contemporary art Archives -

July 12, 2025August 3, 2025

Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional

At the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional is the first museum exhibition in Mexico in nearly 20 years for one of the country’s leading contemporary artists. The show surveys Orozco’s work from the 1990s to the present, spanning four floors and the museum’s public plaza. With more than 300 works—sculptures, installations, photographs, drawings, paintings, and games—the exhibition explores Orozco’s practice of creating an interplay between objects and concepts.

April 30, 2025April 30, 2025

Benoît Pype, Le Sablier Millénaire

In the Palais de l’Élysée, the 300-year-old palace that is the official residence and office of the president of France, a conceptual work of art by the artist Benoît Pype is a recent addition to more than 5,000 arts décoratifs, 500 works of art, and 100 clocks from the collections of the Mobilier National. In one of the 365 gilded rooms once home to Madame de Pompadour, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles de Gaulle before Emmanuel Macron, Pype’s Le Sablier Millénaire (Millenium Hourglass) proposes a much longer potential history.

November 30, 2024December 1, 2024

Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian

At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan presented a work of art that captured public attention and has kept it, now five years later, past any expiration date. It was deceptively simple—a banana duct-taped to a wall and titled Comedian—but it was a provocation that became the subject of discussions about the value of art.

September 22, 2024September 22, 2024

Today and One Million Years

On Kawara, JAN. 4, 1966, 1966, acrylic on canvas, via David Zwirner — On Kawara, JAN. 4, 1966; image via David Zwirner

On January 4, 1966, the conceptual artist On Kawara made a painting recording that day’s date. The work, Jan. 4, 1966, with white letters and numbers on a solid blue background, was begun and finished that day, signed on the reverse, and placed in a handmade box with a clipping from the New York Times.

October 15, 2023December 4, 2024

Chocolate Room

In 1970, for the US Pavilion at the 35th Venice Biennale, Ed Ruscha took an unconventional approach to printmaking by screen printing hundreds of sheets of paper with chocolate paste. He hung them, floor to ceiling, in a single room that has been the only installation work of his long career. The Chocolate Room is on view now in its seventh iteration in the retrospective exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

June 5, 2022June 10, 2023

Banana Craze

Francois Bucher, United (edition of 3), 2004-2005, 12 RC photographs on aluminium

In 1871 the American entrepreneur Minor Keith won a contract with the government of Costa Rica to build a railroad from the capital city of San José to the port city of Limón. The project would modernize the country and increase exports, like in Chile and Peru, following the industrial expansion of the U.S. But before the Costa Rican railroad was complete in 1890, the government defaulted on its payments and renegotiated a deal which gave Keith’s company 800,000 acres of tax-free land along the railway and a 99-year lease on its operation.

December 19, 2021December 4, 2024

Santiago Arau. Territorios

Santiago Arau, Puebla desde el Iztaccíhuatl, 2019, color digital print, image courtesy of Museo Amparo — Santiago Arau, Puebla desde el Iztaccíhuatl, 2016, color digital print, image courtesy of Museo Amparo

For seven years, a man explored the length, width, and height of the territory of Mexico. He traveled 33,302 kilometers, documenting the borders, cities, mountains, and volcanoes that shape the country. The explorer, Santiago Arau, is a photographer and filmmaker whose project, Territorios, is the subject of an exhibition at the Museo Amparo in Puebla.

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April 28, 2019December 1, 2024

Orbital Reflector

Trevor Paglen, Nine Reconnaissance Satellites over the Sonora Pass, 2008, C-Print, 48 x 60 inches; courtesy of Trevor Paglen, Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; © Trevor Paglen

At 10:34 a.m. on December 3, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Two hours later, 350 miles above Earth’s surface, it released 64 satellites into orbit for the largest satellite launch in US history. One of those, Orbital Reflector, will be the first “purely artistic” object in space.

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April 12, 2018December 1, 2024

The Vertical Earth Kilometer

The Friedrichsplatz and Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, photo by Carroy via Wikimedia Commons

Every five years in Kassel, Germany, documenta is a contemporary art exhibition lasting 100 days. Each edition presents hundreds of works in and around the city, typically conceptual and frequently site-specific. Of the thousands of works shown since the first documenta in 1955, sixteen have become permanent installations in Kassel.

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October 8, 2017December 3, 2024

Zeitz MOCAA

On September 22, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) opened in Cape Town, South Africa. It’s a major development, locally and globally, and is described in superlatives: the first major contemporary art museum in Africa; the largest museum to open in Africa in a century; and the largest contemporary African art museum in the world.

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