Review of 15 international art exhibitions in 2022
1，Bacon: Man and beas
The Royal College of Art, London
From January 29 to April 17, 2022
Irish-born artist Francis Bacon was the son of a horse breeder and one of the most important painters of the 20th century. Banished from his conservative family by his father at the age of 16, after which he drifted in Berlin and Paris before finally settling in London, his formative years coincided with some of the most disturbing events of the 20th century.
This large exhibition focuses on Bacon’s fascination with animals: how it shaped the painter’s attitude towards the human body and distorted it, and at some of the most extreme moments of existence, his figures are barely recognisable as human or beast. The exhibition also explores how Bacon was fascinated by animal migration, observing animals in the wild during his travels in South Africa, and with his studio filled with books on wild animals, whether chimpanzees, bulls, dogs or birds of prey, Bacon felt he could get closer to understanding the true nature of humanity by observing the unfettered behavior of animals.
The works on display span Bacon’s 50-year career, with highlights including some of Bacon’s earliest works and his last paintings, as well as three bullfighting themes on display for the first time.
2，Hockney's Eye: The Art and technique of depiction
The Fitzwilliam Museum
From March 15 to August 29, 2022
As one of the most influential artists of his time, David Hockney had a major exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Xiang Gallery at Downing College in the spring and summer of 2022.
Through traditional and cutting-edge ways of making art, the exhibition explores Hockney’s obsession with how we see the world and how to capture our world of time and space on the surface of a flat picture. In working with cameras, digital drawing, ipads and digital cinema, Hockney followed a tradition of creative experimentation with optical devices, from the use of the camera lucida to Canaletto’s camera obscura and the birth of naturalism in the Renaissance in the 15th century.
In the galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Hockney’s drawings, paintings and digital artworks have a series of provocative encounters with works by artists such as Claude Monet, John Constable and Andy Warhol. The exhibition showcases Hockney’s pioneering modern experiments combining hand, eye and optical instruments from the 1960s to the present day, with the iconic Grand Canyon I (2017) one of many brilliant and bold works on display.
3，150 years of Mondrian
The Hague Art Museum
From April 2 to September 25, 2022
2022 marks the 150th anniversary of Mondrian’s birth, and in April the Hague Art Gallery marked the artist’s birthday with an exhibition exploring Mondrian’s inspiring friendships and his role as an inspiration to many who came after him. Mondrian brought painting to a new level of abstraction, and his influence on modernism was immense – not only in the visual arts, but also in architecture and fashion.
Mondrian theorized that each primary color could represent a musical note, while the white, gray, and black Spaces on the canvas could represent other types of noise. The curator of the exhibition said that about Mondrian’s grid paintings, people can “hear” the colors he used.
Mondrian wanted to “create a spiritual space between the viewer and the work of art,” and he considered his abstract expression “a form of meditation to reach this divine truth.” Mondrian’s work is open to a variety of interesting interpretations, in part because the artist is constantly reinventing himself and exploring a variety of areas.
4，Whitney Biennial
New York, USA
From April 6 to October 16, 2022
Since 1932, the Whitney Biennial has been showcasing the landscape of American art, reflecting and engaging in cultural dialogue through exhibitions. The 80th landmark exhibition was curated by curator and Director of curatorial programs David Breslin and curator Adrienne Edwards. Titled “Keep Quiet,” the 2022 biennial features 63 artists and collectivities whose vibrant works reflect the challenges, complexities and possibilities facing American art today.
David Breslin and Adrian Edwards said in a curatorial statement: Rather than offering a unifying theme, we pursue throughout the exhibition a powerful energy that demonstrates the creation, sharing and sometimes concealable meaning of conceptual art, which can combine the richness and materiality of ideas, and confront larger social frameworks through personal narratives sifted through politics, literature and popular culture; Works of art can complicate the meaning of “America” by addressing physical and psychological boundaries. The biennale intends to experiment across generations and disciplines, proposing the exchange and reciprocity of cultural, aesthetic and political possibilities.
The Biennale’s subtitle, “Keep Quiet,” is a colloquial phrase. The curators were inspired by the way novelist Toni Morrison, jazz drummer Max Roach and artist David Hammons referenced it in their works. The curators say the Whitney Biennial is a forum for artists, and the works on display reflect the things that bother artists and the questions they ask.
5，Venice Biennale
Venice, Italy
From April 18 to November 27, 2022
In the main exhibition of this year’s 59th Venice Biennale, artists will tackle major threats to the future of humanity such as global plague, the catastrophic effects of climate change and the development of artificial intelligence. “Despite the climate crisis that prompted this exhibition, it wants to be an optimistic one,” curator Cecilia Alemani said in a statement.
