2015 summer exhibitions
New Museum
235 Bowery
NYC 10002
Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden
June 10–September 13, 2015
Third and Fourth Floors
The New Museum will present the first major New York museum exhibition of the German artist Albert Oehlen (b. 1954). Demonstrating his immeasurable influence on contemporary painting, the exhibition will feature several of Oehlen’s most important bodies of work, including a selection of his early self-portraits, his “post–non-objective” canvases, his computer paintings and switch paintings from the 1990s, and more recent works fusing appropriated advertising signage and abstract marks. Throughout his work, Oehlen displays an experimental and intuitive approach to painting and a refreshingly irrational sensibility inspired by a variety of influences, including punk and Surrealism. Rather than following a chronological path through Oehlen’s prodigious 30-year career, Home and Garden will explore contrasts between interior and exterior, nature and culture, and irony and sincerity, illustrating the artist’s commitment to expanding the language of painting in surprising ways. In recent years, as a younger generation of artists has turned again to painting as a critical medium, Oehlen’s work has only become more influential and prescient. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, with Natalie Bell, Assistant Curator.
Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld
June 24–September 20, 2015
Second Floor
Over the course of a 40-year career, American artist Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013) investigated pivotal questions about the role of images in our culture. Her influential body of work deconstructed the conventions of photography and illuminated the medium’s importance in mediating our perception of the world. The exhibition at the New Museum will bring together a selection of over 50 works from the scope of Charlesworth’s career, including her series “Modern History” (1977–79), which pioneered photographic appropriation; the poignant series “Stills” (1980), 14 large-scale works that depict people falling or jumping off buildings, which will be shown in its entirety in New York for the first time; the alluring and exacting “Objects of Desire” (1983–88); “Doubleworld” (1995), which probes the fetishism of vision in premodern art; and her radiant last series, “Available Light” (2012). This will be the first major museum survey in New York of the artist’s work, encompassing an innovative career that has taken on shifting significance with time as it continues to inspire contemporary artists drawing from our increasingly image-saturated culture. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Associate Curator. The “Stills” series is presented in association with the Art Institute of Chicago.
Leonor Antunes: I Stand Like A Mirror Before You
June 24–September 6, 2015
Lobby Gallery
For her first solo exhibition in New York, Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes will present a new body of site-specific works in the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery. The exhibition reflects Antunes’s investment in the work of lesser-known figures from the history of 20th-century art, architecture, and design, for whom New York was an important place for the production and presentation of their work. Demonstrating her deep engagement with native and ancient craft traditions, as well as her insistence on the work of the hand, the exhibition features a densely choreographed series of hanging and freestanding sculptures as well as a geometrical cork and linoleum parquet that covers the floor. These works function as vertical or horizontal demarcations in space or as woven, transparent nets and grids. The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator.
Also on view at New Museum:
The Great Ephemeral: Co-curated with Taipei Contemporary Art Center
May 27–September 6, 2015
Fifth Floor
This exhibition is co-curated by Meiya Cheng, Curator, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, and the New Museum’s Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Lauren Cornell, Curator, 2015 Triennial, Digital Projects, and Museum as Hub; and Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator.
About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
