Well, 2018 is going to be a year full of surprises! And for art this will be the year when art and artists encounter politics and cultural commentary head on. Below are just some of some of the artists and art collectives whose work one expects will gain in traction and influence in the New Year.
1- Philip Guston
A Philip Guston artwork
Ab-Ex painter Philip Guston, after Richard Nixon won the White House in 1968 by less than one percent of the popular vote and according to him the war that was happening to America is the brutality of the world. What kind of man was he to be sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything and then going into his studio to adjust a red to a blue?
Besides turning to figuration an art world scandal that anticipated Dylan’s going electric Guston also penned a suite of ink drawings that skewered America’s 37th President. Brought together for the first time at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown New York space, “Philip Guston: Laughter in the Dark, Drawings from 1971 & 1975” features some 180 Nixon satires and over 100 additional never-before-seen works., these drawings take early honors as the top show of the New Year when viewed.
2- Richard Mosse
A Richard Mosse
Richard Mosse, Ben Frost, and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten has spent several years working with a powerful thermal military camera that can record people from a distance of 18 miles, since camera sees with the accuracy of a missile. Mosse has used it to create spectacular artworks about the global migration crisis. A narrative of the journey made by millions of refugees and migrants across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, this story is relayed via a number of large-scale photographs and a 26 foot wide video installation. The video goes on view at London’s Barbican on February 15 and the photos at Jack Shainman Gallery on February 2 and on May 4 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where Mosse is a finalist for the Prix Pictet photography award.
3- Tania Bruguera
Tribute to Ana Mendieta
Tania Bruguera was someone who defended her right to stage a performance critical of the Cuban government. Then she set up the Instituto de Ativismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) a hub for civic literacy in Cuba that works with Cubanos everyday Cubans to fight for democracy and social justice.
Now she has taken the biggest challenge to run for president of Cuba when Raul Castro steps down in 2018. Bruguera has proposed her own utopian candidacy to build a Cuba where we are all in charge and not just a few.
4- Lygia Pape
Lygia Pape masterpiece
Brazilian artist Lygia Pape eventually tired of its formal severity. In 1959, she moved on to become a founding member of the Neo-Concrete movement along her fellow artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica A group dedicated to the inclusion of art in everyday life. Pape not only broke away from preconceived categories in her art, she also sought to inject an urgent new expressiveness into post-war abstraction that was not available in its European and American variant. Her contributions to art’s expanding geopolitics will be on view in a long-awaited first US monographic exhibition at the Met Breuer in 2017.
5- Jimmie Durham
Jimmie Durham – At the centre of the world
Jimmie Durham knew that art can be an activist, and vice versa. Years before Tania Bruguera coined the term activism. During the 1970s, JA political organizer for the American Indian Movement Durham left the US for a self-imposed exile in Mexico in 1987, and then in 1994, he moved to Europe.
His work much of it combining found and constructed elements with text to expose Western prejudices became highly influential in both locales. This year, Durham’s critical art comes home in the form of an aptly titled traveling museum survey named Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World. The exhibition will be on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum in New York.
6. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Artwork
Yiadom-Boakye’s oil paintings embrace many of the conventions of European portraiture, he was a Turner Prize finalist and one of best painters of her generation, Post-Obama-era updates of classic pictures by Velázquez, Manet, and Degas, Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases have been described as portraits of the idea of portraiture.
Like Kerry James Marshall before her, the artist is committed to creating a global black canon of painting where none previously existed. An up-to-date survey of her work goes on view at the New Museum on April.
7-Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg Artwork
Robert Rauschenberg became rightly famous for bringing the everyday world into his art. Alone or in collaboration with artists, dancers, musicians, and writers, he invented new artistic forms that make him a remarkably timely touchstone for the art of today.
A 21st-century retrospective of the late artist’s work, which is on view at Tate Modern through April 2, brings together over 250 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and sound and video recordings. It travels to MoMA in late May.
8- Occupy Museums
Occupy Museums
Occupy Museum’s current focus is what the group calls the shadow industry of debt which affects artists and non-artists alike. The upcoming biennial, which opens March 17, will serve as their latest platform to reclaim space for meaningful culture by and for the 99%. If the artist list of this year’s Whitney Biennial is any indication, only a few of the participants are committed to mining art’s political dimensions.
Occupy museum is a group that emerged directly from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Since 2011, the collective has consistently zeroed in on the tight yet troubled relationship between art and capital.
9- Henry Taylor
Henry Taylor’s Painting.
LA painter Henry Taylor’s work his painting of Huey P. Newton jazzed up the Whitney’s 2016 portraiture show Human Interest can be characterized with the following oxymoron called the radical naïf.
Figuratively and expressive, poppy yet brimming with racial tension, his paintings address painting, politics, history, and the human condition. If Black Lives Matter had an in-house painter, Taylor would be it.
10- Caroline Woolard
Caroline Woolard on Free Culture
Artist, organizer and activist these are only some of the words that describe Caroline Woolard, the all-around creative agent and thinker. Other words that come to mind are writer, lecturer, and thinker.
Whatever term one uses, Woolard is among the most compelling new voices looking to transform creativity beyond what the market offers. Whether talking real estate or experimental systems of mutual aid, she blurs the lines between object making, performance, community organizing and political activism.
The contributions of these artists along with those of younger creators can help set new standards for artistic value that may one day be more suited to the world today.
What do you think?