Perhaps no 20th-century band of artists has had as impactful a legacy as the Surrealists, a rangy, global group whose goal was nothing less than “a revolution in consciousness,” says Matthew Affron, the curator of “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100” at the Philadelphia Art Museum (open now through February). This knockout exhibition, the first of many must-see shows this season, is composed of roughly 200 paintings, films, and sculptures from stars like Joan Miró, Leonora Carrington, and Roberto Matta. The traveling exhibition began at the Centre Pompidou—fitting, as Surrealism was born in Paris—and Philadelphia is the fifth and final stop. Special to this iteration is a focus on the artists who arrived in North America after fleeing Nazism in Europe. With our world in turmoil once again, Surrealism’s radical imagination is a fitting antidote.
Considered by many to be the greatest living painter, Gerhard Richter, 93, is the subject of a sweeping retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (open now through March). The exhibition brings together six decades’ worth of work, the breadth emphasizing the unending experimentation Richter brought to his art, whether dragging a squeegee across his canvases or deconstructing Renaissance-era masterworks, such as his 1973 series Annunciation after Titian. Presented in chronological order, the exhibition has something for everyone.
One of the more striking stories to come out of the art world lately is that of Bettina Grossman, an avant-garde artist whose vast archive of photographs, sculptures, film, and paintings is only just coming to light. Bettina (she preferred the mononym) lived in the Chelsea Hotel from 1972 until her death, in her 90s, in 2021. Her estate is now stewarded by the artist Yto Barrada, who recognized Bettina’s creations as not only worth saving but deserving of a wider audience. Cue “Original Order Order Original: The Art and Archives of Bettina,” the largest presentation of the artist’s work to date, now open at Ruth Arts in Milwaukee (through April). The project is both an exhibition and an ongoing excavation: “Just weeks ago we were opening a box of work that no one has ever known existed,” says Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art Thought director Andrea Andersson, who curated the show. And the art is captivating: undulated carved wood sculptures, candid street photography, experimental 16-mm film. “We’re just catching up to her extraordinary genius.”
Moving further west, the ever-excellent abstract artist Jacqueline Humphries takes over two floors of the Aspen Art Museum starting in December (through April). Humphries, 65, blends traditional painting techniques with signifiers of our modern era—coding language, screen-like silver paint—to offer a 21st-century take on Abstract Expressionism. On her nine-foot-tall canvases, you might find an image not unlike a captcha test. For this exhibition of mostly new work, the New York–based artist returns to fluorescent paints, which under a black light reveal hidden forms. The show makes the case for Humphries as one of our most inventive, ambitious painters.
More than 100 stunning photographs, many of them taken in Central and West African cities in the mid 20th century, make up “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (December through July). With the continent’s decolonization movement as a backdrop, image makers like Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, and Malick Sidibé documented the revolutionary energy and Pan-African solidarity in their communities. But rather than a specific slice of history, “Ideas of Africa” shows how the spirit of that time has ricocheted across geographies and generations. As curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who organized the show with Chiara Mannarino, explains, the exhibition “takes imagination and movement as its beating pulse.” The photographs here leap off the walls—powerful, stylish, and very much alive.
Over in London, a pair of shows with winter openings celebrate two giants of British art. At the National Portrait Gallery, “Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting” (February through May) will focus on the esteemed late artist’s works on paper. Where Freud’s psychologically intense paintings are big on texture, his drawings are stripped of flourish and intimately spare. Tender renderings of his subjects—including his daughter Bella Freud and his second wife, Caroline Blackwood—pierce the surface to get at deeper truths. As Blackwood once said of Freud’s sitters, “If they ever had secrets they have been spilled so openly that they no longer qualify as such.”
On the other side of the Thames, Tate Modern’s “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” (February through August) will give the grande dame of confessional artwork her largest exhibition yet. Emin’s oeuvre spans 40 years and includes painting, sculpture, installation, video, and neon—all of which will be represented at Tate Modern. Both new work made since her 2020 cancer diagnosis and famed pieces like 1998’s My Bed, an installation of the disheveled site of a breakdown, will come together, showing how Emin, 62, continues to inspire with her blunt emotion and raw provocation.
Later in the spring, the opening of the much-anticipated Obama Presidential Center on Chicago’s South Side brings with it a slew of exciting art commissions, including a 70-foot-long mural by Aliza Nisenbaum that will anchor the library’s reading room. For the commission—“the honor of a lifetime,” she says—Nisenbaum worked with President Obama to choose writers (Walt Whitman, Toni Morrison) to incorporate into the mural alongside native Midwestern plants and quotidian activities. The result is a vivid celebration of both the natural and literary worlds, which no doubt will enrich the learning that takes place around it.