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Dates: 1 Dec 09 - 30 Apr 10
Categories: Archaeology & Ancient art
Address: 4 Neophytou Douka Street Athens GR- 106 74
Tel: +30 210 722 8321 Website

The Greek god of love, lust and desire was a popular deity in antiquity and a favourite subject of playwrights, poets and artists.

This ambitious exhibition surveys the changing perceptions of Eros (known as Cupid to the Romans) from the eighth century BC when he was viewed as an influential god to the Roman period when he became less potent and a mere companion to Venus.

On view are more than 280 artefacts including bronzes, sculpture, pottery and wall paintings drawn from museums in Greece, Cyprus, Italy and France.

These artefacts will show the varied depictions of Eros from a handsome, adult male to a chubby child (pictured, Eros and Psyche about to exchange a passionate kiss, second century AD). One of the earliest written records of Eros appears in Hesiod’s Theogony—the most important Greek creation myth.

According to the poet, Eros is: “…the fairest of the deathless gods; he unstrings the limbs and subdues both mind and sensible thought in the breasts of all gods and all men.” Hesiod says that Eros was one of the oldest deities, born from Chaos alongside Gaia (the Earth) and Tartarus (the Underworld).

Later descriptions of the god’s birth contradict Hesiod’s version by stating that he is the son of Aphrodite.

By Late Antiquity it is the second version of the god’s birth that predominates, and representations of Eros tend to show him as a naughty child. Emily Sharpe

Eros and Psyche about to exchange a passionate kiss, second century AD

Dates: 21 Nov 09 - 14 Mar 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Lichtentaler Allee 8b Baden-Baden 76530
Tel: +49 (0)7221 39898 0 Website

This exhibition is the last of three major retrospectives at the Museum Frieder Burda to feature significant German artists.

After Polke and Richter, the Baselitz retrospective, curated by Goetz Adriani, consists of 75 large paintings and 50 works on paper, celebrating 50 years of the artist’s oeuvre.

The first exhibition is divided into four main categories: works from the early 60s; diptychs from the 70s; the “Heroes” series; and the late “Remix” paintings.

Chronologically organised, they trace Baselitz’s painting career from 1959 to the present.

The show aims to offer new insights by focusing on the role of the past in his work.

According to Adriani, the artist’s East German heritage plays an essential part in the works shown: “Already in his early work Baselitz revolted against the political and painterly restrictions of social realism, introducing scandalous sexual themes to his art.” The “Heroes” series critically deals with “broken German heroes rather than brave German soldiers”, Adriani notes. A highlight of the show is the “Remix” series, which Baselitz began in 2005.

Engaging anew with his works from the early 1960s, he manoeuvres the past into the present.

What were dark and depressed works are now repainted with a “rococo lightness” said Adriani, In “Baselitz: 30 Years of Sculpture” at the neighbouring Staatliche Kunsthalle, which consists of 15 sculptures shown alongside eight paintings, curator Karoline Kraus explores the relationship between the artist’s sculpture and painting.

Works of different media from the same creative period are displayed to offer a new perspective on the Baselitz’s three-dimensional work.

Among the works on show is the new sculpture Volks Ding Zero, 2009, which is being shown for the first time.

Volks Ding Zero, 2009

Dates: 21 Nov 09 - 14 Mar 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Lichtentaler Allee, 8a Baden-Baden D-76530
Tel: +49 (0)722 130 0763 Website

Dates: 3 Dec 09 - 11 Apr 10
Categories: Curious
Address: Palau Nacional, Parc de Montjuïc Barcelona 08038
Tel: +34 93 622 0360 Website

The 75th Anniversary celebrations at MNAC begin this month with the opening of this commemorative exhibition that brings together approximately 80 important works of art belonging to Catalonian cultural heritage.

