For the fall 2019 season, the New Museum presents the first US survey of work by Hans Haacke in over thirty years throughout the Museum’s main galleries, joined by Carmen Argote’s first solo museum exhibition.
Hans Haacke: All Connected
October 24, 2019–January 26, 2020
Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Floors
The first major US survey of work by Hans Haacke (b. 1936, Cologne, Germany) in over 30 years, Hans Haacke: All Connected brings together more than thirty works from across the artist’s career, from the 1960s to the present. This exhibition will be the first American museum survey by the highly influential artist since the New Museum presented the exhibition Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business in 1986.
For six decades, Haacke has been a pioneer in kinetic art, environmental art, Conceptual art, and institutional critique. This retrospective will bring together a wide range of works, focusing in particular on how Haacke expanded the parameters of his practice to encompass the social, political, and economic structures in which art is produced, circulated, and displayed. The exhibition will include a number of Haacke’s rarely seen kinetic works, environmental sculptures, and visitor polls from the late 1960s and early ’70s, and will also feature works from the 1970s and ’80s that address the corporate sponsorship of major art institutions and political interference, along with more recent works that consider the intersection of global capitalism, nationalism, and humanitarian crises around the world.
The exhibition will also serve as the New York premiere of Haacke’s Gift Horse (2014), a bronze sculpture of a horse’s skeleton adorned with an LED ribbon streaming stock prices in real time, which the artist originally created for London’s Fourth Plinth Program. Gift Horse, on view on the Museum’s Fourth Floor, will be accompanied by Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), a canonical piece of Conceptual art that was at the center of the Guggenheim’s cancelled Haacke retrospective in 1971.
This exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by the New Museum and Phaidon Press, including contributions from Larry Abramson, Tania Bruguera, Daniel Buren, Jeremy Deller, Sam Durant, Maria Eichhorn, Olafur Eliasson, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Sharon Hayes, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, Pamela M. Lee, Park McArthur, Walid Raad, Gloria Sutton, and John A. Tyson, along with Hans Haacke in conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.
Carmen Argote: As Above, So Below
September 24, 2019–January 5, 2020
Lobby Gallery
Los Angeles–based artist Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico) traces, layers, and transforms diverse materials sourced from her surroundings. At the heart of her interdisciplinary practice is a continuous conversation between her own physical form and the location in which she is working—often responding to the various cultural, economic, personal, and historical narratives within a particular site. Informed by this dialogue, many of her works bare vestiges of her body’s interactions with its environment. Working with materials seeped in symbolic significance—such as coffee, pine needles, avocado, and cochineal dye—Argote’s work sheds light on the constantly shifting surface of urban landscapes and her own experience as a Mexican immigrant in the United States.
For her first solo museum exhibition, Argote presents a selection of new and recent paintings, large-scale works on paper, and a sculptural installation. The majority of these works were created during two residencies in Guadalajara, including one in the former home and studio of renowned Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. As is typical with her practice, Argote responded to the surrounding architecture and agriculture, incorporating the varieties of plants and fruit in Orozco’s central courtyard and gardens, as well as other locally sourced produce, into this body of work as raw materials. The exhibition’s title, “As Above, So Below,” comes from an aphorism associated with sacred geometry and tarot that construes the terrestrial world as a reflection of the celestial one. The title speaks to the transformative quality of Argote’s work, in which native plants, natural pigments, architecture, and the artist’s body interact with one another alchemically, giving rise to something else entirely.
This exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.
About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
