Category: Hottest Show

Hottest Show: Richard Serra

If you weren’t already aware of Richard Serra as one of the country’s most respected sculptors, you will be after taking in his forty-year career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA actually accounted for the requirements of Serra’s enormous sculptures in its recent rebuilding and renovation, a fact which underlines his esteemed reputation and makes for a stunning installation in the 2nd floor contemporary art galleries and sculpture garden. The show’s 550 tons of undulating steel sculpture include three new pieces as well as iconic favorites, making it not only one of the most anticipated shows of recent years, but the hottest show of the summer.

For more information, visit MoMA’s website.

Hottest Show: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gordon Matta-Clark

This month, the exhibition mostly likely to get people talking earns its ‘hottest show’ tag by literally applying the heat to gallery visitors. As part of an installation, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, his assistants, staff at David Zwirner Gallery, or volunteers are preparing daily vats of feisty Thai curry to which visitors can help themselves. Dealers, critics and art world luminaries have been spotted indulging in a spicy lunch at tables and chairs scattered around a plywood structure which replicates 303 Gallery’s space in Soho, where the piece was first exhibited in 1992. Tiravanija reveals his indebtedness to Gordon Matta-Clark’s precedent-setting café, ‘Food’ and his unconventional use of real estate by sharing the gallery space with a recreation of Matta-Clark’s ‘Open House,’ a sculpture made in a dumpster which coincidently occupied the same SoHo address as Tiravanija’s exhibition when it was created in 1972.

For more information, visit David Zwirner Gallery’s website.

Hottest Show: Picasso at the Guggenheim, Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum

Just can’t get enough Picasso! No less than three major New York museum exhibitions currently feature the art master, arguing for his allegiance to historical Spanish painting (Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso at the Guggenheim), identifying his influence on American art (Picasso and American Art at the Whitney Museum) and his importance to one of the early 20th century’s greatest art dealers (Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Factor in the extensive permanent collection display of the artist’s work at MoMA, and this could be one of the city’s biggest Picasso moments in recent history.

Find out more on the following museum websites: Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hottest Show: Doug Aitken at MoMA

What do you get when you mix a hot art star, Hollywood luminaries including Tilda Swinton and Donald Sutherland, and the exterior walls of the sleek, midtown Museum of Modern Art? A highly visible, super-stylish art video in the form of Doug Aitken’s seven screen projection, Sleepwalkers, which began screening nightly outside MoMA in mid-January. Times critic Roberta Smith concisely summarized the effect as “dazzling and a bit bloodless.” But considering that New York magazine anticipated this to be the “most seen show in MoMA’s history,” and the fact that the museum reported over two and a half million visitors last year, that’s a huge audience for Aitken’s film, without a doubt making it the hottest show in town. (Sleepwalkers screens nightly at MoMA from 5pm – 10pm until February 12th.)

See the trailer and visit the on-line exhibition on MoMA’s website:

Hottest Shows: John Bock, Lisa Yuskavage

Two shows vie for the title of ‘most talked about’ this month: young, German maverick John Bock’s new video and zany rooftop installation at Anton Kern Gallery and painter of curvaceous women, Lisa Yuskavage’s latest bevy of babes at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea and Zwirner & Wirth uptown. Those who love Bock’s signature mad scientist behavior will delight to find the provocateur slithering through cabinetry, eating from a can of ravioli with a spoon attached to a chair leg and performing other bizarre feats. Likewise, Yuskavage fans will enjoy a spectacular array of light drenched, color-soaked portraits of fecund females. Neither will leave you short of conversation. (John Bock is at Anton Kern Gallery until November 25, Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings are up until November 18.)