The list of institutions from which work for the commemorative show has been sourced includes: the Musée du Louvre, the Musée de Cluny, the Musée d’Orsay, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée des Beaux-arts de Montréal, the Guggenheim in New York and Spain’s own Museo del Prado. Other work has been sourced from an equally international list of private collections but most significantly for the museum, some pieces, such as the Beget Majesty, a major work of Catalan Romanesque sculpture housed at the church of Sant Cristòfor in Beget, or the impressive Gothic altarpiece of the Virgin of L’Escala by Joan Antigó at the monastery of Sant Esteve in Banyoles, are leaving their churches for the first time. Artists represented in the exhibition as “Guests of Honour” include Bernat Martorell, Damià Forment, Marià Fortuny, Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, resulting in a show that is comprised of both painting and sculptures as well as lesser known graphic work.

The 75th anniversary affords the museum an excellent reason to borrow from collections worldwide while also providing a chance to welcome home some of the most significant objects to be created in region. (Pictured, José Tapiro y Baro, Arab’s Head.) R.C.

José Tapiro y Baro, Arab’s Head

Dates: 29 Jan 10 - 18 May 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Plaza dels Àngels, 1 Barcelona 08001
Tel: +34 (0)93 412 0810 Website

Over a hundred works by the celebrated Canadian artist Rodney Graham have been brought together for this exhibition, which surveys the artist’s output since 1978.

The pieces come from both public and private collections and together display the abundance of references to art history, literature, philosophy and pop culture that permeates Graham’s work, including influences as diverse as Edgar Allen Poe, Jeff Wall, Donald Judd and Sigmund Freud.

Graham works with an eclectic range of material and media resulting in a show consisting of painting, photography, installations, prints, music, video, sculpture, and books.

The exhibition also includes Graham’s first foray into painting with a series of 21 works in the style(s) of Pablo Picasso entitled “My Master”.

Graham chose to tackle both Picasso and the medium of paint by creating abstract fields of complementary colours resulting in compositions that clearly reflect the influence of the Spanish master while resisting pastiche. The exhibit—which, after leaving Macba, will tour the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle—also features Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003 (still, pictured) a work consisting of a 1961 Victoria 8 film projector displaying views of snow falling on a 1930s German Rheinmetall typewriter.

The work is one of Graham’s most notable: the size of this exhibition provides ample opportunity for viewers to place the piece in context among Graham’s numerous other witty, intelligent and often dense, theory-based works.

Rob Curran

Rheinmetall/Victoria 8, 2003

Dates: 5 Nov 09 - 21 Feb 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945) Post-War (1945-70)
Address: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 1, Place Neuve Geneva CH-1204
Tel: +41 (0)22 3105270 Website

After a 20-year break from Giacometti (the last Genevan exhibition was in 1986), the curator of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Nadia Schneider, has designed an exhibition of sculpture, drawings, notebooks and photographs illustrative of his career between 1835 and 1946.

In this period, he abandoned the influences of his impressionist-inspired father, Giovanni, and of the surrealists, and turned to figurative art, in particular to representations of the human body.

The early part of this period sees the diminution of heads and figures which later becomes an investigation of the relationship between distance and dimension.

This chapter is bracketed by earlier and later works to highlight this radical change.

The exhibition has been made in collaboration with the Fondation Alberto Giacometti, Zurich, which has loaned a number of the exhibits.

Man Walking in the Rain, 1948

Dates: 1 Jan 10 - 31 Oct 10
Categories: Design
Address: The Headrow Leeds LS1 3AA
Tel: +44 (0)113 247 7241 Website

For most of 2010, the main sculpture galleries at Leeds Art Gallery will be occupied by work that has punctuation or text modification at its heart.

The adjacent Henry Moore Institute is responsible for mounting sculpture shows at the gallery, and institute curator Sophie Raikes has selected works that are principally in two dimensions, although the first gallery is dominated by Fiona Banner’s monumental bronze Full Stops, 2007, in effect puting the entire exhibition into a state of qualification, as if intended to indicate that all is not as it seems.

It’s particularly apposite setting for pieces such as Rosie Leventon’s palimpsestic work Newspaper Drawing (pictured, detail), where the artist has written a personal story, in silver ink, over pages taken from an Arabic newspaper, making both the writing and the newsprint very difficult to read.

Also in the first gallery is Emma Kay’s The Bible—2717 Objects in Order of Appearance, 2002, a huge text of biblical items that the artist recalled from memory.

Other work comes from Mona Hatoum, Ian Hamilton Findlay and David Nash, among others. I.M.

