All roads lead to Italy this season, and not only because the Venice Biennale, the greatest art exhibition of them all, opens there in May. Over in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is staging a Raphael retrospective—the first ever devoted to the Renaissance master in the US, shockingly. In Paris, at the Louvre, another titan of the Renaissance takes center stage: Michelangelo, whose sculptures will be shown alongside Rodin’s. In Vienna, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is giving a big show to Canaletto and his nephew, Bernardo Bellotto.
But back to the Biennale. That exhibition is the most high-profile biennial in the world and the star of a year that marks an astonishing convergence of biennials taking place the world over. New York alone is getting two this spring: the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York, at the Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1, respectively. Then, in Pittsburgh, there’s the Carnegie International, and farther afield, in Australia, there’s the Biennale of Sydney.
Big group shows like these are great, of course, but there’s nothing better than a good, old-fashioned retrospective. The Museum of Modern Art’s momentous Marcel Duchamp retrospective will offer those thrills, and so will a large-scale show for Francisco de Zurburán at London’s National Gallery.
These are admittedly the kind of shows one expects from grand institutions, and thankfully, the spring also brings with it many more surprising offerings geared around under-recognized artists to balance them out. Aurèlia Muñoz, Anna Casparsson, Pascale Martine Tayou, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, David Lamelas, L. V. Hull, and Kim Yun Shin are all among those receiving some of their biggest shows to date this spring.
Below, a look at 74 museum exhibitions and biennials to see this season.
“Martin Wong: Chinatown USA” at Wrightwood 659, Chicago
Martin Wong once said that when he painted Chinatowns in New York and San Francisco, he worked “not in a Western style but an Eastern style,” a remark that hinted at a desire for these images to be imbued with Chinese heritage. In these paintings, fire-breathing dragons and fighting Bruce Lees collide in spaces that are clearly imagined but rooted in reality. Wong’s attempts to reconcile fact and fiction—and Chineseness and Americanness—are at the center of this 100-work show, the biggest one devoted to the singular painter since a traveling retrospective finished its run nearly a decade ago.
April 17–July 18
Venice Biennale
Now returning for its 61st edition, the greatest art exhibition in the world returns, this time with a twist due to an unfortunate turn of fate: Its curator, Koyo Kouoh, died while creating the show, leaving five advisers whom she selected to see her project to fruition. The resultant show will be titled “In Minor Keys” and will focus on artists who “refuse orchestral bombast and goose-step military marches,” as she put it in an accompanying text. Guadalupe Maravilla, Dan Lie, Wangechi Mutu, and the late Seyni Awa Camara are among the 111 talented artists featured in the main show, which is complemented by a range of national pavilions, some of them already controversial.
May 9–November 22