18 Must-See Exhibitions in Europe in 2022, From a Duet Between Van Gogh and Etel Adnan to Francis Bacon's Animal Paintings
Europe’s art world will be bustling this year with a string of biennial exhibitions in the first half of 2022, beginning with curator Cecilia Alemani’s 59th Venice Biennale, which opens this April after being pushed back a year due to health restrictions. In June, documenta returns to Kassel, this time curated by Indonesian collective ruangrupa. But in and around these two landmark shows are many must-see exhibitions across Europe, from a major Hito Steyerl retrospective in the Netherlands to an exhibition in the U.K. dedicated to the textile works of Louise Bourgeois.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Fondation Beyeler, Basel
January 23–May 22
“One rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I would see,” said Georgia O’Keeffe in early 1926. Visitors at Fondation Beyeler will have five months to see first-hand what the artist, who died in 1986, saw through an in-depth survey of this key figure of modern American art. The exhibition, the first of its kind in Switzerland in almost two decades, will showcase important works by O’Keeffe spanning six decades.
Hito Steyerl: “I Will Survive”
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
January 29–June 12
“I Will Survive,” Steyerl’s largest-ever retrospective exhibition in the Netherlands, will span the German artist’s career, from her video works made in the early 1990s to her architectural installations that have become predominant in the last decade. Rein Wolfs, director Stedelijk Museum, called it a “sweeping overview” that will bring together 20 major loaned works from “each phase of Hito Steyerl’s artistic practice,” including a few early works that are in the Stedelijk collection.
Francis Bacon: Man and Beast
Royal Academy, London
January 29–April 17
The RA will hold a large-scale exhibition on the 20th-century Irish painter, focused on his visceral works depicting animals. The son of a horse breeder, Francis Bacon’s lifelong fascination with fauna shaped his approach to the human figure. It is sometimes hard to discern whether his abstracted creations—riddled with anxiety and bursting with deep instinctual drive—portray a human or a beast. The exhibition includes 45 paintings spanning 50 years, from his early paintings of biomorphic creatures from the 1930s and ’40s to a trio of works about bullfighting from 1969—the latter are shown together for the first time next to his final work, a study of a bull, painted in 1991. Read More...