Dates: 29 Jan 10 - 7 May 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Duke of York, King's Road London SW3
Tel: +44 (0)20 7823 2363 Website

Often under-represented in museums and institutes in India itself, there has been a growing international interest in contemporary art from India in recent years. “The Empire Strikes Back” brings together 26 Indian artists, the majority of whom have not previously had their work shown in the UK. T.V.

Santosh, Subodh Gupta and Jitish Kallat (pictured, Public Notice 2, 2007) among others, have all achieved widespread recognition following high profile exhibitions.

This, in turn has allowed commercial galleries in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai to prosper, opening up secondary spaces in Europe and the US, allowing greater access for collectors.

Work on view in “The Empire Strikes Back”, from artists including Tallur L.N, Bharti Kher, Shezad Dawood as well as Santosh, Gupta and Kallat, often examines the effects of the country’s continuing economic evolution and political unrest.

The recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai inspired a number of works included in the exhibition, while topics such as the legacy of the Raj era and Ghandi’s attempt to create a society free from religious conflict are also touched upon.

Another focus is the effect of the country’s continuing urban expansion and development, and the resulting effects on social cohesion.

Installation, painting, sculpture, film and video pieces are all included in the exhibition and, along with the more high profile artists listed, there is work from a number of young and emerging practitioners.

Twenty-eight-year-old T.

Venkanna, who has had group and solo shows in Mumbai and Baroda, uses almost Dalí-esque compositions in his oil paintings, juxtaposing religious and political references, while Hema Upadhyay examines socio-political inequality through her photography and installation. The involvement of Phillips de Pury as the exhibition’s principal sponsor verifies the strength and commercial relevance of contemporary Indian art in today’s art market.

William Oliver

Dates: 4 Feb 10 - 11 Apr 10
Categories: Far East
Address: Mosley Street Manchester M2 3JL
Tel: +44 (0)161 235 8888 Website

Ten works by emerging artists from China, India and Japan, selected from Frank Cohen’s collection of more than 1,000 works of art collected over 30 years make up this exhibition, which reflects the collector’s recent interest in the east.

Featuring contemporary painting and sculpture, the exhibition is intended to function as a showcase for the east’s “future stars” with represented artists including Chen Lei and Ravinder Reddy.

Cohen’s collection has been shown at such major international museums as Tate, the Guggenheim, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, but this is the first to be held in his home town of Manchester. The exhibition includes the trademark laughing faces of Chinese artist Yue Minjun, who also appeared in the Saatchi Gallery’s 2008 exhibition “The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art”, and the work of one of India’s most recognised artists, Ravinder Reddy, who is represented here by her striking and large fibreglass bust entitled Gilded Head, 2007.

Yoshimoto Nara, the Tokyo-based pop artist lets visitors walk among his scattered works in the installation London Mayfair House, 2006, a representation of his working studio, and the London-born, New Dehli-based Bharti Kher presents The Skin Speaks A Language Not Its Own, 2006, a life-size baby elephant crafted from bindis on fibreglass.

Such emerging artists are exhibited side-by-side with the established artist Takashi Murakami, whose painting Army of Mushrooms, 2003, is on display.

At the opening of the exhibition on 4 February, Cohen will give a talk about his passion for collecting accompanied by the curator of the show, David Thorp. R.C.

Bharti Kher, The Skin Speaks A Language Not Its Own, 2006

Dates: 22 Jan 10 - 18 Apr 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 180 St Kilda Road Melbourne 3004
Tel: +61 (0)3 8620 2222 Website

It’s only fitting that the most comprehensive exhibition of Ron Mueck’s work in the southern hemisphere should be staged in the artist’s hometown of Melbourne.

Since making his art world debut in 1997 in the star-making “Sensation” show at the Royal Academy in London, Mueck’s name has been synonymous with hyper-realistic sculpture.

The son of a toy maker, Mueck, born in 1958, began his career as a model-maker/special effects creator for the movie industry before transforming, in his 30s, into a full-time artist.

