From a lost and now recovered film archive by one of America’s sharpest photojournalists to a legacy prize for award-winning contemporary British artists, there’s lots to see this September.
The renewed energy that comes with September is found at lots of these galleries this month; many exhibitions mark the first ever retrospectives for contemporary artists and rare, never-before-seen works are on display. From London to Chicago, Amsterdam, New York and more, these are the exhibitions to know this September.
Viviane Sassen Phosphor: Art & Fashion, FOAM, Amsterdam
Contemporary fashion and art photographer Vivian Sassen has helped define the multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted creative industry as we know it today, with her bold and eclectic image making. From flamingoes super-imposed over fashion shoots to her modern play on erotic Renaissance painting, these are the types of images you don’t often see. FOAM, Amsterdam’s photography gallery, is honouring the Dutch-born artist to mark the first ever large-scale retrospective of her work, aptly located in her home country. Here, thirty years of work is drawn out across over 200 images, and each of which experiments with saturated colours, dramatic light and shadow, and human intimacy with a striking and lasting impact.
Masahisa Fukase: From Window, Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
Hour by hour, day by day, the world wakes up, dresses, and sets off for work. And that’s just what Yōko Wanibe did too, morning after morning, on the way to her job at an art gallery in Tokyo. Except, for Wanibe, her husband – none other than the Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase – was waiting at the window of their fourth floor apartment to snap her picture. This ritualistic, intimate exchange between the couple documents many ideas within fleeting moments: the couple’s playful relationship; the changing of Wanibe’s moods; the changing of the seasons through Wanibe’s shifting (but ever-chic) wardrobe; the near-dismal backdrop of the suburban housing where the couple, like many city-goers, lived in 1974. But most of all, they become vignettes for the joy that can be found in the mundanity of life. For the first time, these works will be on display in London, and as a whole exhibit at the Michael Hoppen Gallery. You’ll find 33 rare vintage silver gelatin photographs hung on the walls to celebrate Masahisa Fukase’s introspective, whimsical work.
The Turner Prize, Tate Britain, London
Every year, Tate Britain – home to a prestigious collection of art that stories the UK’s art history – hosts The Turner Prize. This prestigious prize is named after canonic Romantic, English painter J. M. W. Turner, who is remembered as ‘the painter of light’ for his dramatic landscape and maritime paintings, and seeks to commemorate the best of the UK’s contemporary art scene. This year is the 40th anniversary of the prize, and the four shortlisted artists are nothing short of pioneering. There’s Pio Abad who explores cultural loss and colonial histories through etchings and sculptures; Claudette Johnson who documents the internal and external lives of Black women and men through figurative portraiture; Jasleen Kaur who uses music, sculpture, and kinesis to bring everyday objects to life; and Delaine Le Bas who creates immersive arts and landscapes that draw on the cultural history of the Roma people. Their work is on show at the Tate Britain from the 25 September, and the winner of the prize is announced on 3 December.
Robert Frank: Life Dances On & Scrapbook Footage, MOMA, New York
Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank captured the essence of American working life across six decades with a harsh-realism, documentary style. Best remembered for his iconic photobook The Americans, including his shot of a New Orleans train window, two exhibitions of Robert Frank’s work are running in conjunction with one another at MOMA this autumn. Both Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue and Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage are commemorating the artist’s photojournalistic style in different ways. Life Dances On explores the photographer’s relationships – both personal and artistic – with local American communities through over 200 objects ranging between films, books, archival materials, and photographs. Meanwhile, Scrapbook Footage focusses on much of Frank’s previously unseen film and video footage, which has been digitalised, with the help of film editor Laura Israel and art director Alex Bingham, from materials found after Frank’s death in 2019.
Collecting Modernism: Pablo Picasso To Winifred Nicholson, Charleston In Lewes
If you’re looking to catch your modernist fix, there are few better options than to head down to Sussex; to Charleston House, once the home of modernist painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, or the newly opened Charleston Trust in Lewes. The latter, has curated an exhibit boasting the most canonical names within the European modernist movement (as well as the sub movements that sparked from this productive period) including Pablo Picasso, Winifred Nicholson, Amedeo Modigliani and more. What’s so interesting about this exhibition is that it traces the early origins of the modernist movement through the objects that inspired modernist work – and that of Bloomsbury Group artists – rather than just focussing on the core Bloomsbury Group. A modern art collection of over 80 paintings were passed between the homes of artists Eddie Sackville-West, Eardley Knollys, and Mattei Radev, and it’s these rare items that are on display.
Georgia O'Keeffe: My New Yorks, Art Institute Of Chicago, Illinois
“My New Yorks would turn the world over,” mused artist Georgia O’Keeffe as she roamed the streets of New York city over several years, paint brush in hand, recreating the city on canvas. These paintings from the 1920s are a far cry from Southwestern landscapes and the haunting paintings from New Mexico ranches that the American modernist is often remembered for. Many of these canvases were painted from the artist’s 30th-floor New York apartment, located in the Shelton Hotel which, at the time, was the tallest residential skyscraper in the world. Staggering in both scale and perspective, rigid lines of colours dominate the canvas to represent how skyscrapers began to dominate more and more of the New York sky.
Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors, Garden Museum, London
How much can you decipher of an artist and their work through the colours, trimmings, and floral varieties blooming in their garden? Lots according to London’s Garden Museum. Like any other form of artistry, the style of gardens have been subject to cultural and periodic movements through the centuries, and the modernist period is no different. Gardening Bohemia narrates the lives of Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Vita Sackville-West through paintings, photographs, textiles, garden tools, manuscripts, letters, and more. From becoming ‘theatres’ as well as settings where sexuality and creativity could be explored, these gardens were more than just physical spaces.
Mo Yi: Me In My Landscape, Arles
Fleeting, lonely, busy, erratic … the antonyms suited to describing city life go on and on. The motions and feelings of living in a city are often hard to describe, because they are so different. These are the kinds of ideas that Chinese artist Mo Yi’s photography queries. As a self-taught photographer, you don’t see conventional methods of shooting in his work that mirror certain artistic moments and styles. Instead, interesting perspectives, confusing focal points, and polarising point of views characterise the works – which Mo Yi often took without looking through the viewfinder. From a self portrait on a busy street, to a single white heeled shoe amongst a flurry of bikes, these photographs are rare moments that together form a tapestry of China’s changing social fabric in the late 20th century.
Lead image: Eudocimus Ruber, from the series Of Mud and Lotus, 2017 © Viviane Sassen and Stevenson (Johannesburg /Cape Town / Amsterdam).
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