This Artist Was Off the Radar. Now She’s Back

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Paris, “Vivian Suter: Disco” (Until Sept. 7)
In the early 1980s, the Swiss-Argentine artist Vivian Suter, in her early 30s, came to Guatemala while traveling Central America alone. She decided to stay. The year before, she had been placed in a group show at the Kunsthalle Basel and was uninspired by the endless social obligations of the art world. But in Panajachel, where she welcomes the tropical environment into her open air studio, she was off the radar. The past few years have seen Suter reentering public view, and now, with 500 works, this is her largest presentation to date. palaisdetokyo.com

Bilbao, “Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night” (Until Sept. 11)
Typography can be seducing. Barbara Kruger knew that well from her days designing layouts for Condé Nast. By the late 1970s Kruger began using the same bold Helvetica and Futura fonts she had favored in graphic design in paste-ups that she clipped and glued by hand. Instead of selling something, slogans like “buy me I’ll change your life,” “your body is a battleground,” were statements. Later, her words would plaster entire walls. Kruger’s first exhibition in Spain features her floor-to-ceiling installations, video, and new works in Spanish and Basque. guggenheim-bilbao.eus

London, “Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985-2025” (Until Sept. 7)
In 1985, Lubaina Himid curated the exhibition “The Thin Black Line” with a roster of eleven Black and Asian women she insisted belonged in British institutions, including Sonia Boyce, Ingrid Pollard, and Marlene Smith. “We are here to stay,” she wrote in the catalogue’s foreword. Forty years on, Himid reunites the same group, showcasing paintings, sculptures, and photographs made since the original show and two new commissions by Chila Singh Burman and Marlene Smith. ica.art

London, “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting” (Until Sept. 7)
In 1995, Jenny Saville’s self portrait was the star piece of Saatchi Gallery’s Young British Artists III, propelling her to fame shortly after her graduation from the Glasgow School of Art. The fleshy, confrontational nude also signaled a comeback of figurative painting. Saville studies medical illustrations and has watched plastic surgery operations in New York to understand the flesh, before rendering its forms with Bacon’s visceral intensity and de Kooning’s frenetic abstraction. This retrospective, her largest museum show to date, spans over forty years with new portraits verging on abstraction. npg.org.uk

London, “Magna Carta 1225” (Until Sept. 19)
In 1225, a teenage Henry III reissued the Magna Carta—first signed by his father to make peace with rebel barons—as a gesture of royal goodwill in exchange for a tax. This version, pared down and politically shrewder, became the one enshrined in English law. With it came the lesser-known Charter of the Forest, which reigned in royal power over land. 800 years later, the Society of Antiquaries is bringing out its rare manuscript copy of the 1225 text that’s become a symbol of universal rights. sal.org.uk