Editor’s Pick – Top International Shows:  December 20 – December 27, 2010

Louise Lawler: Later
9 December – 15 January 2011
Yvon Lambert
Paris
http://www.yvon-lambert.com

Louise Lawler presents the photographs she took in Yves Saint Laurentʼs apartment as Christieʼs prepared for the 2008 sale of the late designerʼs art collection, dubbed by many as the “sale of the century”. In these pictures, Lawler captures the exotic hothouse environment of the reclusive designer, focusing on the elaborate and rare objects, furniture, floral arrangements and art with which he surrounded himself. In addition to individual photographs, the exhibition features two extremely large wall murals. One is a dense detailed photograph blown up to fill a large gallery wall; the other is an impressionistic photograph (taken with a cell phone) stretched to wrap around the gallery walls.

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Colur and Space
12 December – 27 February 2011
MOCA
Los Angeles
http://www.moca-la.org

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space is the first museum exhibition to situate pioneering Latin American artists among the international canon of those working with light and space. The exhibition aims to illuminate the field by expanding the dialogue surrounding light-and-space practices in contemporary visual art beyond the California tradition of the late 1960s and ’70s to include pivotal Latin American impulses expressed more than a decade earlier. The exhibition resents re-creations of important large-scale installations by five highly regarded and influential artists: Carlos Cruz-Diez (b. 1923), Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Julio Le Parc (b. 1928), Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) and Neville D’Almeida (b.1941), and Jesus Rafael Soto (1923-05), each of whom has conducted groundbreaking investigations of human perception and sensation, consistently challenging preexisting standards of art as a static two-dimensional experience in ways that have provoked new and extraordinary levels of viewer engagement.

Diango Hernandez
17 November – 30 January 2011
Blood Mountain Foundation
Budapest, Hungary
http://www.bloodmountain.org

Blood Mountain Foundation launched its Artist-in-Residence Programme earlier this year and the first encumbent, Diango Hernández, is currently presenting work during his stay in Budapest. Hernández’s exhibition, ‘a kiss, a hat, a stamp’, pays tribute to Budapest’s tradition of independent creative practices and its rich second-hand shops. Hernández uses a process of finding, assembling, creating and re-appropriating materials sourced from a local artisan workshop, flea markets and antique dealerships. The exhibition focuses on fragments (rather than whole objects) and edges (as opposed to surface areas), allowing the found objects to take on new forms and new meanings in their revised settings.

Simon Starling: Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)
16 December 2010 – 20 February 2011
Camden Arts Centre
London
http://www.camdenartscentre.org

This exhibition, curated by British artist Simon Starling, is the latest in a series of artist-selected shows. ‘Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts)’ brings together works by 30 artists and designers, revisiting the rich history of the Camden Arts Centre by showing fragments of exhibitions from the past 50 years. These works are reinstalled in the exact positions they previously occupied and Starling has selected new works by artists as an imagined future for the Centre’s exhibition programme.

Henrik Olesen
4 December 2010 – 30 January 2011
Malmö Konsthall
Malmö, Sweden
http://www.konsthall.malmo.se

Henrik Olesen is one of Denmark’s most important contemporary artists and this exhibition at Malmö Konsthall is his first major show in the Nordic region. The exhibition presents a selection of his works from the past 15 years in combination as well as a new site-specific intervention. In his works Olesen questions power relationships and how our history has been written, with particular reference to homosexuality. He draws on both contemporary and historical materials from architecture, law, economics, natural science and art history in order to draw our attention to the general repression and suppression of homosexuality throughout history. He explores, breaks and also comes to terms with the heterosexual structures which have held society in an iron grip throughout history.

Anton Corbijn
23 October – 29 January 2011
Galerie Anita Beckers
Frankfurt (Main)
http://www.galerie-beckers.de

Anton Corbijn has once stated his interest in portraying the pain of creation and in the people who struggle with that process. This exhibition presents Corbijn’s latest photographic series devoted to some of the most consecrated artmakers of today (including Gerhard Richter, above). Uniting an austerity principle with an aesthetic one, these black and white prints strike us for their precision in capturing the geniality of the portrayed in sometimes humorous, sometimes intriguing situations.

Callum Innes and Colm Toibin
16 December – 29 January 2011
Sean Kelly Gallery
New York
http://www.skny.com

For the first time in its history, the Sean Kelly Gallery is presenting a collaborative project between an artist and a writer. Works on paper by the Scottish painter, Callum Innes, are exhibited alongside text by the Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, excerpted from a short story (inspired by Innes’s watercolours) that was specifically commissioned by the gallery. The gallery introduced Innes and Tóibín in February 2010. A long-time admirer of Innes’s work, Tóibín spoke at length with Innes about the artist’s watercolours during their initial meeting. They subsequently continued their conversation at Innes’s studio in Edinburgh this summer. As their creative connections became apparent and their friendship grew, the gallery asked Tóibín to write an essay in response to Innes’s works on paper, a request that led to Tóibín’s powerful short story ‘water|colour’. After reading Tóibín’s text, Innes created a new body of watercolours based on it. The resultant exhibition includes this new “block” of 101 watercolours by Innes and excerpts from Tóibín’s story.

John Divola
11 December – 5 February 2011
Laura Bartlett Gallery
London
http://www.laurabartlettgallery.co.uk

‘My acts, my painting, my photographing, my considering, are part of, not separate from, this process of evolution and change. My participation was not so much one of intellectual consideration as one of visceral involvement,’ John Divola

John Divola’s Zuma Series is a landmark body of work completed between 1974 and 1977. The works’ association with process is centered in the fact that the artist not only recorded the decomposition and dilapidation of this structure, but that he began to participate, like an natural elemental force of nature, with the transformation of the structure.

How Soon Is Now
20 November – 8 February 2011
Garage Center for Contemporary Culture
Moscow
http://www.garageccc.com

‘How Soon is Now’ presents fifteen of the most interesting contemporary artists working with the photographic medium, including Anne Collier, Darius Khondji, Elad Lassry and Taryn Simon. They have been selected by five of the world’s leading artists and curators – Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf. The group exhibition showcases a broad curatorial perspective of international contemporary photography and offers the visitor a snap-shot of each artist’s work.

Summer 2010/11
2 December 2010 – 15 January 2011
Michael Stevenson
Cape Town
http://www.michaelstevenson.com

Michael Stevenson is presenting its 15th annual summer exhibition comprising five solo shows by Anton Kannemeyer, Viviane Sassen, Claudette Schreuders, Serge Alain Nitegeka and Hylton Nel. Kannemeyer shows new works from his Alphabet of Democracy series, chronicling the absurdities of life in the democratic South Africa. Dutch photographer Sassen presents photographs taken in East Africa where she grew up. Schreuders exhibits four new sculptures, prior to her solo exhibition in April 2011 at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The winner of the 2010 Tollman Award for Visual Art, Nitegeka, is showing meditations on form based on his experience of Johannesburg. Nel’s new works continue his distinctive style of work, rich in references to the decorative arts, literary and art-historical sources.