A Celebrated Artist Tries on Design
Swiss artist Urs Fischer's functional designs debut in New York. Plus, fractured portraits, revised paintings, and more art highlights.
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Monaco, “Annie Leibovitz: Stream Of Consciousness” (Until Sept. 27)
Few American photographers have shaped the visual lexicon like Annie Leibovitz. While in her 20s, she shot some of the Rolling Stone’s most iconic covers, like the portrait of John Lennon holding Yoko Ono taken hours before his death. Later, her stylized portraits at Vanity Fair helped to define modern celebrity image-making. In her first show in Monaco, Leibovitz shares her recent work including images of Annabelle Selldorf’s renovation of the Frick Collection and Georgia O’Keeffe’s red hill. hauserwirth.com
London, “Tjukurrpa: The Dreaming” (Opens July 9)
Emily Kam Kngwarray didn’t start painting until her seventies, when she was introduced to acrylics. But in under a decade, the Aboriginal Australian painter managed to upend contemporary abstraction, producing over 3,000 paintings that originated from Aboriginal belief systems rather than art theory. Coinciding with her Tate retrospective, paintings by Kngwarray and eight fellow Indigenous Australian artists, including Rover Thomas Joolama and Makinti Napanangka, are brought together in a look at one of the world’s oldest continuous painting traditions. unitlondon.com
New York, “Jane Dickson: Wonder Wheel” (Opens July 9)
For over the past five decades, Jane Dickson has painted the humming underbelly of the American Dream, as seen in Times Square’s flashing lights, Vegas casinos, and through car windows. One subject she’s returned to repeatedly over the past two decades is carnivals. Dickson imbues their flashing signs, electric crowds, and dizzying rides with the melancholy of a Hopper painting. The oilstick works on show draw from her own photographs of places like Coney Island and the San Gennaro festival. karmakarma.org
New York, “Sigmar Polke: Photographs” (Opens July 9)
In 1963, Polke and three of his fellow students—Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, and Gerhard Richter—held an exhibition in a Düsseldorf butcher shop. They called it Capitalist Realism, a tongue-in-cheek response to socialist realism and Pop Art. Over the next two decades, Polke carried the same spirit into his photography. He challenged the illusion of objectivity by warping negatives, overexposing film, and painting on prints. This exhibition showcases his early photography, including Higher Beings Command, a playful portfolio of photographs of objects that resemble, but are not, palm trees. michaelwerner.com
New York, “The Calling of Home” (Until Sept. 6)
In Malaysia, Cheong See Min grew up near a pineapple plantation, a legacy of the British colonial economy, which inspired her most recent handwoven textiles. Made out of pineapple-leaf, the textiles draw from her archival and anecdotal research into the history of land and labor. In this show, See Min and three other Southeast Asian artists—Dutch painter Jennifer Tee of Chinese-Indonesian descent, Singaporean painter Khairulddin Wahab, and Malaysian textile artist Marcos Kueh—trace how colonial history has shaped their homelands. tinakimgallery.com
