Our Favorite Exhibitions of 2018
This year was bookended with hometown trips to Sydney, Australia but otherwise we were stateside which means our favorites have a definite USA bent again this year. Favorites ranged from big, museum retrospectives through to compelling solo gallery shows from contemporary artists.
David Hockey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
We will always see Hockney’s work in person whenever we can. Knowing his prints so well makes viewing his paintings even more enjoyable in terms of how he constructs his images and his economy of tone and line.
Hilma af Klint Paintings for the Future at The Guggenheim, New York
This was the show everyone was ‘gramming and I’m so glad I didn’t let that be a reason to give it a miss. af Klint was well as truly a woman ahead of her time and for a more rounded understanding of her context and practice, I recommend listening to the interview with curator Tracey Bashkoff on the Modern Art Notes podcast.
Image: © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Patricia Treib at Crown Point Press
While not necessarily a fully fledged exhibition, we were thrilled to see the presentation of this new set of five etchings Crown Point produced with Treib.
Image: © 2018 Crown Point Press, San Francisco
Robert Rauschenberg Erasing Rules at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF
This enormously comprehensive exhibition was made even more satisfying in being preceded by a campus visit and talk at UC Davis from the show’s curator, Sarah Roberts. There were pieces presented alongside one another that will apparently not be in such close proximity again for a generation and Rauschenberg’s free movement between mediums was incredibly inspirational.
Image Credit: Print Club Ltd.
John Houck Holding Environment at Marianne Boesky
Houck has been a favorite since we first saw A History of Graph Paper at On Stellar Rays in New York City back in 2013. His constructed, photographed images have only increased in representational complexity - to very satisfying results.
Lauren Owens at MoCA, LA
We were sore to have missed this show at the Whitney earlier in the year so were really thrilled that it travelled a little closer to home. Owen’s work has such an intriguing relationship to printmaking, process-wise through a lot of silkscreen printing as part of her paintings but also conceptually in how she approaches the use of Photoshop, layering, masking, and the residue of digital image manipulation. This was a really wonderful show.
Paul Sietsema at Matthew Marks, New York
This was another wonderfully print-centric show from an artist with a very broad palette of image making; from trompe l’eoil painting, to analogue film. Vintage exhibition posters from the 1970s were reproduced as silkscreen prints at very large scale and then treated to a number of effective over-painting and masking techniques.
Image: Our own from Paul Sietsema at Matthew Marks.