Pacita Abad<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"Several](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Pacita-Abad-MCAD-1.jpg?w=800\")
<\/p>\nA 2018 survey of Pacita Abad’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Courtesy Pacita Abad Estate\/Photo Pioneer Studios<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nPacita Abad<\/a>, who died in 2004 at age 58, has been a cult favorite for a while for her paintings made using a technique she called\u00a0trapunto<\/em>, which involved texturing her canvases about the immigrant experience by stitching them and stuffing them. Praised within certain circles for her innovative combinations of craft and fine-art styles, and for her depictions of communities that often go invisible, the Filipina artist has been the subject of several posthumous surveys. One arrived in Dubai this fall when the Jameel Arts Centre opened a concise exhibition of her rich paintings. Curated by Nora Razian, that show was considerably smaller than one planned for 2023 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, but it still attested to the fact that Abad had been overlooked for far too long.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAlma Thomas<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Thomas_PR_01_Breeze.Rustling.Through.Fall_.Flowers.jpg?w=520\")
<\/p>\nAlma Thomas, Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers<\/em>, 1968.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Phillips Collection<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nBack in 2019, when the Museum of Modern Art<\/a> in New York reopened after a $450 million renovation, abstractions by Alma Thomas shared space with paintings by Henri Matisse\u2014a sign that even the most august institutions were no longer ignoring her. (As of fall 2021, the museum has removed her work from view, though the Matisses have stayed.) A giant within the history of abstraction, Thomas\u2019s work was the subject of a modest but important exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem five years ago, but it wasn\u2019t until 2021 that she got the full-scale survey she has long been in need of. The Columbus Museum in Georgia and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, significantly expanded many people\u2019s understanding of Thomas\u2019s oeuvre, showing that she did far more than create brilliantly hued abstractions using what she called \u201cAlma\u2019s Stripes.\u201d Curated by Jonathan Frederick Walz and Seth Feman, the show exposed often-unseen sides of her oeuvre, including her job as a teacher in Washington, D.C. and the rarely exhibited clothes she handcrafted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nKoga Harue<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Koga-Harue-Umi-The-Sea.jpg?w=758\")
<\/p>\nKoga Harue, Umi (The Sea)<\/em>, 1929.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nAt the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s show \u201cSurrealism Beyond Borders<\/a>\u201d (which is now en route to Tate Modern in London), one artist in particular stood out among the crowd: Koga Harue, a Japanese painter who proffered a style known as\u00a0kikai-shugi<\/em>, or machine-ism. Though he only lived to be 38, Koga emerged as one of Japan\u2019s most important artists during the early 20th century. He advocated for Scientific Surrealism, a tendency that was less dreamlike than what was seen in Europe\u2014and seemingly more objective. In his masterpiece,\u00a0Umi (The Sea)<\/em>, from 1929, a bather standing atop a submarine salutes an ocean filled with fish and gadgetry, as though the boundary between man and machine has totally imploded. Koga was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama in Japan back in 2010, but he\u2019s never had a major survey stateside. As our understanding of Surrealism expands, he\u2019s overdue for one in the U.S.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nMaria Martins<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/O-impossi%CC%81vel-1945.jpg?w=608\")
<\/p>\nMaria Martins, O Imposs\u00edvel<\/em> (The Impossible), 1940s.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Photo Vicente de Mello\/Banco Ita\u00fa, S\u00e3o Paulo<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nOne of the more surprising omissions from the Met\u2019s exemplary Surrealism survey was Maria Martins, who redefined sculpture in her home country of Brazil with writhing forms that exuded an overt kind of eroticism. (For that reason, curator Mario Pedrosa once labeled them \u201cobscene.\u201d) Those in Brazil were in luck, however. To tie in with the country\u2019s bicentennial, the Museu de Arte de S\u00e3o Paulo held a group of shows devoted to Brazilian art history under the aegis of its acclaimed \u201cHist\u00f3rias\u201d series, and one was given over to Martins\u2019s work. Martins was well-connected with the American and European art scenes of her day (she was friends with Marcel Duchamp, and likely inspired one of his final works), but this exhibition, curated by Isabel Rjeille, is important because it devotes so much space to the Brazilian aspects of her art, in particular the mythologies and Indigenous traditions she was drawing on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n\nMaryan<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/MARY021.jpg?w=601\")
