Exhibitions in the artzine on artrepublic.com

Twenty years after Gary Hume emerged onto the British art scene with his large-scale paintings based on institutional doors, Modern Art Oxford presents the first-ever survey of this rich body of work. Hume showed his earliest Door Paintings in the now legendary Freeze exhibition in 1988, organised by Damien Hirst with fellow Goldsmiths students, which heralded a new generation of British artists. 

The extraordinary drawings of Philip Guston (1913–1980) are the subject of this major exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum. Together with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Guston is recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition marks the first retrospective of his drawings in twenty years and the Morgan is the only American venue. 

The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, opening at Tate Britain on 4 June, is the first exhibition to survey the history of British painters’ representations of the Middle East from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It will explore the great range of artistic responses to the peoples, cities and landscapes of the regions lying just across the Mediterranean from Europe.

To celebrate European Capital of Culture 2008, Tate Liverpool will present the first comprehensive exhibition of Gustav Klimt’s work ever staged in the UK. 

A Life in Colour is the first major exhibition of work since Mellis stopped making in 2001, aged 87, due to ill health and features over 60 paintings and sculptures. The exhibition spans Margaret Mellis’ career, from the early still-lifes to the abstract reliefs of the 1960s and the magnificent constructions made from driftwood found on the beach near her Suffolk home. Margaret Mellis was one of the St Ives group of artists in Cornwall during the 1940s. The construction Scarlet Undercurrent, Mellis’ final work, is included in the show.

The Fondation Beyeler is devoting a concentrated retrospective to Fernand Léger (1881-1955), providing a long-overdue review of the key phases of his career. Alongside Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, Léger is one of the most outstanding French modern artists. 

Surreal Things displays more than 200 of the most extraordinary objects ever designed to explore the impact of this avant-garde movement—arguably the most influential of the 20th century—on architecture, design and the decorative arts. Alongside objects designed by Elsa Schiaparelli are works by Meret Oppenheim, de Chirico’s costumes and set designs for Diaghilev’s Le Bal, the ceramics and paintings of Joan Miró and Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures and not forgetting the jewels produced by Alexander Calder, or Carlo Mollino’s furniture, mounted in a unique theme-based setting designed especially for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

The American Scene will feature spectacular images of American society and culture made during a period of great social and political change from the early 1900s to 1960. Featuring 147 works by 74 artists, the exhibition includes the work of John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Josef Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. 

Although highly acclaimed in exhibitions in the United States, Australia and Europe, the work of Bridget Riley remains little known in France. This retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris  provides an opportunity to explore her work.  

The American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is one of the most important representatives of Abstract Expressionism. Twenty years after the last retrospective in a German museum this show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle offers a unique opportunity to discover his outstanding oeuvre anew.