London, Paris, Brussels ... as the new season kicks into gear, here are the exhibitions not to miss

Europe: 8 must-see shows this fall

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Galleries around Europe are reopening for a new season, following a spring and long summer of lockdowns and uncertainties. In these unique times, gallerists are reflecting on the challenges of staging exhibitions, when travel is limited and the way visitors interact with the space needs to be reinvented. As the artworld returns, here are some must-see European exhibitions.

Lee Lozano Hauser &amp; Wirth Somerset October 3, 2020–January 10, 2021Lozano is perhaps most famous for her Dropout Piece, an action by which she gradually left the artworld. It began in 1970 (or 1972, scholars disagree) and culminated when she left New York City for Texas in the early 1980s – or perhaps with her death in 1999. Yet while Dropout is the summation of Lozano’s conceptual art practice, the artist also spent years painting, transitioning from figuration to abstraction within a decade. This exhibition at Hauser &amp; Wirth Somerset is dedicated to her lesser-known early paintings, and in particular to a series of works featuring airplanes. The paintings and drawings show faces covered by planes, an interaction of man and machine that is unexpected. In&nbsp;No title (1962–63), there’s ‘tension and interaction in an imaginary world of body parts, technology, and sexuality,’ says Hauser &amp; Wirth Director Sylvia Bandi. ‘This kind of energy is omnipresent in Lozano’s work.’

Anne Collier The Modern Institute, Glasgow Until November 6, 2020For her third solo show at Glasgow’s Modern Institute, Anne Collier is presenting works (all 2020) from her series 'Woman Crying (Comic)', 'Tear (Comic)', and 'Filter'. They draw on imagery sourced from retro American romance comic books, of the kind once directed at adolescent girls. Collier photographs and reframes selected images, zooming in on the pixelated, heightened drama of a particular section – the eyes, say, or the tears. She offers a potent critique of the clichéd images of suffering females that were – and still are – proffered to young women as representations of themselves. The aesthetic, familiar from Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings or old-fashioned advertising, is far from neutral in Collier’s eye, and the fact that it never seems to go away is just another reason to explore how it is such a common representation of young women, constantly fed back to them.

Sung Tieu, ‘What is your |x|?’ Emalin, London Until November 7, 2020Not long before the COVID-19 lockdowns began in Europe, the Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu opened exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK and Haus der Kunst in Munich. Both dived into state power: in Munich, she created an installation based on immigration bureaus, registration offices, and prisons; in Nottingham, her work explored the Havana syndrome, a health condition first reported by US embassy staff in 2016 in Cuba, possibly caused by microwave weapons. In her first show with Emalin, Tieu presents output that has taken a much more personal turn. The materials – stainless steel and mirror – feel like they replicate the cold environments of state power that she has been exploring, but here the structural meets the personal: the plaques include Tieu’s own birth chart. ‘It is exciting to see her work turn inward and toward the individual and the self,’ say gallery Directors Angelina Volk and Leopold Thun. The artist’s immersive environment, which they describe as ‘extremely delicate,’ includes a series of texts about economic pressure and mental health (in a typeface made for investment bank Goldman Sachs), engraved onto heavy metal doors reminiscent of a vault or a prison.

Louise Lawler, R.H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland Galerie Buchholz, Cologne Until October 24, 2020‘Although formally quite different, we knew that all three artists relate to each other’s work in a very special way,’ says Buchholz’s co-owner Christopher Müller. Louise Lawler, R.H. Quaytman, and Cameron Rowland represent three generations of American artists, and their work – be it sculpture, painting, or photography – intersects in various ways. Rowland’s use of readymades, such as the New York City Police Department incident report form in Reasonable Suspicion (2020), meets Lawler’s signature photographing of other artists’ work, where she treats them as a kind of readymade. This exhibition includes Vienna (either gray, mustard, sage, or lavender) (2018/2019), Lawler’s image of a painting from Quaytman’s solo show at Secession in Vienna in 2017. Quaytman reciprocates in Spine, Chapter 20 [Fraser, Anastas, Lawler] (2010), which features silkscreens of photographs of the artist Andrea Fraser and art historian Rhea Anastas looking at a work by Lawler. Rowland’s readymades are charged with meaning, and placing them in the gallery is an act of drawing attention to structures of power; ‘charged readymade’ feels like an apt description, too, for Quaytman and Lawler’s referential works. The points of encounter cement the links between these three artists, whose concerns are different but whose practices keep meeting.

