Alex Katz’s Set Designs Step Into the Spotlight

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San Diego, “Alex Katz: Theater and Dance” (Opens Aug. 21)
Alex Katz created his first theater set for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, beginning a partnership that would eventually comprising fifteen productions over 60 years. Katz’s flat color fields and tight cropping became the architecture for Taylor’s muscular and unpredictable movements. The painter went on to work with avant-garde theater troupes and poets’ plays, experimenting with the stage’s demands of light, space, and composition. This first comprehensive exhibition of the painter’s playful collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and theater includes major sets, paintings, and sketches. mcasd.org

London, “Sho Shibuya: Falling from the Sky” (Opens Aug. 20)
In the early days of the pandemic, as the headlines bore increasingly grim news, Sho Shibuya began painting the front page of The New York Times each day with the sunrise outside his small Brooklyn apartment’s window. These daily morning meditations resonated with the graphic designer’s Instagram followers and quickly grew into something more. Instead of his many fluorescent sunrises and blue skies, this show selects the melancholy rainy paintings, featuring luminous raindrops streaking across the daily paper. unitlondon.com

New York, “Laura Aldridge: Light on Time” (Until Aug. 29)
Laura Aldrige carefully arranges saturated fabrics, glazed ceramics, and glass to create her funky, uncanny objects. Having emerged from Glasgow’s fiercely inventive art scene, the Scottish artist insists that powerful meaning can be made from subtle relationships between weight, color, and form. Her new series of wall-mounted light sculptures feel almost unexpectedly alive. The series is on show for the month in New York before returning home to Glasgow. margotsamel.com

Buffalo, “Northern Lights” (Until Jan. 12)
In Hollywood, clichéd lovers, tragically separated, look to the night sky for the comfort that their other half sees the same moon. But, of course, there are also beautiful, boisterous differences in how two people see the same thing. For years, modernist painters were inspired by the northern lights and the alluring Nordic landscape, each rendering it in their unique styles. This exhibition showcases 62 of those paintings by Scandinavian and Canadian artists like Edvard Much, Hilma af Klint, and Tom Thomson, in a celebration of the dazzling endlessness of human imagination. buffaloakg.org

Seoul, “Kim Tschang-Yeul” (Opens Aug. 22)
It was in Paris in the early ’70s that late artist Kim Tschang-Yeul, one of Korea’s largest figures in contemporary art, started painting the water droplets he would paint for the rest of his life. He had just turned 40 and the water droplets were his way of distilling his experience of the Korean war. “I saw countless deaths and cruelty. Perhaps the reason why I chose water droplets in the beginning was to get rid of all the memories of humankind, and the unbearable pain,” he later said. Here, works from a brief stint in New York and studio papers accompany the famed water drops. mmca.go.kr