This week we return our gaze to the art world. Below are some highlights of upcoming must-see exhibitions throughout the world from Hokusai to Hip Hop.

Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 26-July 16
Seattle Art Museum, October 19 2023-January 21, 2024

Hokusai (1760-1849) has been admired internationally for well over a century, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, with its outstanding Japanese collection, is well placed to present his work in context. The show comprises more than 90 works by the master and over 200 by his contemporaries and worldwide followers. The first half of the exhibition will trace Hokusai’s relationship with his teacher Katsukawa Shunshō and his links with other Japanese artists and writers of the period. The show’s second half will focus on the 20th and 21st centuries, telling the story of how Hokusai became by far the most famous Japanese artist outside his own country. The exhibition will travel to Seattle and then further venues to be announced.

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 5-July 16 

The German-born, Paris-based fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld started working in the 1950s and never stopped, remaking whole fashion houses—most notably, Chanel—while reconfiguring the couturier profession itself. Intellectual, collector, patron and entrepreneur, not to mention designer and curmudgeon, he died at 85, in 2019, and the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art immediately started planning this major survey on the whole of his career. Featuring close to 150 garments, most pieces will be accompanied by their sketches. Lagerfeld, who regarded fashion as a craft rather than an art, infamously believed that it belonged just about everywhere but a museum. 

Pablo Picasso: Celebration Picasso
Multi Exhibitions

The man, the myth, the misogynist: the many sides of Pablo Picasso’s life and work will come under the spotlight this year as institutions in Europe and the US mark the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death. Picasso’s fame and extraordinary output mean that although there is always a Picasso show on somewhere in the world, and 2023 will see a veritable bonanza of them. Around 50 exhibitions have been organized under the Celebration Picasso 1973-2023 umbrella, supported by the culture ministries of Spain and France. The Musée Picasso in Paris will kick off its celebrations by inviting Paul Smith, the British fashion designer, to curate an exhibition of the Spanish master’s works mixed with pieces by contemporary artists like Mickalene Thomas and Chéri Samba. Several shows will shine a light on Picasso’s contentious relationships with women. This side of Picasso’s character will be further explored by the Brooklyn Museum this summer which will look at Picasso’s work through a feminist lens. 

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions
Art Institute of Chicago, July 29-November 27 

Though Spanish painter Remedios Varo achieved recognition during her lifetime, her reputation has soared in recent years amid the wider rediscovery of women Surrealists. Titled Science Fictions, the show seeks to illuminate the tension between modern science and mysticism in Varo’s imagination as well as the “combination of precise planning and chance operations” that informed her meticulous technique. Working in a virtuosic style that testified to years of academic training in her native Spain and the deep influence of Hieronymus Bosch, she sometimes spent months crafting a single image. Varo’s otherworldly paintings are populated by wraith-like figures engaged in mysterious rituals and investigations: a juggler of stars, a scholar threading crystals on an abacus or an explorer charting a course through a river that surges from a single cup. When she died suddenly in 1963, Surrealism’s founder André Breton described her as “the sorceress who left too soon.”

Simone Leigh
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, April 6-September 4
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, November 3, 2023-March 3, 2024

Simone Leigh will finally receive her first museum survey after years of prolific production and a career-defining presentation at the 2022 Venice Biennale. The exhibition will open at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) before traveling to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and then next year on to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum. The show will survey the past 20 years of Leigh’s career, focusing predominantly on her sculptures in bronze, porcelain, terracotta and glass to highlight how her practice weaves together domestic architecture and feminine forms to create monuments to Black womanhood. It will also include collaborative video works made with artists including Chitra Ganesh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, which continue Leigh’s explorations into the intertwined iconographies of race and gender in the visual arts. The show will culminate with the sculptures Leigh produced for Sovereignty, her presentation for the US pavilion in Venice.

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
Baltimore Museum of Art, April 5-July 16
Saint Louis Art Museum, August 25, 2023-1 January 1, 2024

Since its emergence as a new cultural form in 1970s America, hip hop has shared an unbreakable bond of mutual influence with the visual arts. Bringing together painting, sculpture, photography, poetry, film and fashion, this show by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum will examine the development of hip hop as an art form over the past 50 years. It will explore a variety of hip hop’s themes, from activism and racial identity to notions of bling and swagger, and will highlight hip-hop culture’s relationship to gender, sexuality and feminism as well as its connections to the art world and the art market. Around 70 objects will be on show by creators ranging from artists—including Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Arthur Jafa and Deana Lawson—to fashion designers such as Virgil Abloh, the streetwear brand Cross Colours, and the luxury handbag brand Telfar. There will also be ephemera related to hip-hop history, including wigs from Lil’ Kim’s hairstylist Dionne Alexander, as well as performances and panels.

-Authored by Heather Zises, Marketing Director

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