Walid Raad, Etel Adnan, RayyaneTabet,&nbsp; ‘A sun yellow with anger’ Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg Until October 24, 2020This group show takes its title from an inscription in a book of poetry by Lebanese grande dame Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse (1989). Its manuscript, annotated by Adnan and hung on the walls, is presented alongside Rayyane Tabet’s sculptures of suitcases encased in concrete, the thing meant to carry you elsewhere becoming so heavy you are clearly not going anywhere. Upstairs, Walid Raad’s film Sweet Talk Commissions (Solidere: 1994–1997) (2019) shows, with chilling prescience, downtown Beirut being destroyed and rebuilt in an endless loop. Following the explosion at the Port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, this reference to the city’s past becomes a haunting image of its present. Sfeir-Semler’s Beirut gallery was destroyed in the blast, and, as the press release notes, though the disaster has ‘quickly disappeared from the headlines,’ the city’s inhabitants are still dealing with its tragic aftermath, amid an economic disaster and the pandemic. In light of these events, the gallery has changed its program: ‘A sun yellow with anger’ will now be followed by a solo show by Raad. The idea, explains gallery owner Andrée Sfeir-Semler, is to reaffirm the gallery’s commitment to Lebanon, its ‘mission to promote Beirut’s brilliant cultural scene,’ and ‘capacity to offer the world a window to look through.’

Adrián Villar Rojas Marian Goodman, Paris Until October 31Much of Adrián Villar Rojas’s previous work has focused on the Anthropocene, doomsday scenarios, and human-induced changes to the Earth, and so the COVID-19 pandemic comes into the work quite naturally, as Villar Rojas explores how the pandemic has affected people’s sense of time. Titled ‘La fin de l’imagination’, the show references a wealth of sources from the history of art and science for a site-specific installation using the natural light from the windows and skylight, which he covered in black vinyl that he cut patterns, drawings, and equations into, alongside a 12-screen pillar showing videos and huge drawings lining the walls. The installation, says Nicolas Nahab, Marian Goodman’s Paris Executive Director, ‘truly embodies the way the current sanitary and social climate affects our relation to time, language, and the usual process of creating an exhibition.’

‘YESN’T’Galerie Sultana, ParisUntil October 31, 2020Curated by gallery artist Paul Maheke and gallery owner Guillaume Sultana, this exhibition includes the work of Absalon, David Caille, Anthea Hamilton, Candice Lin, Patrick Staff, Achraf Touloub, free.yard, Tabita Rezaire, and Maheke himself. ‘Their practices seem important because they nurture alternative positions – within and outside the arts industry,’ says Sultana about the show, which looks for (or at) examples of how to expand the discourse around nonbinary, from gender to theory and action. ‘YESN’T’ shows Hamilton’s silk half-butterflies from the series Chopped Monarch (2018) on the walls and on the floor, next to drawings made in iron chloride on copper by Maheke, and a wind chime by Staff that makes only one note – Everyone in One Room (2020). The works diverge in medium and subject, but they fill the small gallery space with different meeting points, from sound and text to nature converging with the small details of everyday life. The word ‘yesn’t’ is ‘a no camouflaged as a yes,’ as curator Cédric Fauq puts it, with the works on view proposing an image of a world where politics are not discussed in simple yeses or nos.

Genesis Belanger Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels November 14–December 19, 2020The work of Brooklyn-based artist Genesis Belanger often takes on domestic themes and objects. Among her small ceramics and cast-concrete sculptures, one can find such modest items as a pair of deviled eggs, a sliced ham, or a shelled peanut. Colored in pastel hues, these delicate objects may seem innocent at first, but darkness lurks in the background. There’s a finger in the vase of flowers and legs coming out of the candlesticks, a pill held in place by what looks like a tongue, and the ham appears to have nails in it. Beneath the ideal-home veneer, breakdown is never far away. The works feed off this tension between allure and revulsion. ‘It immediately resonated with my Belgian surrealist background,’ says gallerist Rodolphe Janssen.

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