This show features 12 of his eerily life-like sculptures drawn from national and international public and private collections, including four new pieces created specifically for the show. “We wanted to present works spanning his entire career—from Dead Dad [pictured], 1996/97, which launched his career to his most recent sculptures which will be making their debut in Melbourne,” said the gallery’s Australian art curator, David Hurlston.

Dead Dad, a smaller than life-size sculpture of the artist’s dead father will be displayed on its own “in a shrine-like environment”.

Also showing are some of the artist’s most famous pieces including Wild Man, 2005, a 2.7 metre sculpture of a slightly dishevelled, naked man sitting in a chair; Mask II, 2001/02, a colossal disembodied man’s head complete with noticeable pores and a five o’clock shadow; and the museum’s own Mueck, the silver-haired Two Women, 2005.

Joining these pieces are the four new works: the aptly titled Woman with Sticks, 2008; Drift, a small-scale sculpture of a man on a lilo; Youth, a poignant work depicting a young black man suffering from stab wounds; and finally what Hurlston calls “a real departure” from Mueck’s oeuvre, which usually focuses on the human form: a massive 1.8 metre-high chicken which will hang from the gallery’s ceiling. Following this presentation the show travels to the Queensland Art Gallery (8 May-8 August) and the Christchurch Art Gallery, New Zealand (30 September-23 January 2011). Emily Sharpe

Dead Dad, 1996/97

Dates: 2 Dec 09 - 7 Mar 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 1018 North Miami Avenue Miami 33136
Tel: +1 305 455 3380 Website

Miami, gateway to the Americas and the commercial centre of multi-billion dollar trade links between the US and Latin America, plays host to an A-list of South and Central American artists this December.

Besides the numerous artists represented by dealers at Art Basel Miami Beach (3-6 December, see next page), the Miami region’s museums and its private collections have a Hispanic flavour.

Special guests at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach—a stroll from the convention centre—include a stellar selection of art lent by the Fondatión Jumex, the largest private collection in Mexico. “Where do we go from here?” (until 14 March) includes Mexican big hitters such as Gabriel Orozco, Minerva Cuevas and Damian Ortega alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, On Kawara, and Jenny Holzer.

The exhibition, at its first stop in the US, poses the question “should we look back?”, says Silvia Karman Cubiñá, the director of the Bass Museum.

Highlights include Warhol’s Sixteen Jackies, 1964, and Sherrie Levine’s Buddha, 1996, an homage in bronze to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal turned fountain.

Cubiñá chose Levine’s work because it is about art history, she says.

And Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s But I’m on the guest list!, 2007, a door marked VIP—could it be more appropriate for ABMB? “It’s humorous.

What does VIP mean?” adds Cubiñá. “Or it’s deeply philosophical, if you want to go there.” Also on show at the Bass Museum is a “pimped-out” Cadillac courtesy of former graffiti artist Dzine who meshes street-art, Swarovski crystals and Chicano “low-rider” culture (until 21 February). A different journey through the art of the automobile can be enjoyed in the Wolfsonian Institute in South Beach. “Styled for the Road”, 1908 to 1948 (until 14 March) celebrates the golden age of car design through advertisements and car designers’ original art work.

Continuing the Latin America-meets-in-Miami theme, the Miami Art Museum is presenting “Everything”, a mid-career retrospective of the Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca, again the first stop on the exhibition’s tour of the US (until 17 January).

As well as the 50 paintings and works on paper, in downtown Miami’s Freedom Tower, Kuitca is presenting “Everything (else), Large Scale Works” (also until 17 January), which includes his set design for Richard Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”, a production first staged in his home town of Buenos Aires.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, explores how artists grapple with storytelling. “The Reach of Realism” (until 14 February), organised by curator Ruba Katrib, includes paintings, photographs and sculpture by artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Wilhelm Sasnal, Tom Burr and Gillian Wearing.

According to Katrib: “None of the artists deal with images in a direct way.

They’re constantly abstracting representations.” For New Yorkers in Miami prepared to head up Highway 1, there is a reminder of home in West Palm Beach, where the Norton Museum of Art has organised “New York, New York: The 20th Century” (until 27 December).

