Top Art Exhibitions in 2021

It isn’t new: 2020 was one of the most difficult years not only for museums but for the entire world. In the case of the formers, since the beggining of the year almost all the exhibitions around the world closed because of the pandemic. Even know, the majority of the museums are still closed and althought they offer exhibitions or art programms online, we are still wondering if the online space is the best way to exhibit art. What this situation brought as an urgent issue—more than ever—for those who are involved with art are addressed by several key questions: What is the role of the museums nowadays? Does the museums need to change their own dynamics base on the new relationships we are dilling thanks to the pandemic? What can offer the art in this times?

While we find the answer and while we hope for the museums to open in 2021, here are some upcoming international art exhibitions and events for this year. With some luck, we will be able to visit them without the fear of bein together.

—Francis Bacon: Man and Beast
Royal Academy of Arts
30 January – 18 abril 2021

This powerful exhibition will focus on Bacon’s unerring fascination with animals: how it both shaped his approach to the human body and distorted it; how, caught at the most extreme moments of existence, his figures are barely recognisable as either human or beast.

—Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation
MACBA
March 2021

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation will situate Gonzalez-Torres’ work within the postcolonial discourse and the connected histories between Spain and the Americas, especially as these impact present-day questions around memory, authority, freedom and national identity. A particular emphasis will be placed on reading Gonzalez-Torres’s work in relation to Spanish, Latin American and Caribbean culture.

—Deana Lawson
Guggenheim Museum, NY.
Spring 2021

On October 2020, Deana Lawson was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize 2020 administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and made possible by Hugo Boos. She is the first artist working in photography and the thirteenth one to receive the biennial prize, which was established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. Lawson’s work examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing themes of familial legacy, community, romance, and spiritual aesthetics.

—Anne Imhof: Natures Mortes
Palais de Tokyo
April 2021

Palais de Tokyo invited Anne Imhof to realise an exhibition occupying all its spaces in the autumn of 2020, but it was delayed due to Covid-19 pandemic. For her Carte blanche, Anne Imhof will create effects of resonance and duplication amid an open architectural space, transformed into a vast sonic body and an inhabited labyrinth. She deconstructs the hierarchical systems it embodies so as to generate new images in which the live, visual arts, music and architecture merge.

—Museo Tamayo: 40th Anniversary
Museo Tamayo
May 2021

The Museo Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo Rufino Tamayo openend in May 29, 1981. Although the museum is closed since mid-December because of the Covid-19 pandemic in Mexico City, the museum has announced through his social network the possibility of presenting special exhibitions to celebrate his 40th anniversary this year and for being one of the most important contemporary art museum in Latin America. We are looking forward to museum’s plans for this big event.

—Kara Walker: A Black Hole is Everything a Stars Longs to Be
Kunstmuseum Basel
5 June – 19 September

Throwing open the doors to her personal archive that she has closely guarded for the past twentyseven years, Kara Walker (b. 1969) presents hundreds of drawings from her studio. The Kupferstichkabinett Basel displays these treasures together with brand-new works by the world-famous American artist in her first extensive solo exhibition in Switzerland.

—Anish Kapoor: Painting
Modern Art Oxford
2 Octobrer – 27 February 2022

The materiality of Kapoor’s substantial body of new works pushes the boundaries between sculpture and painting into visceral new ground.