Based on his interest in the development of human history and cultural anthropology, Boltanski garnered attention for a large number of works in which he combined everyday objects such as biscuit tins with photographs and documents to create links to his own memories as well as those of others.
In the '80s, Boltanski began producing installations that utilized light, including the Monument series (1985-ongoing). These altar-like structures, made out of photographic portraits of children and light bulbs, dealt with religious themes. This led to works such as Altar to the Chases High School (1987), an altar consisting of face shots of Jewish students who enrolled in a Vienna high school in 1931 that were illuminated with light bulbs. As this technique of displaying a collection of portraits evokes images of genocide, specifically the mass murder of millions of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, it has prompted a great deal of controversy. For Boltanski, whose father was Jewish, the Holocaust is something with deeply personal significance. In works such as Personnes (2010), made up of countless articles of clothing piled up in the vast Grand Palais in Paris, Boltanski has used a variety of methods to address themes such as history, memory, death, and absence.

The exhibition «Bernardí Roig. Todos los icebergs son negros. Films 2000-2018», curated by Nekane Aramburu, is a project conceived from Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani of Palma, where it was presented last spring, and that now expanded and reformulated, the Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte opens to the public in Tabacalera.

This exhibition encourages the investigation, analysis and revision of the complex universe of the artist from the presentation and decoding of his audiovisual work, displayed in an exciting scenographic disposition, as an initiatory journey between the appropriation and recreation of his images and visual constructions.

His audiovisual work is the surface on which the fundamental lines of his creative process that always starts from drawing solidify in movement. It is a synthesis of a faceted universe, a baroque of cultured metaphors that through a certain narrative reveals its obsessions and the obstinacy to combat the in-communication of the human being in front of a destiny condemned to extinction.

On this occasion, to overcome the challenge of exhibiting in Tabacalera, the artist has recorded the film «La Joie de Vivre» in the Tabacalera spaces, which is materialised in a large multi-channel installation at the entrance of the exhibition. Bernardí Roig has called a group of women as a tribute to the first women’s union group, Las cigarreras; rebellious, passionate and independent that united the precariousness of the condition of working woman to fortify it.

Descendants or not of that social force, raised in their high-heeled shoes, naked and full of carnality inhabit their generous bodies with fullness. They are splendid presences, signaled by life and filled with graffiti, tattoos and scars. There, in Tabacalera, as in Matisse’s painting «La Joie de Vivre», they pursue, occupy and expand those spaces with their laughter, hugs, confidences and raids, harassed and filmed by a drone; that eye with wings.

The exhibition is part of the 30th anniversary celebrations of the IVAM and showcases works of national and international artists, all produced in 1989, and linked to some of the most important events of this historic year that ended an era defined by the Cold War and the confrontation between the pro-Soviet dictatorships and Western democracies. It focuses on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the Soviet bloc; the AIDS crisis and the cultural wars related to the wave of conservatism that flooded the United States and Europe; the beginning of the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the development of the concept of multiculturalism prior to globalisation. 

Curated by Sandra Moros and Sergio Rubira, in collaboration with Fundació Banc Sabadell.

Featuring more than 210 works the large-scale solo exhibition 'Our Planet Earth and Stars' at The National Art Center Tokyo presents a comprehensive insight into Leiko Ikemura's artistic career. 

Covering some four decades of work, Leiko Ikemura explores a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor painting, printmaking, photography, and video, while depicting various aspects of creation and change as well as the latent potential for these things. Ikemura’s singularly ambiguous vision, exemplified by her integrated landscapes populated with young girls, spirits, small fantastic hybrid creatures, people and animals, easily assumes different forms from one image to the next. Her work conveys the unyielding notion that as living beings we should strive to accept the diverse existence of all things exactly as we find them. Alternatively infused with humor, affection or pain, it is precisely the modest and introspective quality of Ikemura’s art that makes it such an incisive critique of today’s more and more stifling society.  In recent years Ikemura has turned to large landscape paintings to manifest primordial narratives on a mythic scale. 

The artist's works offer a critical perspective on the human conflict with one's surrounding-largely media-based-influences. Figures sculpted in polyester resin combined with fluorescent tubes characterise this motif in Roig's work and form the focus of the present exhibition. The cold neon light resembles the flood of light-based images brought about by the digital revolution. Roig is concerned with the loss of social and individual identity, and with the loneliness perhaps caused by the lack of direct communication. We see humans who experience light as a burden. Light is shown as oppressive, as demanding too much of the human senses, as the dark side of excess. 

“Igloos”, an exhibition dedicated to Mario Merz (Milan, 1925–2003)—one of the most relevant post-war artists—brings together his most iconic group of works, the igloos, dating from 1968 until the end of his life. Curated by Vicente Todolí, and realised in collaboration with Fondazione Merz, the exhibition spans the whole space of the Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca, placing the visitor at the heart of a constellation of over 30 large-scale works in the shape of an igloo: an unprecedented landscape of great visual impact. A key figure of Arte Povera, Mario Merz investigates and represents the processes of transformation of nature and human life: in particular the igloos, visually traceable to primordial habitations, become for the artist the archetype of inhabited places and of the world, as well as a metaphor for the various relationships between interior and exterior, between physical and conceptual space, between individuality and collectivity. These pieces are characterised by a metal structure coated in a great variety of common materials, such as clay, glass, stone, jute, and steel—often leaning or intertwined in an unstable fashion—and by the use of neon elements and wording. The exhibition provides an overview of Mario Merz’s work, of its historical importance and great innovative reach: gathered from private collections and international museums, the igloos will be displayed together in such a large number for the first time.