Paintings, photographs and sculpture by artists ranging from Diane Arbus, Stuart David and Edward Hopper capture the Big Apple’s temptations and extremes during the great American century. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the phrase, “hell is other people”, apt in an over-crowded art museum or art fair.

Sartre only visited the US once, in 1945, much preferring Russia and China.

He was also pals with Castro.

Undaunted, curator Berta Sichel has selected art from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection with reference to Sartre’s ideas. “Being in the World” (until 7 March, at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation), includes work by Bill Viola, Chantal Akerman and Muntean/Rosenblum. Also in Miami, the Frost Museum of Art tackles the big theme of peace on earth.

Artists from around the world, including Bill Viola (again), Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, Chuck Close and Marina Abramovic, have contributed to a “collective tapestry of images that mirror the many roles of the Dalai Lama”.

The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader’s own foundation has collaborated with the Florida International University Museum to create “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama” (until 10 January). Miami wouldn’t be Miami without its private art collectors.

The Rubell Family Collection in Miami is showing “Beg Borrow and Steal”, an exhibition that takes its cue from Picasso’s definition of a great artist: the ones who don’t just borrow, they steal ideas and images (until 29 May).

Javier Pes

Dates: 1 Nov 09 - 14 Mar 10
Categories: Design
Address: 1001 Washington Avenue Miami Beach 33139
Tel: +1 305 535 2622 Website

A poster advertising a 1937 Plymouth car at the Wolfsonian Institut

Dates: 7 Jan 10 - 18 Apr 10
Categories: Archaeology & Ancient art
Address: Route 30 South Middlebury 05753
Tel: +1 802 443 3168 Website

The Greek and Latin texts published by the Loeb Classical Library are easily distinguished—by their bindings: green for Greeks, red for Romans.

This exhibition of 18th-century prints recalls a kind of Hegelian green-red dialectic that raged mid-century, a search for an aetiology of western art that would secure aesthetic orthodoxy and hegemony.

The debate turned on such questions as: did western art develop from ancient Greek or ancient Roman precedents? Is ancient Greece or ancient Rome the ideal to which one should look for inspiration? With a display of prints of the contemporary artists at the forefront of this debate—in the green corner, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), and the British antiquarians, James Stuart (1713-88) and Nicholas Revett (1720-1804); and in the red corner, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78)—the museum shows how visual “evidence” provided rhetorical devices and propaganda for both sides (shown here, James Stuart, A Doric Portico, 1762). By the middle of the 18th century, the Grand Tour was well established and the glories of ancient Rome (as well as the canon of 16th- and 17th-century artists) were largely accepted as the measure of taste and artistic inspiration.

However, from 1755 Winckelmann began laying the foundations (mostly writing about Greek sculpture) for a neo-classical aesthetic that found resonances with certain Enlightenment notions then in the air (rational thought and political freedom) by valorising Greek over Roman art.

His expertise in the study of Greek and Roman antiquities was widely recognised and, in 1763, he was appointed Commissioner of Antiquities by Pope Clement XIII.

His rise was tragically cut short by his murder in Trieste in 1768. The reds were not idle, however.

From the moment of his arrival in Rome in 1740s, Piranesi brought out work after work of drawings and prints that illustrated and celebrated Latin antiquity.

He made an exceptionally powerful impression on a new generation of students at the Académie de France, including Charles de Wailly, Marie-Joseph Peyre and perhaps Jacques-Germain Soufflot, and he counted visiting British architects, such as William Chambers, Robert Adam, Robert Mylne and George Dance, among his acquaintance, if not his protégés.

Three centuries later the debate seems to have generated more heat than light and it is hard to appreciate what appear to be nit-picking polarisations that feed these rows—but are they so different from the “culture wars” of our own days? Food for thought and a feast for the eyes. D.L.

Dates: 13 Dec 09 - 1 Mar 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present) Latin American
Address: 11 West 53rd Street New York 10019-5497
Tel: +1 212 708 9400 Website

This mid-career retrospective comes 16 years after The Museum of Modern Art organised Orozco’s first solo museum show—“Projects 41: Gabriel Orozco” (1993).

In the intervening period the Mexican artist has continued to move freely between painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and installation, producing an amazingly varied oeuvre.