<\/p>\nMaryan, Personnage in a Box<\/em>, 1962.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan, New York<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nAccording to art historiani Ziva Amisha-Maisels<\/a>, Maryan may have been the first artist ever to paint the carnage of the Nazis\u2019 concentration camps. That alone would qualify the Polish-born artist as an artist worthy of a deep dive, but there are many other aspects of his life and oeuvre that make him worth noting, including his ties to the postwar French art scene, his use of figuration at a time when it was considered anathema to art-making in some circles, and a film he made during the \u201970s that connects his own experience as Holocaust survivor to the global fight against fascism. Never before had Maryan been the subject of a proper retrospective until Alison M. Gingeras curated one for the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami this year. The show makes a solid case for writing Maryan into the history of postwar art for good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nShigeko Kubota<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/244_2021_WEB-Press-Site-2000x2000-1.jpg?w=600\")
<\/p>\nShigeko Kubota, Berlin Diary: Thanks to My Ancestors<\/em>, 1981.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a92021 Estate of Shigeko Kubota\/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Courtesy Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna\/Photo Denis Doorly\/Photo \u00a9Museum of Modern Art<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nIt\u2019s possible that the trajectory of video art history may not have been the same were it not for Shigeko Kubota<\/a>. During the \u201960s and \u201970s, at a time when most videos were being shown almost exclusively on small monitors, she realized that these moving images need not only be seen on a screen\u2014they could also appear in expansive sculptures meditating on humanity\u2019s relationship to the natural world and her heroes, which included Marcel Duchamp and her husband Nam June Paik. Kubota\u2019s reputation has long paled in comparison to Paik\u2019s, but in 2021, the world finally saw just how important she was. Japanese audiences got the most expansive view of Kubota\u2019s work with a retrospective that is currently touring the country, but New York audiences got a taste, too, in the form of a small but well-rounded survey at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Erica Papernik-Shimizu.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nHerv\u00e9 T\u00e9l\u00e9maque<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/H2G03729.jpeg?w=800\")
<\/p>\nHerv\u00e9 T\u00e9l\u00e9maque, One of the 36,000 Marines over our Antilles<\/em>, 1965.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Photo Hugo Glendinning<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nIt can be shocking just how much art by today\u2019s youngest sensations looks a lot like paintings by Herv\u00e9 T\u00e9l\u00e9maque, who has long been a giant of the French art scene, having lived there since the early \u201960s. Born in Haiti, the 83-year-old artist was given a survey this year at the Serpentine Galleries in London; it may have been only a quarter of the size of his 2015 Centre Pompidou show, but it was no less significant. (The Serpentine\u2019s show was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Joseph Constable<\/a> with Elizabeth de Bertier.) On view at the Serpentine are paintings that evince T\u00e9l\u00e9maque\u2019s flirtations with multiple art movements, including Surrealism and narrative figuration. These visually striking works combine an array of imagery\u2014advertisement-like pictures, portraiture, and semi-abstract elements\u2014and occasionally pay mind to political issues like Haiti\u2019s history of colonialism and the N\u00e9gritude movement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nHeidi Bucher<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/50ee31b1-de36-b000-296b-cb84a3c50926.jpeg?w=800\")
<\/p>\nInstallation view of “Heidi Bucher: Metamorphoses,” 2021, at Haus der Kunst, Munich.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Photo Markus Tretter\/ \u00a9The Estate of Heidi Bucher and Haus der Kunst<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nMomentum surrounding the under-recognized Swiss sculptor Heidi Bucher has been building since 2017, when her work appeared in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. A proper showcase for her latex casts of architectural spaces could not have come soon enough, and finally, in 2021, one arrived at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where 150 of her works were exhibited in a big retrospective curated by Jana Baumann. That show, which is also set to travel to the Kunstmuseum Bern and Muzeum Susch, piquantly highlights Bucher\u2019s interest in the relationship between one\u2019s body and its environment, with certain sculptures hung from high above like flayed skins in a butcher shop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n