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition by Viktor Pivovarov, one of the founders of the Moscow Romantic Conceptualism movement.

Included in the exhibition is the artist’s new cycle of paintings ‘Moscow, Moscow!’ (2017), as well as his acclaimed album ‘Dramatis Personae’ (1996) and little-known albums ‘If’ (1995) and ‘Florence’ (2005–2010). The exhibition is accompanied by a sound installation from surviving audio tapes of lectures by Merab Mamardashvili, Alexander Piatigorsky, other great philosophers and writers whose life and work are closely linked to the artist’s creative path.

Like other figures of the Moscow Conceptualist movement, Viktor Pivovarov makes a remarkable connection between the visual and verbal fabric in his art. This interweaving of the fantastic and realistic produces a new metaphysical dimension in Pivovarov’s works, which are always tied to a specific time, place and highly articulated psychological situation. With an easy sleight of hand the artist transforms the most serious things into a merry carnival accessible to everyone and dependent on the spectator’s own register of perception.

"... I tried to convey the universal energy that united the Moscow artists and poets who created the postwar Moscow myth, to convey what Mamleev describes as the ‘passionate desire to go beyond the boundaries of ordinary human consciousness, which felt like a prison," says Viktor Pivovarov.

The exhibition title ‘Moscow Album’ explains the basic principles of the conceptual approach. The form of this album implies obligatory ‘attribution’ of the drawings, while the traditional, comfortable intimacy and a special, familiar atmosphere permeated with humor can be discerned in all the series included in the exhibition.

KEWENIG is proud to present the most comprehensive catalogue on Ghada Amer's ceramic work. The book showcases pieces that Amer created during her residencies at Greenwich House Pottery, New York, in the years 2014 to 2017 as well as a photographic documentation of her most recent work in the studios of Cerámica Suro in Mexico. It is published through DISTANZ Verlag and contains texts by Justine Ludwig and Britta Schmitz as well as an interview with the artist by Sebastian Preuss.

This major touring exhibition focuses on Kentridge’s large-scale film installations including O Sentimental Machine (2015) and The Refusal of Time (2012), an immersive work exploring the technology of time-keeping and string theory, created in dialogue with physicist Peter Galison. A display of new and recent tapestries, works on paper and artist books will accompany the film projections, presented within an environment designed by Kentridge’s long-term collaborator Sabine Theunissen.

Combining drawing, tapestry, music and film projection as well as sculpture, this major touring exhibition draws on sources as broad as early cinema, China’s Cultural Revolution, opera, scientific theories of time and space and the generative qualities of nature and creativity.

Thick Time is co-organised by Whitechapel Gallery, London, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Whitworth, The University of Manchester.
William Kentridge: Thick Time at the Whitworth is supported by a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant from Art Fund.

“I think of land, sea, sky. And they always make a massive connection. I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land…stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending…” – Sean Scully

A major highlight of the 56th Venice Biennale, Sean Scully’s acclaimed Landline series makes its U.S. debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Featuring never-before-seen artworks from the renowned series, Sean Scully: Landline presents a dramatic shift in the work of one of today’s most influential artists. With thick, gestural brushstrokes and loose bands of color, the Landline paintings show Scully’s transition away from his earlier hard-edged minimalism to his current, more expressive style, a style that no doubt elicits the beauty and brilliance of the natural world. 

Spanning a variety of media—including watercolor, oil painting, and sculpture—the works in the exhibition showcase the artist’s remarkable ability to deepen, mystify, and vary his relatively limited repertoire of motifs—largely comprised of vertical and horizontal stripes. With gestures toward the land, sea, and sky (and the indistinct lines between them), the works navigate the elemental relationships that compose our world, and in doing so reveal the sublime character of those interactions. Together, the works will transform the Hirshhorn’s Second Level inner-circle galleries into an unceasing current of color and energy.

This exhibition debuts more than twenty years after the Hirshhorn opened Scully’s first mid-career retrospective in 1995, a pivotal exhibition that cemented his status at the center of contemporary painting. Building on the narrative of this 1995 survey, Sean Scully: Landline affords viewers the opportunity to witness the next step in Scully’s artistic evolution, one that continues to impact the greater landscape of contemporary abstract art. Following its Hirshhorn debut, the series will travel to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in Spring 2019.

Curated by Stéphane Aquin, Chief Curator with curatorial assistance from Sandy Guttman.

Pedro Cabrita Reis's new installation is located in front of MAAT museum and consists of two illuminated aluminium towers and was commissioned by E.D.P. Foundation, Lisbon.

The Daniel and Florence Guerlain Drawing Prize, which has already showcased over thirty artists since its creation, this year pays tribute to three artists living in Europe. Their work will be on view at the Parisian Salon du Dessin, where the winner will be announced on the 22 March.