The big themes of the spring season in the world of museums and biennials are migration and mutation. The former is the loose focus of this year’s edition of the Venice Biennale, the world’s biggest art festival, which will explore artists who live in diaspora. But it is also the subject of a range of retrospectives for artists whose work provides a rebuke to the notion of national borders as fixed, immutable things. oriqq
Transformation was a core component of Surrealism, an avant-garde that is turning 100 this year. It is, however, not the only movement celebrating an anniversary in 2024—Impressionism, the French movement launched in 1874, is now 150 years old. Both -isms are being toasted in big shows this season.
But it is not just living artists and modernists who are being feted. An Angelica Kauffman retrospective, long in the works, is finally here, and so is a restoration of a prized Jan van Eyck painting.
Below, a look at 60 must-see museum shows and biennials to visit this spring. oriqq
Gunter Brüs at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria
Installation view of “Günter Brus,” 2024, at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria.
Photo : ©Günter Brus and Kunsthaus Bregenz/Courtesy the artist/Photo Markus Tretter
Gunter Brüs, an artist associated with the Viennese Actionist movement of the 1960s, unfortunately did not live to see the opening of this show. When he died earlier this month at 85, he was praised as a key performance artist whose painful provocations defined an era of Austrian art. In these works, Brüs would do violence to his own body; in one performance, he cut himself with razors to a point where he had to the end the piece because he was so physically exhausted. That work, titled The Real Test (1970), is no less intense when viewed 54 years on in the form of the photographic documentation that appears in the Kunsthaus Bregenz’s career-spanning survey, among the largest exhibitions ever devoted to him. oriqq
Through May 20
