If you were wowed by the titanic powers of Sigmar Polke at MOMA last year, mark your calendar for June 10, when the New Museum surveys the career of his influential student Albert Oehlen. The German painter, sixty, was also a close friend and frequent collaborator of German art’s hard-charging bad boy Martin Kippenberger (who died in 1997). While Oehlen’s approach is just as radical, he has kept a more modest profile, and “Home and Garden,” as the show is titled, is his New York museum début. Oehlen brings both refinement and a spiked, punk irreverence to painting, treating canvas as a lab for restless experimentation, in which distinctions between abstract and figurative, feral and tame, color and black-and-white, even digital and analog, become meaningless.
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction—and mom-and-pop commerce—is the subject of “Analogue,” Zoe Leonard’s exhibition at MOMA, which opens June 26. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur-driven “Arcades” project, Leonard spent ten years haunting the Lower East Side, among other locales, with a nineteen-forties Rolleiflex camera, documenting the vanishing world of hand-painted signs.
For three decades, the renowned Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo has been bringing a sense of political urgency—and a consciousness of the fragility of human life—to post-minimalism. Her earliest installations involved hospital furniture and shirts impaled on rebar; in 2014, she connected a network of garmentlike silks using some twelve thousand needles. A retrospective of her work opens at the Guggenheim on June 26.
On a lighter note, the Morgan Library & Museum celebrates the sesquicentennial of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” beginning June 26, and on June 30 the Met opens “John Singer Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends.” ♦
