OPENING
Guess What? Hardcore Contemporary Art Is Truly a World Treasure: The YAGEO Foundation Collection 31 March – 31 May National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (MOMAK) momak.go.jp
If the unusual title of this exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto doesn’t grab your attention, then the glittering list of 40 artists certainly will: Sanyu, Francis Bacon, Zao Wou-Ki, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter, Sugimoto Hiroshi, Andreas Gursky, Cai Guo-Qiang, Peter Doig, Marc Quinn, and the list goes on. The display of 75 works of Western and Chinese modern and contemporary art showcases the YAGEO Foundation Collection of Pierre Tie Min Chen, CEO of the YAGEO Corporation, who started the collection when he was a student. Intriguingly, the exhibition also promises a game that offers visitors an insight into the experience of being an art collector.
Marc Quinn, Miniature Venus, 2008. The YAGEO Foundation, Taiwan © Marc Quinn
Renaissance Splendors of the Northern Italian Courts 31 March – 21 June The Getty Center, Los Angeles getty.edu
With its position on essential trade routes, northern Italy was not only one of the wealthiest regions of Renaissance Europe, but also awash with a plentiful supply of spices, dyes and silks. Princes and nobles attracted the most innovative painters and illuminators of the age to work in the courts, producing panels and books that displayed their owners’ taste and status. These magnificent illuminated manuscripts from the Getty Museum’s collection need to be admired up close to be fully appreciated. Don’t miss A Renaissance in Dining on 15 May, a hands-on culinary workshop exploring the culture and cuisine of the northern Italian courts with food historian and chef Nancy DeLucia Real.
Taddeo Crivelli, The Trinity, c.1460–70. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Peter Anton: The Foodhist Temple 2 April – 2 May Unix Gallery, New York unixgallery.com
Peter Anton is inviting you to come and worship at the altar of food. In many ways the sculptural successor to Wayne Thiebaud, Anton turns up the dials of humour, colour and scale in his seductive works, which play with viewers’ expectations and desires. In The Foodhist Temple, oversized mixed-media sculptures of sweet and savoury foods — boxes of chocolates, doughnuts, cakes, pizza, bacon, fried eggs and sushi — will be displayed on altars around the gallery, with pillows and rugs available for comfortable contemplation.
Peter Anton, Sunshine Assortment, 2014. Courtesy of UNIX Gallery and Peter Anton
Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions 3 April – 14 June Nottingham Contemporary nottinghamcontemporary.org
While Glenn Ligon’s solo exhibition Well, it’s bye-bye/If you call that gone is currently on at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects (until 18 April), at Nottingham Contemporary he is acting as artist-curator. For Encounters and Collisions, Ligon has chosen works by 45 major artists — many of whom are referred to in his own art and writing — to be displayed alongside key examples of his own work. Many of the pieces selected share Ligon’s concerns with American identity, power, race, gender and sexuality, from artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Cady Noland, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, Zoe Leonard and Lorna Simpson.
Glenn Ligon, Malcolm X #1 (small version #2), 2003. Courtesy the Rodney M. Miller Collection
CLOSING
Paul Johnson: The Sunless Sea Until 4 April Focal Point Gallery, Southend focalpoint.org.uk
The Sunless Sea seems an apt title for an exhibition at Focal Point, a gallery on the south Essex coast. In fact, London-based Paul Johnson was inspired by the area’s history of attracting utopian thinkers, and by the failure of their visionary ideas. In a series of pieces including large sculptural works that seem like salvaged artefacts or relics, Johnson presents a vision of how, in the future, we might look back to this present time.
Installation view, The Sunless Sea, Paul Johnson, 2015. Courtesy Focal Point Gallery. Photo: Manuela Barczewski
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