ARTnews - The Editors of ARTnews - September 5, 2018 - The new season brings major shows for under-seen figures like Ree Morton, Siah Armajani, Rubem Valentim, and Ruth Asawa, as well as diverse, toothsome-sounding surveys like the Carnegie International and a show of contemporary Zimbabwean painting in Cape Town. The most intriguing show of the season? It seems like it will be hard to beat “The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space,” a survey of centuries of objects related to that celestial wonder organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, but that is just one of the ambitious affairs on deck. Below, a look at this season’s most promising shows.
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“Contesting Modernity: Informalism in Venezuela, 1955–1975”
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
October 28, 2018–January 21, 2019
The last few years have seen a resurgent interest in art from across Latin America, with mountains of scholarship looking to complicate and decentralize the traditional Western art-historical canon. This exhibition, curated by the ever-reliable Mari Carmen Ramírez and organized with the Colección Mercantil Arte y Cultura in Caracas, will look to add to modern and contemporary art history with a presentation of over 100 works related to the Informalist movement in Venezuela. The little-studied movement, like many contemporaneous ones around the world, was partly a response to the seismic political and social changes faced during the Cold War, including a shift to democracy and exploding wealth and socioeconomic inequality. The artists, many of them still relatively unknown in the United States, looked to reject the conventional forms of artistic production, instead opting for new forms of experimentation reliant upon geometric abstraction. —M.D.