This is examined here, with a large selection of objects, drawings, photographs and paintings which MoMA hopes will provide the audience with a context for Orozco’s large sculptures and installations. The retrospective provides an opportunity to showcase many of Orozco’s works for the first time in New York.

Some of Orozco’s classic works from the 1990s will be included in the exhibition, such as La DS, 1993, the Citroën car reduced to two-thirds its usual width, and Black Kites, 1997 (pictured), the human skull covered in a graphite grid long before Hirst covered one in diamonds.

The curators feel the exhibition “highlights the diversity of Orozco’s materials and the variety of his methods while presenting an oeuvre that is unique in formal power and intellectual rigor”.

The sculptures and installations My Hands are My Heart, 1991, Yielding Stone, 1992, Elevator, 1994, Four Bicycles (There Is Always One Direction), 1994, Yogurt Caps, 1994, Lintels, 2001, and Working Tables, 2000-2005, 2005 are also included in the show.

Major support for the exhibition was provided by the National Council for Culture and the Arts as well as by Fundación Televisa, Mexico.

After finishing at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the exhibition will travel to the Basel, Paris and London. K.A.

Black Kites, 1997

Dates: 3 Feb 10 - 28 Jun 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945)
Address: 61, rue de Grenelle Paris 75007
Tel: +33 (0)1 42 22 59 58 Website

The concept of vanitas or the transitory nature of life has served as inspiration for artists and artisans for millennia.

Almost all artistic movements from the Baroque to neo-pop art, post-impressionism to surrealism have explored the theme in painting, sculpture, photographs, jewellery, videos, engravings and objects.

This unusual exhibition traces vanities in art from antiquity to the present day by presenting an eclectic mix of 160 objects - from modern-day pieces such as a c-print of Damien Hirst's diamond encrusted skull, For the Love of God, 2007, and Carrying the Skeleton, 2008, a c-print by Marina Abramovic, which shows the Serbian performance artist carrying a skeleton on her back, to earlier examples such as ancient Pompeian mosaics of skulls and the popular memento mori genre paintings of the 17th century.

Issues such as global warming as well as political and spiritual splintering have created a renewed interest in vanities.

The exhibition opens with contemporary examples by artists such as Jan Fabre, Cindy Sherman, Yan Pei Ming and Annette Messager, among others, and the theme is then explored in reverse chronological order, covering more than two thousand years of history.

Highlights include: two paintings of St Francis, one by Caravaggio and the other by Zurbaran; Cezanne's still-life Nature Morte, Crane et Chandelier, 1866-67; and Warhol's Skull, 1976.

The exhibition ends with an extensive display of vanitas-themed jewels on loan from international collections, including a rare opportunity to view pieces from the world famous Codognato collection.

The luxury Venetian jewellery house has produced pieces for cognocenti and art world glitterati such as Manet and Warhol for more than 120 years.

This exhibition, co-curated by the general director of the Italian Ministry of Culture Claudio Strinati, is the first undertaken by the museum's recently appointed art director Patrizia Nitti. E.S.

Cezanne's still-life Nature Morte, Crane et Chandelier, 1866-67

Dates: 13 Jan 10 - 21 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 3, avenue Général Eisenhower Paris 75008
Tel: +33 (0)1 44 13 17 17 Website

Monumenta 2010 is the third in a series of solo exhibitions commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and presented in the vast, Baroque-style nave of the Grand Palais in Paris.

This month, French artist Christian Boltanski will fill the 13,500 sq. m space with an installation of sculpture and sound entitled Personnes, meaning both “people” and “nobody”.

In keeping with the organiser’s decision to showcase a French artist (or artist living in France) on alternate years, Boltanski’s presentation follows an exhibition in 2008 by American sculptor Richard Serra and a series of installations in 2007 by German-born Anselm Kiefer, who has lived in Barjac in southern France since 1993.

Despite being announced in 2009, Boltanski’s exhibition is being mounted in the subsequent calendar year as the artist insisted that it be experienced during cold weather.

Anish Kapoor and Daniel Buren will be the subsequent Monumenta artists.