The exhibition will focus on three themes: the representation of bodies and their metamorphosis; The relationship between individuals and technology; And the connection between the body and the earth. The main exhibition will eventually feature around 130 artists.
How has the definition of human changed? What constitutes life, and what distinguishes animals, plants, humans, and non-humans? What are our responsibilities to the Earth, to other people, and to the other organisms that live with us? And what would life and Earth be like without us?
6，Matisse Red Studio
Museum of Modern Art, New York
From May 1 to September 10, 2022
Matisse: The Red Studio reassembles the masterpiece for the first time with six other paintings, ceramics and three sculptures. Focusing on the origins and history of Matisse’s Red Studio (1911), the exhibition also features never-before-seen archival photographs and letters, as well as related paintings and drawings. Part of the exhibition is dedicated to preserving science and the latest discoveries about the process of making paintings, and the creative space in the exhibition also invites visitors of all ages to inspire them through drawing, writing and reflection.
This is a small but informative exhibition that dissects one of the artist’s greatest early paintings. This exhibition brings together all the extant works depicted by Henri Matisse in the Red studio – for the first time since they left their studio in the Paris suburb of issyle-moulineaux.
Since it entered the museum’s collection in 1949, the red, seductively radical work has attracted admirers. After being shown at MoMA, the exhibition will be on view at SMK – National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen from October 13, 2022 to February 26, 2023.
7，Cezanne
Art Institute of Chicago
From May 15 to September 5, 2022
Cezanne is regarded as an “artist’s artist”, and in fact some of his supporters and admirers, including Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro in the 19th century, and Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the 20th century, called Cezanne “the greatest of us all”.
This exhibition is the artist’s first major retrospective in the United States in 25 years and the first Cezanne exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in more than 70 years. Planned in collaboration with Tate Modern, this ambitious project explores Cezanne’s work across media and genres through 80 oil paintings, 40 watercolours and drawings, and two complete sketchbooks. This outstanding collection covers Cezanne’s signature themes and series – little-known early allegorical paintings, Impressionist landscapes, paintings by Saint-Victor Montagne, portraits and bath scenes – and includes rare public and private collections in North America, South America, Europe and Asia.
The exhibition also sheds light on Cezanne’s pioneering ways of opening up insight for generations of artists. Through the complementary perspectives of art historians, artists and conservators, this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition provides a complete clue to our time’s reunderstanding of the giants of art history.
9，Barbara Kruger
Miss you. I mean me. I mean you
Museum of Modern Art, New York
July 16, 2022 to January 2, 2023
Kruger’s large-scale work for New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) showcases the artist’s bold textual statements about truth, faith and power in the Marron Family Atrium. In the new exhibition, Kruger gives full play to her long-standing interest in architectural space, with strong but witty guidance in the work, encouraging the audience to immerse themselves in this “chaotic world” and make their own thinking.
Kruger is known for his work based on iconic texts that address issues such as capitalism and body autonomy. Her work often takes the form of obscure statements, reminiscent of the sans-serif writing of advertising copy; Printed on vinyl and black and white photographs, they have appeared in museums and public places around the world for 40 years.
Through a variety of media, including street billboards, bus body advertisements, subway car advertisements, advertising light boxes, postcards, posters, various public display Spaces and even the clothes on people’s backs, artists have penetrated their social critical concepts into all levels of American society and widely influenced people’s ideas.
10，Lee Yuhwan retrospective exhibition in Tokyo
Nippon Art Museum
From August 10 to November 7, 2022
This year coincides with the 15th anniversary of the opening of the Nippon Art Museum in Japan, and in August, Lee Woo-hwan’s large-scale solo exhibition was ushered in, which was his first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan in 17 years. Lee Yu-hwan played a foundational role in the “School of Things” movement and contributed to the Korean monochrome painting movement. The serene white canvas is illuminated by expressive paint, and a large site-specific sculpture of stone and iron is a hallmark.
The rich cultural implications of Lee Yuhwan’s works transcend their geographical context. The professional background of philosophy brought him the thinking pattern of abstract rationality, while the ubiquitous “Tao” and “Zen” in Japanese and even Asian culture rendered rationality an ineffable color. This is what he considers the best state of creation, a state of chance encounter and collision.
This exhibition is curated by Lee Yuhwan himself, and the 59 works run through the 1960s to the latest creation, tracing the passionate track of continuous creation over the past 60 years. The audience can have a glimpse of the artist’s thinking on the relationship between things and things, things and space, and things and images in different stages.
