From the first ever Deana Lawson survey in New York to a selection of Surrealist design objects in London, these are the best exhibitions to see around the world in 2022
There are a lot of exhibitions to be excited about in 2022. In March, a major survey of drawings and paintings by Marlene Dumas will open in Venice at Palazzo Grassi, while Louise Bourgeois is to be celebrated with a whopping three exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel, London’s Hayward Gallery and The Met respectively. A Bishopsgate Institute takeover at the Barbican’s Curve gallery promises to highlight over a century’s worth of objects and ephemera relating to London’s LGBTQ+ history, and elsewhere, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s beautiful Fly in League with the Night will return to the Tate in November after her initial 2020 run was interrupted by Covid. Below, AnOther highlights ten more art shows to look forward to.
Ai Weiwei: The Liberty of Doubt at Kettles Yard, Cambridge: 12 February – 19 June 2022
Following a characteristically busy year in which he released his memoir 1,000 Years of Joys and Sorrows while opening shows in Seoul and Porto, next month Beijing-born artist Ai Weiwei arrives at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge with an exhibition informed by notions of truth, authenticity and value (as well as globalisation, the coronavirus pandemic and the geopolitical crisis). A former resident of the city – he moved there with his family in 2019 following a stint in Berlin – for the new show Ai Weiwei: The Liberty of Doubt, the artist will show a single installation of 13 artworks presented alongside 14 antiquities bought at auction in 2020. It’s the first time he has paired his own work with historic Chinese objects, and the juxtaposition honours Weiwei’s fluid ideas about the act of copying.
“I try to make work that incorporates the seductions of the culture that we live in but also makes us think,” Barbara Kruger told AnOther in 2004. 18 years on, this spring LACMA will unveil a major new exhibition spanning four decades, organised in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. Highlighting Kruger’s single-channel videos from the 1980s as well as digital productions from the last two decades, Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You, sees the American artist’s work spill out across the museum’s galleries with floor to ceiling vinyl room wraps, multichannel video installations and audio soundscapes, her distinctive palette and bold font choices front and centre throughout.
Deana Lawson at MoMA PS1, New York: 14 April – 5 September 2022
The first museum survey dedicated to Deana Lawson’s oeuvre arrives at MoMA PS1 in April, featuring work from 2004 through to the present day. Boasting a unique richness across her catalogue, Lawson’s images project a particular kind of intimacy that camouflages the actual relationships of her subjects. “A mirror of everyday life, but also a projection of what I want to happen. It’s about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday Black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent,” she says. A key component of these visuals, and something that will no doubt captivate observers at MoMA, are the domestic spaces in which her pictures are staged. As Doreen St. Félix noted in the New Yorker in 2018, Lawson “has a knack for identifying and arranging the strangely potent components of Black interiors that mean nothing and so much.”
Hollywood at Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin: 6 April – 19 November 2022
Despite settling in Paris in 1961 – and then Monte Carlo in 1981 – the late fashion photographer Helmut Newton and his wife June enjoyed winters in Los Angeles from 1957 until his death in January 2004. The location – they usually stayed at the Chateau Marmont – was ideal in terms of proximity to celebrity, and throughout the 80s and 90s Newton would shoot actors, directors and musicians in and around Hollywood. Many of these iconic portraits, as well as some of his nudes, shot for the pages of Playboy, will appear in a new show in Berlin this April. In addition to Newton’s work, Hollywood will also feature the neighbourhood as seen by photographers such as Larry Sultan, Julius Shulman, George Hoyningen-Huene and Alice Springs.
Nick Cave: Forothermore at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago: 14 May – 22 October 2022
Once described as “the most joyful, and critical, artist in America,” Nick Cave’s upcoming retrospective promises to inspire, delight and stimulate. Based in Chicago since the late 1980s, where in 2018 he opened the live-work space Facility, it’s fitting that the show, titled Nick Cave: Forothermore, debuts in the city where he’s spent decades creating, educating, and campaigning. Working across different mediums, the new show will feature several never before seen pieces – amongst them a continuation of his Soundsuits series – and a site-specific installation in Spinner Forest that will hang in the museum’s two-storey atrium and fourth-floor lobby. The show, the museum suggests, “is an ode to those who, whether due to racism, homophobia, or other forms of bigotry, live their lives as the ‘other’ – and a celebration of the way art, music, fashion, and performance can help us envision a more just future.”
Women Painting Women at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas: 15 May – 25 September 2022
Opening in May, the new group show Women Painting Women promises to “recognise female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of post-war figuration,” with a focus on painting chosen for its proximity to privilege in the context of traditional portraiture, “particularly for white male artists.” Separated into four themes – The Body, Nature Personified, Color as Portrait and Selfhood – the exhibition spotlights close to 50 portraits that reconsider and ultimately evolve the way women are represented, offering a variety of aesthetics and political starting points. With a stunning lineup of 46 crucial artists, the work of trailblazers like Alice Neel and Emma Amos will be shown alongside more contemporary figures such as Jordan Casteel and Somaya Critchlow.
 Kamoinge Portrait, negative 1973; print 2019 American Gelatin silver print)
Founded by Roy DeCarava – a collaborator of the poet Langston Hughes, and one of 15 artists who boycotted the Whitney’s Contemporary Black Artists in America show in 1971 – the Kamoinge Workshop emerged in 1963 as a collective of African-American photographers keen to support, mentor and collaborate with one another. Merging two existing photography groups – whose members included Louis Draper, Herbert Randall and James Ray Francis – the collective borrowed its name from the 1962 book Facing Mount Kenya, and in 2013 was recognised as “the longest continuously running non-profit group in the history of photography.” The show at The Getty Centre, titled Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, seeks to unpack the collective’s formation in tandem with the wider cultural shift in photography of the 60s and 70s.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude at Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf: 9 September 2022 - 22 January 2023
In September, a new show at Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast will offer an extensive look at the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The final exhibition to be approved by Christo before his death in the spring of 2020 (Jeanne-Claude, who once mused that “artists don’t retire. They die,” passed away in 2009), it will re-contextualise the couple’s early work, showcasing them alongside pieces by artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein. Elsewhere, the curators have pulled from Ingrid and Thomas Jochheim’s mammoth collection, introducing “each and every” project realised by Christo and Jeanne-Claude since Wrapped Coast premiered in the late 60s.
The first Surrealist Manifesto published by André Breton in 1924 described Surrealism as “Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Nearly 100 years on, today it’s considered one of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century and continues to fascinate with its early reinvention of everyday objects. In Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 –Today, London’s Design Museum will consider how the movement has shaped design over the last century, exploring its influence on everything from furniture and interiors to graphic design, fashion and photography. Standout names like Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, Ray Eames and Isamu Noguchi will all have work featured.
Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life at Tate St Ives, Cornwall: 26 November 2022 – 1 May 2023
Originally conceived to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Hepworth Wakefield in 2021, when Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life arrives at Tate St Ives in November, it will be revamped to engage with Hepworth’s life in Cornwall. Having moved to St Ives at the outbreak of the Second World War with her husband Ben Nicholson, Hepworth spent several decades living and working by the Cornish coast – a scenic existence caught on camera by Dudley Shaw Ashton in the poetic 1953 short, Figures in a Landscape – up until her death in 1975. A collaboration between The Hepworth Wakefield, the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate St Ives, the exhibition will showcase some of the influential artist’s most important works, many of which were made within a short distance from the museum.