For Boltanski’s installation, a 12-metre-tall mountain of clothes (he says “clothes are like people”) will be piled up at the back of the nave. A crane, which the artist describes as “the finger of God”, will randomly grab handfuls of clothes from the mountain, lifting them up 30 metres to the ceiling of the nave and dropping them back onto the pile. “It’s about chance,” says Boltanski. “The big idea behind the piece is this killing factory because you have a mountain of clothes and this metal hand that will take some clothes and reject other clothes.

It’s like the finger of God because we don’t know who is going to be killed or not killed.” At the same time, the sound of 400 recorded human heartbeats will be continuously broadcast via speakers arranged throughout the space.

Boltanski intends the encounter with the installation to be overwhelming: “When you arrive, you will hear all the heartbeats at the same time and it will sound like a factory,” he says. “But if you are close to one of the loud speakers you will be able to hear one special heartbeat, the heartbeat of somebody.” For the past two years, Boltanski has been collecting heartbeats as part of an ongoing project called Archives du coeur.

During Monumenta, he will continue to create this compendium and visitors will be invited to have their heartbeats recorded and stored on the Japanese island of Teshima.

Boltanski was originally due to exhibit at the Grand Palais in summer, but to create an immersive and uncomfortable viewing experience, he insisted that visitors encounter his work during the winter months. “There were two things I specified for this work,” says Boltanski. “First, I wanted the exhibition to be in winter because I wanted to not have any heating and for it to be very, very cold so that people will be inside the work rather than in front of it.

The other thing was that I wanted the work to be destroyed after.” Boltanski has often stipulated that his works be destroyed or recycled at the end of an exhibition, and his installation at the Grand Palais will also be a one-off. “You really must work with a space to make a special work for it, and for there to be no object to keep afterwards for another place,” he says. Building on his factory analogy, Boltanski describes the Grand Palais as a “big railway station or factory”.

The antithesis of a white cube, the artist explains that working in the Baroque-style space means you have to find a way of working with the architecture. “You write a story for the space,” he says. “You must make a kind of collage with the architecture.” Another exhibition of Boltanski’s work entitled Après (After) will run near concurrently at Mac/Val, on the outskirts of Paris (see box).

Here, an installation will offer visitors a version of an afterlife.

Boltanski sees the two exhibitions as part of the same presentation: “It’s like they are two circles of Dante’s Inferno,” he says. “Personnes is the place where you die and Après is where you go when you are dead.

It’s more comfortable and it’s more hot.” Anny Shaw

Space man: Christian Boltanski moved his Monumenta commission to 2010, in order that his installation be experienced in the cold

Dates: 19 Dec 09 - 13 Jun 10
Categories: Decorative Medieval
Address: 4400 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh 15213-4080
Tel: +1 412 622 3131 Website

In the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque, tapestry was the art form—far more costly and elite than art in any other medium (sculpture included), a wall covering vastly superior to any other.

This most prestigious of media was produced throughout Europe, but nowhere more copiously or with such technical perfection than in Flanders.

Furthermore, the leading artists of these periods—most famously Raphael—produced designs for the weavers.

This exhibition looks at the relationship of artists and weavers by bringing together examples from the museum’s extensive collections of prints and tapestries.

On view are six large tapestries: Alexander Entering Babylon in Triumph, from the set “The Life of Alexander”, 1691; The Defeated Pompey Meeting His Wife at Sea, from the set “The Story of Julius Caesar”, designed in 1540 by Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and woven in 1640 in Brussels; The Triumph of Hope from the set “The Triumphs of the Seven Virtues”, woven in Brussels in 1530; The Holy Family attended by Angels, woven in Brussels around 1530 and Winter and Autumn from “The Seasons of Lucas”, woven by the Gobelins Manufactory, Paris in the late 17th century. D.L.

The Defeated Pompey Meeting His Wife at Sea, from the set “The Story of Julius Caesar”, designed in 1540 by Pieter Coecke van Aels

Dates: 19 Dec 09 - 6 Jul 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945)
Address: 151 Third Street San Francisco 94103-3159
Tel: +1 415 357 4000 Website

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) is pulling out all the stops to celebrate its 75th birthday.

