The exhibitions I adored this 12 months—and the one I didn’t

The Venice Biennale is all the time notable and the affect of this 12 months’s present felt large. It options in my picks of the 12 months, alongside numerous group exhibits and solo exhibitions. A lot has been fabricated from the immersive expertise increase; however none moved me to incorporate them right here, besides because the one stinker.

Venice Biennale: Stranieri Ovunque/Foreigners In all places

Adriano Pedrosa’s worldwide exhibition was a magnum opus reflecting a life’s work. With extra historic work than many Venice exhibits—partly correcting systemic geographical biases in earlier Biennales—there was nonetheless a transparent, constant presentation of latest developments, with queer, indigenous, “outsider” and émigré artists to the fore.

Zanele Muholi, Tate Fashionable, London

Reinvigorated after its Covid-shortened spell at Tate Fashionable, this retrospective confirmed Muholi’s devastating and defiant achievement in documenting queer Black life in South Africa. The huge central room that includes Somnyama Ngonyama was an impressive reflection of one of many nice modern workout routines in self-portraiture.

Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage, Fondation Beyeler, Basel

A hovering 70-work survey, exploring the significance of journey to Matisse’s life and work.

The Time is At all times Now, Nationwide Portrait Gallery, London

Ekow Eshun’s gathering of twenty-two Black artists was a triumph. Eshun careworn that it was not triumphalist in marking the prominence of portray by Black artists. Nonetheless, it learn as a best hits of latest contributions to the medium, with main works by Michael Armitage, Kerry James Marshall and Jennifer Packer amongst its many highlights.

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behaviour, Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel, Venice

My decide of the collateral Venice Biennale exhibits. It mixed the exact drawing and delicate color of the Indo-Persian manuscript portray wherein Sikander educated with extra modern media and applied sciences. Her work explores feminism, post-colonialism and the local weather emergency, whereas giving flight to a luminous imaginative and prescient and creativeness.

Glenn Ligon: Everywhere in the Place, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Invited to reply to Cambridge’s encyclopaedic museum, Ligon introduced his clear imaginative and prescient and astute commentary. From neons with a number of translations of the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy on the façade, evoking the slipperiness of language round energy and company, to cheek-by-jowl flower work, each joyous and subtly alluding to extraction and historic world commerce, Ligon’s interventions reframed the museum and its holdings with affect and nuance.

Acts of Resistance: Images, Feminisms and the Artwork of Protest, South London Gallery

Acts of Resistance was an intersectional, continent-crossing survey of latest developments in pictures with a selected deal with political activism and precarious communities. It was by turns life-affirming and disquieting, and by no means lower than enthralling.

Ellsworth Kelly, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

A sonorous exhibition within the metropolis the place Kelly first discovered his creative voice. Fittingly proven whereas Matisse’s Pink Studio was within the galleries above, it confirmed how Kelly embraced a number of traditions in Europe with a reductive and seductive purity. He stated he wished “to get on the rapture of seeing”; this was rapturously stunning.

The Imaginary Establishment of India, Barbican Artwork Gallery, London

If push got here to shove, my present of the 12 months. With acquainted voices like Bhupen Khakhar and Sheela Gowda alongside a number of artists who’re revelatory to many people, it was fantastically designed, immaculately paced and resonantly stirring.

THE TURKEY: The Butterfly Path, Outernet, London

Outernet, the free, immersive house in central London, claimed in 2023 that it was the UK capital’s most visited attraction. In January, I ventured to see Pixel Artworks’s mixed-reality atmosphere: a digital glasshouse occupied by one Professor Peter Pelgrin, with butterflies that might land in your hand through an augmented actuality app. It laudably tried to boost consciousness about species extinction, however clumsily, through a trope—Pelgrin, the “intrepid explorer”—symbolic of historic extractive practices. The visuals have been confectionery-coloured to the purpose of sickliness. All spherical, an execrably gaudy spectacle.