Opening in June

June 6–September 8, 2019

Lucas Arruda’s first large-scale institutional solo exhibition opens at the Fridericianum, in Kassel. Organized by the museum’s director, Moritz Wesseler, the show is called Deserto-Modelo, a title shared by the majority of the artist’s solo exhibitions to date and the name given to his ongoing series of untitled works depicting landscapes and seascapes. The exhibition at the Fridericianum includes a number of these paintings, as well as prints, light installations, slide projections, and films.

June 8–September 1, 2019

A video titled Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream, Ciudad Juárez, México, made by Francis Alÿs in collaboration with Julien Devaux, Rafael Ortega, Alejandro Morales, and Félix Blume, in 2013, is included in a group show called The Tangible Trace at the TarraWarra Museum of Art, in Tarrawarra, Australia. In this work, Alÿs attempts to enact the aphorism expressed in the work’s title, and in doing so makes problematic the idea of trying to create something beautiful in the face of a terrible situation. Alÿs kicks a flaming soccer ball through Juárez at night, his path illuminated only by the light from the fire, which he must strike with his foot in order to proceed. The darkness of the night provides a veil for the city’s ever-present problems, including the sale of drugs, prostitution, and police indifference, which are only momentarily glimpsed along his route. Walking is an important facet of Alÿs’s practice, the repetitive, meditative action serving as a catalyst for the recognition of deep-rooted issues. Curated by Victoria Lynn, the exhibition, which is part of the TarraWarra International series, according to the press release, "explores the notion of a trace as a residue or marker of a place, situation or body of knowledge."

June 13, 2019–January 12, 2020

Three works by Dan Flavin go on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami). Puerto Rican light (to Jeanie Blake) 2 (1965), part of the ICA Miami’s permanent collection, is presented in its own gallery space along with two works loaned by the Estate of Dan Flavin: four red horizontals (to Sonja) (1963) and a primary picture (1964). An eight-foot vertical installation of red, pink, and yellow fluorescent light, Puerto Rican light (to Jeanie Blake) 2 is dedicated to a woman who was working at Green Gallery, in New York, at the time of Flavin’s seminal solo exhibition there in 1964; Blake told the artist that his fluorescent works reminded her of "Puerto Rican lights."

June 13–September 15, 2019

Works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia are included in The Polaroid Project at the McCord Museum, in Montreal. This traveling exhibition surveys the history of the Polaroid photographic company through works created by a diverse selection of artists during the second half of the twentieth century. Centered around several hundred photographs, the exhibition also includes prototypes, models, experimental films and papers, technical drawings, and other materials relating to the Polaroid.

June 15–September 1, 2019

Works by Marcel Dzama and Raymond Pettibon are included in the traveling group exhibition Hand Drawn Action Packed, opening in June at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, in the UK. "Painter, draughtsman, and filmmaker Marcel Dzama creates ink and watercolor drawings of fantastical characters enacting bizarre, surreal scenarios," an Artsy video feature explains, adding that the artist “admits a personal aversion to technology’s rapid advance in our lives and embraces tradition, creating intimate works on paper inspired by the work of William Blake and Francisco de Goya, among others.” Pettibon is well known for prolific drawings that have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary, embracing both high and low culture. The two artists are longtime friends and have collaborated on a number of drawings together, some of which have been made into limited-edition zines.

June 15–September 22, 2019

The Scottish National Gallery presents the first museum survey of Bridget Riley’s work to be held in the UK for sixteen years. Spanning more than seventy years of the artist's practice, the show is being organized in partnership with Hayward Gallery in London, where it will travel in October 2019.

June 19–August 25, 2019

Oscar Murillo presents new works in Collision/Coalition, a two-person exhibition with Tony Cokes at The Shed in New York. The artist’s latest solo exhibition at the gallery, Manifestation, is on view at David Zwirner in London from June 8 through July 26, 2019.

June 20, 2019–March 15, 2020

I Am... Contemporary Women Artists of Africa at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, in Washington, DC, includes a 2016 work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby titled Wedding Souvenirs, which the artist has said shows her brother’s wedding. Interviewed in The White Review, Akunyili Crosby, whose experience of syncretic cultures in both Nigeria and the United States informs the subject matter of her artworks, describes how the portrait fabrics used in her work "speak to the history of African fabric." She continues: "Those fabrics still are, but not all of them, a really high brand called Vlisco, which is a Dutch company, and it’s still produced in Holland and sold across the African continent. Then local fabric houses started mimicking Vlisco’s mechanical printing and production, and something different came out of it. [The postcolonial theorist] Homi K. Bhabha does a good job explaining how hybridity is a product of mimicry; it usually starts as mimicry, but in trying to mimic something it’s never perfect. It’s always close enough but not quite, and it’s in those ‘not quite’ moments that new trans-cultures are born. This can be seen in commemorative fabrics, which are unique to the continent."

June 29–November 17, 2019

The Return is Luc Tuymans’s second major solo exhibition at De Pont Museum in Tilburg, The Netherlands. The first, in 1995, marked the debut show of his work in The Netherlands. This exhibition presents some fifty works spanning 1975 to the present.

Image: Luc Tuymans, Corso III, 2015