5 art exhibitions to visit in January 2022
Art belongs to humanity as a whole, so it's more than legitimate to want to enjoy it. Some of the most anticipated exhibitions are ready to hit the scene in 2022. With new work from rising artists to fascinating 20th century painters, we recommend five national and international exhibitions to start the year off on the right foot.
1. Mark Bradford onSerralves
The American artist Mark Bradford (1961) is currently recognized as one of the great names in painting of the last two decades, due to his own pictorial language. By recurrently using everyday materials and tools in her works, there is a rigorously physical approach to the material presence of painting, in which she talks about various social and political themes, such as the AIDS epidemic, misrepresented representation and fear of queer identity and homosexuality, systemic racism in the United States and more recently, the crisis arising from Covid-19. This exhibition focuses on the last three years of artistic production, inspired by ancient mythology in tension with contemporary conflicts.
2. Biting the Powder by Fernão Cruz at the Gulbenkian Museum
Highlighted by the newspaper Expresso as one of the best of 2021, this individual exhibition of works by Fernão Cruz opened on September 24 at the temporary exhibition gallery of the Gulbenkian Museum, bringing together a selection of 30 new works, created by the artist specifically for this project, with curated by Leonor Nazaré. With free admission, it is on display until January 17, 2022.
3. Life and Work of Frida Kahlo at Teatro Instante
From December 2nd to April 1st, a sound and visual installation will be on display in honor of the Mexican painter. Frida Kahlo. An audiovisual experience that brings together more than a hundred plastic, literary and photographic works, which aims to show the public the works of Frida Kahlo, such as his famous self-portraits the hered vein (The wounded deer) and the one dedicated to Doctor Eloesser, as well as other lesser-known works, such as Dorothy Hale's Suicide (The Suicide of Dorothy Hale) or What does the water say to me (What the water gave me). This immersive experience is organized around three major thematic areas: a parallelism between the artist's work and the testimonies of her contemporaries, the most intimate facet, in the artist's roots and friendships and in the traumatic accident that made her reborn as a painter, and finally, a recreation of Casa Azul, where Frida Kahlo was born and lived until the date of his death. Composer and pianist Arturo Cardelús, nominated for the Goya awards, composed an original soundtrack especially for this exhibition.
4. The Magritte Machine noThyssen-Bornemisza National Museum
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza hosts the first retrospective exhibition organized in Madrid dedicated to the work of surrealist painter René Magritte. René Magritte's provocative images were intended to change the preconditioned perception of reality, forcing the viewer to become hypersensitive to their surroundings. This exhibition brings together around 70 works, including paintings and works on paper, together with a selection of photographs and films - which is structured around six elements of his work: the silhouette, the window, the mechanism that changes the size and the weight, the mimicry, which allows camouflage in the surroundings, and the mask, which suppresses and projects the face.
5. Women in Abstraction at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
This exhibition demonstrates the contributions made by “women artists” to abstraction in the 20th century, up until about the 1980s, with some original forays into the 19th century. The idea is to highlight the decisive moments of history, while questioning the canons of abstraction. The exhibition thus reveals the process of invisibilization that marked the work of these artists, while presenting their positions, with all their complexities and paradoxes. Many of these artists adopted a genderless identity, while others claimed “feminine” art.