11，Lucian Freud: A New perspective
National Gallery
October 1, 2022 to January 22, 2023
The exhibition brings together the artist’s most important work from seven decades – spanning earlier works such as Rose Girl from the 1940s (British Council Collection); “Reflections with Two Children (Self-Portrait)” (Museo Nationale de Thyssen-Bonnemisza, Madrid) in the 1960s, until his famous late works.
Freud is considered one of the most important figurative painters of the last century. The son of architect Ernst Freud and grandson of Sigmund Freud, the artist is known for his “relentless” transformation of the human body into loose brushstrokes and rich colors.
His lovers, friends, family and celebrities such as David Hockney, Queen Elizabeth II… Regardless of their status, regardless of their life story, they are all equal in his pictures: real, tender and complex beings made up of flesh and blood. Freud could spend hours, months, or even years observing his subjects, with the eye and mind capturing far more information than a camera lens could record.
12，Alice Neil
The Centre Pompidou
October 5, 2022 to January 16, 2023
Alice Neel (1900-1984) was an important figure in the North American art landscape and spent her life painting marginalized people. Little known in her lifetime, this extraordinary painter is known in the art world today for her acumen in depicting different segments of American society.
Neil often painted female nudes, a far cry from the traditional paradigm of shaping from a male perspective, without any sentimentality. She was a free and independent woman who went against the avant-garde trends of the time, and her figurative paintings spanned periods of abstract, pop, minimalism, and conceptual art. The two-part exhibition revolves around class and gender struggles and features a total of 75 paintings and drawings.
Neel is known for his portraits, which focus on people on the margins of all social classes, especially portraits of women who escape the male gaze. In her 60-year career, she has never been influenced by Impressionism or avant-garde art such as abstract, Pop, minimalism, and conceptual art, and has focused her life on realistic art and self-expression.
13，Edward Hopper's New York
Whitney Museum of Art
October 19, 2022 to March 5, 2023
For Hopper, New York is a city that exists in the mind and on the map, a place formed through lived experience, memory, and collective imagination. In his later years, he recalled that New York was “the American city I know and love best.”
New York was Hopper’s home for nearly six decades (1908-67), a period that spanned his entire mature career. Hopper’s New York is not an accurate portrayal of the 20th-century metropolis, which has experienced tremendous growth during his lifetime – skyscrapers reaching record-breaking heights, construction sites roaring across the five boroughs, an increasingly diverse population – but he still portrays New York as if it were uninhabited.
Eschews the city’s iconic skyline and picturesque landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building, instead turning his attention to out-of-the-way corners, Hopper’s New York depicts the artist’s enduring fascination with the city, as well as his private record of it.
14，Alex Katz: The party
The Guggenheim Museum in New York
October 21, 2022 to February 20, 2023
Born in 1927, Alex Katz has been working continuously for eight decades to capture the most pleasing visual experiences. “Eternity exists in a few minutes of absolute consciousness,” Katz said in 1961. “Successful works seem to be a composite reflection of that.” Whether it’s an exchange between friends or a beam of light shooting through a tree, Katz’s goal is to create a kind of record of “things that go by fast.”
Katz came to prominence as an artist in the mid-20th century, creating a model of figurative painting that blended the energy of abstract expressionist oil paintings with the American vernacular of magazines, billboards and movie screens. Throughout his practice, he has made the environments of central New York and coastal Maine his primary subject, documenting an evolving group of poets, artists, critics, dancers, and filmmakers who have energized the cultural avant-garde from the postwar period to the present.
Featuring paintings, drawings, collages, prints and standalone “cutouts,” the retrospective will begin with the artist’s sketches of New York subway riders in the late 1940s and will end with the intoxicating, immersive landscapes that have dominated his work in recent years.
15，Meira Oppenheim: My exhibition
Museum of Modern Art, New York
October 30, 2022 to March 4, 2023
She is regarded as the “Muse” of Surrealism, whose work embodied many movements in 20th century art, especially Dada and Surrealism, but she has always been difficult to categorize. She refused to divide art into “male” and “female”, for her gender is not binary, but mutually permeating; In the seven years prior to her collection, MoMA had never held a permanent collection of works by any female artist. She is Meira Oppenheim.
Known for her famous fur-lined teacups, Oppenheim’s six-decade career has been little known outside her native Switzerland, with many of her paintings, sculptures, compositions, relief, jewelry designs, works on paper and collages being exhibited in the United States for the first time. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see Oppenheim’s work – from bold objects first exhibited with the Surrealists in the 1930s, to painted collages that incorporate natural materials found in the Alpine landscape, to sculptures made of bronze and semi-precious stones – in a wide variety.
This is the artist’s first major exhibition to cross the Atlantic and the first solo show in the United States in 25 years, looking back at the Swiss avant-garde artist’s career.