\n\n\nKarimeh Abbud<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/EidH8O2XcAAuYyG-2.jpeg?w=800\")
<\/p>\nKarimeh Abbud, Three Women<\/em>, 1930.<\/div>\nPhoto<\/span>\u00a0:\u00a0<\/span>Photo Issam Nassar<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\nIn the first half of the 20th century, Karimeh Abbud reshaped photography in the Middle East when she became the first woman artist to operate a portrait studio in Palestine. The images she shot\u2014memorable pictures of middle-class Palestinians\u2014contained none of the harmful trappings of Western ethnological photography. Although some believe she was among the first women photographers in the Arabic world, Abbud was barely known at all until the Darat al Funun art space in Ammann, Jordan, staged a show of her photography in 2017. She\u2019s still never had such a major showing in the U.S., although the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured her in its bracing exhibition \u201cThe New Woman Behind the Camera<\/a>,\u201d which is now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nYolanda M. L\u00f3pez<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/Lopez-2-.jpg?w=442\")
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nPacita Abad<\/a>, who died in 2004 at age 58, has been a cult favorite for a while for her paintings made using a technique she called\u00a0trapunto<\/em>, which involved texturing her canvases about the immigrant experience by stitching them and stuffing them. Praised within certain circles for her innovative combinations of craft and fine-art styles, and for her depictions of communities that often go invisible, the Filipina artist has been the subject of several posthumous surveys. One arrived in Dubai this fall when the Jameel Arts Centre opened a concise exhibition of her rich paintings. Curated by Nora Razian, that show was considerably smaller than one planned for 2023 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, but it still attested to the fact that Abad had been overlooked for far too long.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Back in 2019, when the Museum of Modern Art<\/a> in New York reopened after a $450 million renovation, abstractions by Alma Thomas shared space with paintings by Henri Matisse\u2014a sign that even the most august institutions were no longer ignoring her. (As of fall 2021, the museum has removed her work from view, though the Matisses have stayed.) A giant within the history of abstraction, Thomas\u2019s work was the subject of a modest but important exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem five years ago, but it wasn\u2019t until 2021 that she got the full-scale survey she has long been in need of. The Columbus Museum in Georgia and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, significantly expanded many people\u2019s understanding of Thomas\u2019s oeuvre, showing that she did far more than create brilliantly hued abstractions using what she called \u201cAlma\u2019s Stripes.\u201d Curated by Jonathan Frederick Walz and Seth Feman, the show exposed often-unseen sides of her oeuvre, including her job as a teacher in Washington, D.C. and the rarely exhibited clothes she handcrafted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n At the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s show \u201cSurrealism Beyond Borders<\/a>\u201d (which is now en route to Tate Modern in London), one artist in particular stood out among the crowd: Koga Harue, a Japanese painter who proffered a style known as\u00a0kikai-shugi<\/em>, or machine-ism. Though he only lived to be 38, Koga emerged as one of Japan\u2019s most important artists during the early 20th century. He advocated for Scientific Surrealism, a tendency that was less dreamlike than what was seen in Europe\u2014and seemingly more objective. In his masterpiece,\u00a0Umi (The Sea)<\/em>, from 1929, a bather standing atop a submarine salutes an ocean filled with fish and gadgetry, as though the boundary between man and machine has totally imploded. Koga was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Hayama in Japan back in 2010, but he\u2019s never had a major survey stateside. As our understanding of Surrealism expands, he\u2019s overdue for one in the U.S.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n One of the more surprising omissions from the Met\u2019s exemplary Surrealism survey was Maria Martins, who redefined sculpture in her home country of Brazil with writhing forms that exuded an overt kind of eroticism. (For that reason, curator Mario Pedrosa once labeled them \u201cobscene.