Throughout the year (in fact starting a bit early and finishing a bit later), the museum is presenting a series of exhibitions under the heading “75 Years of Looking Forward” that will trace the history of the institution through the artists, collectors, and San Francisco leaders who founded and helped bring life to the institution. The Anniversary Show assembles some 400 works of art (pictured, Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988) chosen by Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture; Corey Keller, associate curator of photography; and Sarah Roberts, associate curator of collections and research.

The curators tried to highlight the significant and distinctive moments of the museum while also showing how SFMoMA helped shape the appreciation and understanding of Modern and Contemporary art both within San Francisco and across the country.

As the curators noted, “SFMoMA has grown through bold leaps of faith, true to the adventurous spirit that has pervaded the Bay Area since the Gold Rush.

It took a great deal of gumption on the part of the museum’s founders to start a cultural institution in the middle of the Great Depression and make it flourish.” K.A.

Dates: 18 Dec 09 - 14 Mar 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: One Fine Arts Drive St Louis 63110
Tel: +1 314 721 0072 Website

London-based Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE is known for his works of art that explore history, culture, and the passage of time.

Never confined to one medium, Shonibare has worked with sculpture, photography and installations. “Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play” continues Shonibare’s exploration of both African identity and European colonialism as well as the issues of race, identity, and class.

The artist has strategically placed seven figures of playful, active children throughout the museum’s period rooms, engaging the audience in a kind of treasure hunt as they search for the figures while exploring the rooms.

The life-sized figures are captured in moments of various means of play—skipping rope, holding a doll, riding a scooter—and they are dressed in Victorian costume that is made from Dutch wax fabric, which is commonly referred to as “African print”. With this small detail, Shonibare complicates the relationship between the mischievous children and the period-specific interior he has placed them in. K.A.

Dates: 31 Oct 09 - 14 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku Tokyo 135
Tel: +81 (0)3 5245 4111 Website

It is perhaps surprising that it is only now, at the age of 65, that Rebecca Horn has been honoured by a solo exhibition in Japan.

Significant both as a post-war German artist and as a woman artist, Horn was prominent among the creative generation that emerged in the 1960s, producing a body of work that has remained consistent across a wide range of artistic practices, from drawing and photography through performance and film to kinetic sculpture and installation.

She has traced her artistic vision to the year she spent convalescing after almost poisoning herself to death at the age of 20 while working with fibreglass without a mask: confined to bed, she passed the time designing extensions to her limbs and body. A work that brought her early acclaim was Unicorn, 1970, in which a young woman is filmed walking through a wheat field wearing only a tall prosthetic horn on her head; the piece seemed very contemporary, but also tapped into the timeless and mythic.

Later extensions often included feathers, and eventually they left the human body behind, to become strangely elegant and affecting automata, often described as “machines with souls”.

This exhibition provides an overview of Horn’s 40-year career, from early film works to the “bodylandscapes” of recent years. B.M.

Dates: 10 Dec 09 - 21 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 231 Queens Quay West Toronto M55 2G8
Tel: +1 416 973 4949 Website

“Nothing to Declare” continues a 22 year tradition of The Power Plant presenting the most engaging Canadian contemporary artists in an international context.

The works of art in this exhibition focus not on memorialising grand persons, ideals and political meanings, but instead on the interest of the artists in their materials and work.

As a spokesman for the Power Plant says: “Often straddling the boundary between figuration and abstraction, elegance and awkwardness, invention and decay, the works in the exhibition can seem ambiguous, open-ended and messy.” The tentative quality of the sculptures seems to mirror the feelings of our uncertain time and the sculptors sometimes seem to be controlled by their materials, rather than the other way around. The objects in the show are a mostly produced using craft, household and Do-It-Yourself processes (pictured, Kara Uzelman, Magnetic Stalactite, 2009) that contribute to the ambivalence of the exhibition The name of the exhibition also plays its own pun.

Not only are foreign substances smuggled into the exhibition with the mix of unexpected materials and references, but also the exhibition showcases artists born in Canada alongside work by artists who have immigrated to the country, creating an overarching view of Canadian creativity. Katharine Albritton

Kara Uzelman, Magnetic Stalactite, 2009