What to visit in July?
Art belongs to humanity as a whole, so it's more than legitimate to want to enjoy it. There are several museums and centers for the dissemination of contemporary art around the world. Which ones should I visit? Some of the most anticipated exhibits are set to hit the stage during the month of July. With new works from rising artists to the fascinating painters of the 20th century, we recommend five national and international exhibitions, which deserve a visit with lynx eyes, attentive to the smallest detail.
1.Document XV
This year the documenta takes place from 18 June to 25 September 2022 in Kassel. Documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH is a non-profit organization supported and financed by the City of Kassel and the State of Hesse, as well as the German Federal Cultural Foundation.In 1955, Kassel painter and Academy professor Arnold Bode tried to bring Germany back in dialogue with the rest of the world after the end of World War II and connecting the international art scene through a “presentation of 20th century art”. He founded the "Western Art Society of the 20th Century" to present art that had been considered by the Nazis to be degenerate, as well as works of classical modernity that had never been seen in Germany in the destroyed Fridericianum Museum. The first documenta was a retrospective of works by great movements (Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Blaue Reiter, Futurism) and brilliant individualists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky and Henry Moore. Ruangrupa is the Artistic Director of the fifteenth edition of documenta. The Jakarta-based collective of artists built the foundation of documenta around the core values and ideas of lumbung (Indonesian term for a communal rice barn). Lumbung as an artistic and economic model is rooted in principles such as collectivity, sharing of community resources and equal allocation, and is embedded in every part of the collaboration and exhibition.
2. MAAT
This month MAAT will host several exhibitions, including the monumental proposal for Vhils to the performance program that crosses different disciplinary areas and artistic fields.Let's start with Alexandre Faro akaVhils, which in this exhibition uses video exclusively, a language that the Portuguese artist has been exploring more recently. Prisma is an exhibition composed of a set of images representing everyday life in nine cities: Mexico City, Cincinnati, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Macau, Paris, Beijing and Shanghai, where the artist has held, over the last few years, important works of public art.
In the same building there are Interferences — Emerging Urban Cultures, which demonstrates the cultural diversity that characterizes the city of Lisbon. Interferes is an exhibition that affirms different expressions of urban culture, exploring narrative itineraries of the city through a dialogue that privileges the museum as a critical space, a meeting place between different communities and sensibilities – the established ones that frequent it and the subaltern ones that are unaware of it – , starting point for new beginnings. MAAT thus becomes a stage for timeless utopias and struggles, for emerging tensions, for stories told and yet to be told.
On the occasion of the Portugal-France 2022 Season, theMAAT presents for the first time in Portugal a wide panorama of Antoine de Galbert's personal collection.A collector passionate about breaking barriers, Antoine de Galbert likes to create dialogues between contemporary art, popular arts and art brut in his collection. Recognized figure of patronage in France, he created a foundation with his name and inaugurated in 2004 La Maison Rouge, a private art center in Paris, whose programming marked the Parisian cultural landscape until its closure in 2018. Antoine de Galbert continues the mission of its foundation, namely to promote various forms of current creation, to support research in the History of Art, to support artists and critics in publishing publications, to contribute to the enrichment of museographic funds through donations and acquisitions.
Inspired by the history and original function of the exhibition site, the theme of the evening quickly took hold. Through a route conceived as a crossing, from dusk to dawn, from blindness and loss of references to hope for better days on the horizon, from nocturnal dreams to cosmic night, the exhibition invites visitors to walk through this nocturnal interval, conducive to to the expansion of the imaginary, to dreams and visions of the future.
3.Serralves in Luz
Serralves em Luz returns for a second edition and transforms the entire Serralves Park into an impressive light exhibition, providing the nocturnal enjoyment of this magnificent space through a surprising experience.
After the success of the first edition, referred to in the British newspaper The Times - one of the titles with the greatest recognition globally - as one of the 10 best exhibitions to visit in all of Europe, Serralves em Luz returns to Parque de Serralves on the 22nd of June with the creative direction of Nuno Maya and organized in articulation with the Serralves team and with light designs by Coletivo OLAB, Sophie Guyot, Tamar Frank and Tilen Sepič.
Along a 3 km route, twenty-five light installations, using multiple sources, low-consumption technologies and even plant elements recovered in the Park itself, provide a magical sensorial experience, in an immersive environment that reveals new perspectives of this remarkable space and invites you to discover its natural and architectural heritage.
Nuno Maya's light designs, created specifically for this exhibition, combine various forms of light with different locations in the Park, awakening different emotions and visual sensations in the viewer, while international interventions focus on luminous and interactive sculptural pieces that allow, through for the first time, an active role of the public that can thus transform, through light, the natural landscapes of the spaces. From the children's studio, designed by the exhibition's creative director and executed in collaboration with the Serralves Educational Service, a video mapping projection was also created on the façade of the Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira, signed by students in the 2nd year of the Escola Básica da Oporto pastry shop.
In parallel to this large nocturnal and open-air exhibition, there will be a program of guided visits and photography workshops, which complement and enhance the experience of the different dimensions present: light, nature, art and architecture.
4.COMIC. SUEÑOS AND HISTORY at CaixaForum Madrid
This exhibition addresses comics as a tool for thinking and as a means capable of interspersing the discontinuity cut in the logic of stories. Throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, comics have been a mirror of reality capable of capturing changes in society and models of imagination. At the same time, the comics were also an incentive for these changes and provided substantive anticipations, as shown by the approach to the work of authors such as George Herriman, Milton Caniff and Jean Giraud (Moebius). The exhibition includes works by some of the most famous characters or comics, such as The Yellow Kid by Richard Felton Outcault, Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay, Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff, Tintin by Hergé, Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond, The Spirit by Will Eisner, Sin City by Frank Miller, The Amazing Spider-man by John Romita, Watchmen by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore, Arzach by Moebius and Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt, among others. In addition, these works dialogue with a selection of works by national authors.
5.Shirley Jaffe: An American Woman in Paris at the Center Pompidou
With her death in 2016, Shirley Jaffe, the American painter, left behind a rich collection of abstract art, whose significant collection was donated to the French State and received by the National Museum of Modern Art in 2019. This original exhibition shows how the artist he had to abandon the gesture in order to bring ever-increasing tension to his artistic experience. The chronological presentation periodically orchestrates face-to-face arrangements of works from different periods. Precious studio notes made by the artist for each of her photos are displayed in showcases with archival material from her studio. Shirley Jaffe was born in New Jersey in 1923, studied at the Cooper Union in New York, from where he left for Paris, where he settled in 1949. In the 1970s, we see the development of his personal style with chiseled contours, his geometry is well ordered, but also apparently random, but scrupulously dictated, like some of the musical compositions of his contemporaries.