\u201d) Those in Brazil were in luck, however. To tie in with the country\u2019s bicentennial, the Museu de Arte de S\u00e3o Paulo held a group of shows devoted to Brazilian art history under the aegis of its acclaimed \u201cHist\u00f3rias\u201d series, and one was given over to Martins\u2019s work. Martins was well-connected with the American and European art scenes of her day (she was friends with Marcel Duchamp, and likely inspired one of his final works), but this exhibition, curated by Isabel Rjeille, is important because it devotes so much space to the Brazilian aspects of her art, in particular the mythologies and Indigenous traditions she was drawing on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n According to art historiani Ziva Amisha-Maisels<\/a>, Maryan may have been the first artist ever to paint the carnage of the Nazis\u2019 concentration camps. That alone would qualify the Polish-born artist as an artist worthy of a deep dive, but there are many other aspects of his life and oeuvre that make him worth noting, including his ties to the postwar French art scene, his use of figuration at a time when it was considered anathema to art-making in some circles, and a film he made during the \u201970s that connects his own experience as Holocaust survivor to the global fight against fascism. Never before had Maryan been the subject of a proper retrospective until Alison M. Gingeras curated one for the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami this year. The show makes a solid case for writing Maryan into the history of postwar art for good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s possible that the trajectory of video art history may not have been the same were it not for Shigeko Kubota<\/a>. During the \u201960s and \u201970s, at a time when most videos were being shown almost exclusively on small monitors, she realized that these moving images need not only be seen on a screen\u2014they could also appear in expansive sculptures meditating on humanity\u2019s relationship to the natural world and her heroes, which included Marcel Duchamp and her husband Nam June Paik. Kubota\u2019s reputation has long paled in comparison to Paik\u2019s, but in 2021, the world finally saw just how important she was. Japanese audiences got the most expansive view of Kubota\u2019s work with a retrospective that is currently touring the country, but New York audiences got a taste, too, in the form of a small but well-rounded survey at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Erica Papernik-Shimizu.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n It can be shocking just how much art by today\u2019s youngest sensations looks a lot like paintings by Herv\u00e9 T\u00e9l\u00e9maque, who has long been a giant of the French art scene, having lived there since the early \u201960s. Born in Haiti, the 83-year-old artist was given a survey this year at the Serpentine Galleries in London; it may have been only a quarter of the size of his 2015 Centre Pompidou show, but it was no less significant. (The Serpentine\u2019s show was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Joseph Constable<\/a> with Elizabeth de Bertier.) On view at the Serpentine are paintings that evince T\u00e9l\u00e9maque\u2019s flirtations with multiple art movements, including Surrealism and narrative figuration. These visually striking works combine an array of imagery\u2014advertisement-like pictures, portraiture, and semi-abstract elements\u2014and occasionally pay mind to political issues like Haiti\u2019s history of colonialism and the N\u00e9gritude movement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n Momentum surrounding the under-recognized Swiss sculptor Heidi Bucher has been building since 2017, when her work appeared in the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. A proper showcase for her latex casts of architectural spaces could not have come soon enough, and finally, in 2021, one arrived at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where 150 of her works were exhibited in a big retrospective curated by Jana Baumann. That show, which is also set to travel to the Kunstmuseum Bern and Muzeum Susch, piquantly highlights Bucher\u2019s interest in the relationship between one\u2019s body and its environment, with certain sculptures hung from high above like flayed skins in a butcher shop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n In the first half of the 20th century, Karimeh Abbud reshaped photography in the Middle East when she became the first woman artist to operate a portrait studio in Palestine. The images she shot\u2014memorable pictures of middle-class Palestinians\u2014contained none of the harmful trappings of Western ethnological photography. Although some believe she was among the first women photographers in the Arabic world, Abbud was barely known at all until the Darat al Funun art space in Ammann, Jordan, staged a show of her photography in 2017. She\u2019s still never had such a major showing in the U.S., although the Metropolitan Museum of Art featured her in its bracing exhibition \u201cThe New Woman Behind the Camera<\/a>,\u201d which is now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\nAlma Thomas<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nKoga Harue<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nMaria Martins<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nMaryan<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nShigeko Kubota<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nHerv\u00e9 T\u00e9l\u00e9maque<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nHeidi Bucher<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nKarimeh Abbud<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\nYolanda M. L\u00f3pez<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n