The Spring Arts Preview
Page 3 of 4
MUSEUMS
Wait, wait, wait: how is it that the Neue Galerie's recently opened survey Otto Dix (through August 30) is the first ever solo museum show of the essential German artist's work in North America? With their unusual mixture of Renaissance perspective, Art Nouveau ornament, grotesque Expressionist gloom and sly humor, the over 100 paintings in this show, spanning the early 20s to the 60s, make abundantly clear how essential Dix is to your understanding of modern art.
The Museum of Arts and Design is really stinking up its new Columbus Circle space, which we mean in the best of ways, because we'll be front and center when their show of artworks made from growing, rotting, pulverized, living and organic materials Dead Or Alive (April 27-October 24) opens with a weeklong preview (starting April 22) during which visitors can see the gooey installation coming to life.
We cannot wait to climb all over Mike + Doug Starn's giant bamboo jungle gym Big Bambu (April 27-October 31), which will tower fifty feet above the Metropolitan Museum's rooftop garden, affording adventurous visitors incredible vistas across Central Park and vertiginous vertical views of the itty bitty ants below. Come early on and you can even help the twins and their crew put the tidal wave-shaped thing together.
Julie Mehretu's massive ink and acrylic canvases, in which abstract forms swirl, swoop, decompose and recombine into mutated bodies, might represent a city being reshaped by a building boom, or battalions mobilizing during a vast land war, or even the dematerialized bits of data whose circulation increasingly dictates how our lives are lived. We look forward to tracking her latest movements in Grey Area at the Guggenheim (May 14-October 6).
Sort of like Dali, we have this image of Warhol just scrawling his signature on whatever his studio assistants brought him during the last years of his life, but the Brooklyn Museum's Andy Warhol: The Last Decade (June 18-September 12) makes the case for the importance of works from that period, which were of a much larger scale than his earlier output, and included collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring.
