From breath taking art exhibitions to new museums openings and usual art fairs: here they are some highlights of the year ahead

Good news for art passionates: the new year seems to be rich in interesting worldwide cultural appointments. In term of shows, among those already announced the five most awaited ones are:


Vermeer
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 10 February-4 June

It will be the biggest ever show about the Dutch master after the one held in 1995-1996 at the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC). 28 of Johannes Vermeer’s 37 paintings will be displayed over ten rooms in a chronological order from early paintings of the mid-1650s up until his late works completed shortly before his death in 1675. Visitors who will want to learn more about the artist should also head to Delft (around 50km away from Amsterdam) to see Vermeer’s home town.







Egon Schiele: Young Genius in Vienna 1900
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, 26 January-9 April

The first major Schiele’s retrospective held in Japan will include 50 of his drawings and paintings, from early mannered studies to renowned self-portraits, and over a hundred works by other artists such as Gustav Klimt, Richard Gerstl and Oskar Kokoschka. Most of them will be loaned by Vienna’s Leopold Museum.



The Rossettis
Tate Britain, London, 6 April-24 September

Around 90 artworks by Dante Gabriel Rossetti will be displayed in the artist’s first retrospective at the Tate. Some masterpieces are already shown in the permanent collection of the Museum (“The Annunciation”, “Beata Beatrix”, “Proserpine”). Instead other ones will join the location thanks to this precious event (“The Blessed Damozel”, “Mnemosyne”). There will be presented to the public also Dante’s sister Christina poetries and, for the first time, Elizabeth Siddal’s 30 artworks. She began painting in the 1850s thanks to the critic John Ruskin and she worked until her death in 1862.







El Greco in the Labyrinth
Palazzo Reale, Milan, 13 October-9 February 2024

Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541-1614), known as El Greco, will be the protagonist of Milan Autumn. The exhibition will present some of his best known paintings directly from the El Greco Museum in Toledo, the Prado, the Uffizi Galleries and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It will be the first significant El Greco show in the city from 1993.



Simone Leigh
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 6 April-4 September
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, 3 November-3 March 2024

The protagonist of the United States 59th Biennale Pavilion, Simone Leigh, will have her first museums major project at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and after at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The retrospective will finally come to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to the California African American Museum in 2024. The exhibition will display the past 20 years of Leigh’s career, focusing on her sculptures made in bronze, porcelain, terracotta and glass. It will also include video art pieces made in collaboration with artists such as Chitra Ganesh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, which continue Leigh’s explorations into the iconographies of race and gender.

However in 2023 there will not only be interesting exhibitions: the opening of new museum institutions is also planned, such as the International African American Museum in Charleston (South Carolina, USA).The city was the largest slave port in the US: the Museum is set to open across from the historic dock. The focus will be the exploration of the cultural and socio-economic impact of slavery.
In Giza it’s almost ready the Grand Egyptian Museum, costed $1bn. Its work began 20 years ago. With 484,000 sq. ft, it will be the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single civilisation. 100,000 Egyptian artefacts will be displayed in front of the pyramids. Many artworks will come from other Egyptian institutions.







It’s not an opening, but a reopening the one of the National Portrait Gallery in London. Visitor can be admire again its masterpieces from the 22nd of June 2023. The complete restoration has included a reorientation of the entrance, a new double-height learning space underneath the new entrance and some top-floor galleries.
In addition to this news there will be four Biennals: the International Architectural Exhibition in Venice, the 15th Sharjah Exhibition in UAE, the 35th Bienal de São Paulo in Brasil and the Liverpool Biennal. The second one will be held from 7 February to 11 June following the last project of the curator Okwui Enwezor. More than 300 artworks will be shown across the Emirate in 18 venues. Also the Liverpool Biennial will indagate the postcolonial thematics. “uMoya: the Sacred Return of Lost Things” is its title (10 June-17 September 2023).







Finally, let's not forget the usual art fairs whose calendar has finally returned to the pre-pandemic situation. We will talk about these market events in a next article.