黑料不打烊

From exhibitions opening this month to the last-chance shows closing soon, we’ve rounded up some of February’s most exciting exhibitions from cities around the world.

London

Jesse Darling: The Ballad of St Jerome, Tate Britain, Until February 24th

Jesse Darling, Lion in wait for St Jerome and his medical kit (2018) 

The lion tamed by St Jerome is re-imagined as a colonised servant, the wings of Icarus sit, rickety, bolts-and-all, above the doorway. Crutches and bandages are recast as a threatening forest, and austere bookshelves buckle and limp. Above it all is a sketched-in sky, reached up to by a fragile ladder. Jesse Darling’s show brilliantly diagnoses our act of reaching for the sky, and the inevitability of our falling, in a way that’s as uncomfortably accurate as it is strangely heartwarming.

Franz West, Tate Modern, Opens February 20th

Franz West, Epiphanie an Stühlen (2011). Image courtesy Tate. 

From being able to handle the exhibits (West’s Passstücke (Adaptives) are made to be passed around) to enjoying the colorful amorphism of the design (overseen by Sarah Lucas), this exhibition upcoming at the Tate promises to be an irreverent joy.

Don McCullin, Tate Britain, Opened February 4th

Don McCullin, Homeless Irish Man, Spitalfields, London (1935). Image courtesy Tate. 

In a recent BBC documentary, Don McCullin revisits a former mining village in the North East of England called Consett, nearly 45 years after he photographed it. Whilst there, he is recognised by a man who appeared in one of those photographs, taken in the 1970s, whom he has not seen since.

Such a moment, ordinary and entirely extraordinary at once, serves to highlight just what McCullin’s work means to the working-class people he represented. Whether photographing soldiers in several wars, or taking contemplative landscape photos at home in Somerset, McCullin’s always able to find the mythical within the mundane. This major retrospective gives you all of that and more.

Tracey Emin: A Fortnight of Tears, White Cube, Bermondsey, Opened February 6th

Tracey Emin, A Fortnight of Tears (2018). Image courtesy White Cube.

Once dubbed 'the Bad Girl of the Young British Artists', Emin's latest solo exhibition shows that she's kept her attitude whilst maturing into a painter and sculptor of true tenderness and feeling. A Fortnight of Tears treads that finest of lines between birth and death, exploring abortion and the passing of the artist's mother. Its a moving meditation on the creative act as bound up in a flux of life, sex, and loss. Emin, as ever, stares death in the face without blinking, and gets her hands dirty in the process.

Oxford

Jeff Koons, Ashmolean Museum, Opened February 7th

Jeff Koons, Seated Ballerina (2010-2015). Photo by Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

America's commander-in-kitsch offloads his chrome-casts onto the world's oldest museum for several months during 2019. The quintessential 'love-or-loath' figure, Koons has earned his place in art history purely through causing a stir. His comfort with decadence and deliberate flirtation with meaninglessness has rankled as much as it has delighted over the years, but it's undeniably fascinating to see these anti-totems displayed in such an arch-historical setting. The sculptures are 'reflective' only in the most literal sense, but are self-aware in their indulgences. Catch this "micro-retrospective" before June 9th. 

New York

Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Until January 2020

Robert Mapplethorpe, Sef-Portrait, New York City (1983)

Perennially relevant, the photogrphs of Robert Mapplethorpe are a thing of contrived beauty, almost mythical-seeming in their enormous poise. The Guggenheim welcomes a large and long-running retrospective in 2019, which, save for a brief hiatus during July, will be open until 2020. Perhaps there's no rush to see it this month, but we promise this one's worth multiple visits.

Paris

Theaster Gates: Amalgam, Palais de Tokyo, Opens February 20th

Theaster Gates, 12 Ballads for the Huguenot House (2012). Photograph by Heinz Bunse. 

Gates is among the foremost social practise artists. His work involves community collaboration and activism, and grows from his background studying city planning in Chicago. Much of the work is site-specific, based on craft and performance. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris opens his first solo gallery exhibition this month. Gates is represented by White Cube, and their release states that the exhibition “explores social histories of migration and inter-racial tensions, displaying new videos, sculptures and architectural gestures.”

Vasarely: Sharing Forms, Centre Pompidou, Opened February 6th

Victor Vasarely, Gyongly 2 (1971) 

Victor Vasarely is credited with inventing Op Art, a school which champions illusion. It has its roots in Constructivism and Dada, and has influenced many contemporary artists, perhaps most notably Bridget Riley. Vasarely once made a kinematic sculpture, George Pompidou, in honour of the then French President, and Pompidou himself inaugurated the Vasarely Foundation after the artist’s death. Fitting, then, that Vasarely’s first major retrospective in France will be held at the Centre Pompidou this year. Works in every conceivable medium will be shown. Expect to be dumbfounded by some keen optical showmanship.

Florence

Banksy: This is Not a Photo Opportunity, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Until March 24th

Banksy, Bulletproof David (Suicide Bomber) (2008) 

Banksy needs no introduction. The fact that his street art plays with ideas of urban illegality and aesthetic ephemerality mean that Florence is a strangely apt location to house a retrospective. The city is perpetually charged with conflict between the State - which wants to preserve its beauty for posterity or profit or both - and the residents, who want to live in their homes. Add to this the oddity that work by such a fervently anti-establishment artist would find a home in the palace of the Medici, and you’ve got what promises to be an eye-opening perspective on the by-now-cliched images of classic Banksy.

Tokyo

Reciprocal Reliance, SCAI The Bathhouse, Until February 23rd

Anne-Charlotte Finel, Fosse (2018) 

This group exhibition showcases the work of three Paris-based artists, Anne-Charlotte Finel, Enzo Mianes, and Anne-Charlotte Yver. They’ve collaborated with DJ/producer, Voiski, and curatorial collective Curate It Yourself to create an immersive sort of ‘ecosystem’ within one of Tokyo’s most exciting gallery spaces. Video and sound combine with exo-skeletal installation to bring about an experience that hopes to “foster a parallel between humanity and nature”. Catch it within the next two weeks.

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