Spectacular art shows by Time out

Spectacular art shows

“Flatlands" Whitney Museum of American Art, through Apr 17
Five contemporary painters—Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Cerletty, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Caitlin Keogh, and Orion Martin—share an approach to representational imagery that relies on flattened forms and color. While their debt to the cartoonish qualities of Pop Art and Chicago Imagism is obvious, these artists eschew the anarchic optimism of both for expressing a certain 21st century anomie, conjuring, in the words of the curators “a sense of space that is dimensionless and airless.”

“Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, through Apr 20
The work of this renowned Swiss artistic duo ruminates on the everyday and how we deal with it, framing experience as a dialectic of minor epiphanies and incidental absurdities. Their most famous piece, a 1987 video titled, The Way Things Go is a demented masterwork of comic timing that follows the chain of causalities created by an enormous Rube Goldberg contraption built out of wood, metal, Styrofoam and castaway objects (tires, jugs, buckets, ladders).

Marcel Broodthaers Museum of Modern Art, through May 15
Broodthaers may be the most important artist you never heard of. Originally A critic and poet, he became a leading figure in European art during the 1960s and 1970s. His enigmatic works helped to create the template for contemporary installation art and practically invented the Conceptualist genre known as “institutional critique.” He was that classic figure of art history, the innovator who writes the checks eventually cashed by others. Presenting 200 works in multiple mediums, this retrospectiveoffers a long-overdue appraisal of his career.

“Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, through May 15
The Old Master period in Western Art History was, let’s face it, a sausage fest with women pretty much relegated to the role of artist’s model or mistress. There were, however, a few exceptions, one of whom is the subject of this Met showcase. Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) was primarily a portrait artist, but her style and technique rivaled those of her contemporary, Jacques-Louis David. Remarkably, she was completely self-taught, but that didn’t prevent her from being accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Her exceptional oeuvre is vividly brought back to life in this retrospective, the first ever accorded the artist.

Isa Genzken, Two Orchids Doris C. Freedman Plaza Central Park, through Aug 21
The German artist who stuck a giant rose on the facade of the New Museum reaches back into her floral bag of tricks with this pair of gargantuan orchids measuring 34 and 28 feet high, respectively. Last installed at the 2015 Venice Biennale’s, these meditations on nature versus artifice pop up outside Central Park just in time for Spring.by the time out!