The Venice Biennale has traditionally been seen as a retrospective on the present, but this year, it could be said to be an exhibition about the past. More than half of the 331 participants died, a sure sign that the long-standing trend of canonizing the uncanonized may finally be reaching its peak. Many of these artists hail from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the South Pacific, proving that the Western art world has officially begun to shed its Eurocentric bias.
How permanent will all these rewrites be? For example, will the 2084 canon reflect changes at the Venice Biennale 50 years ago? It’s too early to know. One telling factor is whether museums and galleries begin to offer exhibitions to these new entrants. Another question is whether the biennale’s critics, who have existed even before the exhibition opened, can maintain its large audience.
What is now evident is that those who were under-recognized are officially recognized. This is evident not only at the Biennale, but also in this year’s institutional programming. Here are 10 artists receiving deserving awards in 2024.
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Sangodar Badjasin Ajala
Photo credit: Marco Zorzanello
Most of the late artists at the Venice Biennale are represented by a single work, and in a salon-style presentation grouped by painting genre, curator Adriano Pedrosa wisely included galleries outside the historic district. Several gorgeous works by Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá are on display. Àjàlá, who died in 2021, created batik paintings that featured double and crossed figures whose colorful bodies benefited from the Nigerian artist’s knowledge of herbalism, which led him to use a variety of plants to achieve a variety of hues . Although his paintings tend to be completely abstract, the figures contained within them remain in focus, displaying a captivating presence against a deep black background. Àjàlá makes a living as a priest of Shango. He was not an artist by training or profession. But his labor-intensive paintings suggest he is still worthy of museum investigation.
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Mavis Pusey
Photo credit: Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews
Historically, deceased artists have not featured in the Whitney Biennial, which is known primarily for spotlighting young artists who deserve attention, but this year, Mavis Pusey joins the ranks of the generations that came after her artists appeared together. Born in Jamaica in 1928, Pusey came to New York at the age of 18 and stayed there for decades, creating semi-abstract paintings based on scenes of abandoned and impoverished neighborhoods. One such canvas with some hard-edged strips—perhaps a reference to the boarded-up windows—takes center stage here, becoming a logical precursor to contemporary artworks focused on suppressing, confusing, and dividing communities excluded. mainstream. Next year Pusey will be the subject of an investigation by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.
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Tapta
Image credit: ©Lola Pertsowsky/Private Collection, Brussels
The excitement surrounding Tapta, a Polish-born artist who has lived most of her life in Belgium, has been growing steadily over the past few years, with a 2023 survey at the WIELS Center for Contemporary Art followed this year at the Muzeum Susch A proper retrospective was held. Switzerland. Tapta’s small but growing fan base tends to gravitate toward her fiber art, in which she uses rope to create suspended textiles and structures that evoke jungle-like canopies suspended above the viewer’s head. But this retrospective shows that Tapta was more than just a fiber artist—she innovatively used materials like rubber to form equally majestic sculptures that made hard materials appear soft, and vice versa. Tapta died of a heart attack in 1997 at the age of 71, but it’s fair to say that she had officially found a second chance at life.
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Hamad Butt
Image source: Tate Gallery
Hamad Butt left behind a small but formidable body of work that established him as an important, albeit relatively unknown, artist adjacent to the group of young British artists of the 1990s. The Pakistani-born British artist finally gets the retrospective he deserves at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, which is currently showing a series of Barth’s sculptures, many of which are fragile in design. Take, for example, a 1992 sculpture in which a tube of iodine is contained in a glass container and illuminated with infrared light. The piece could easily be damaged or destroyed; its vulnerability was not unlike that of Bart’s body, which at the time was already beginning to battle HIV. About two years after completing the work, Barthes died of AIDS-related complications, plunging his work into semi-obscurity. Now, it’s poised to gain even more attention.
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Lillian Lane
Image credit: Photo Stephen Weiss/Courtesy of the artist
For decades, Liliane Lijn has created a fascinating body of work that explores invisible forces: female presence, power and words. International audiences have already seen many of her sculptures, including at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she showed three works from the 1970s and 1980s that looked like female bodies and imaginary creatures. . The American-born artist, who is now in her 80s and has spent much of her life in London, is having her most comprehensive retrospective to date, organized by the Munich Haus der Kunst and Tate St. Organized jointly with the Tate St. Ives and at Haus Der Kunst and the Mumok Museum in Vienna. Appropriately, the exhibition is titled “Alive,” referring to the inner life that her sculptures often seem to imbue with.
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Emily Karaka
Image credit: Courtesy of the artist/Auckland Art Gallery Auckland Arts
The bright, cheerful colors of Emily Karaka’s paintings seem to conflict with her subjects, which are often the dispossession of their native land. The artist, who is of Ngati Te Ahi Waru descent and is now in her 70s, has never made entirely somber art, although she often refers to the Treaty of Waitangi, which stripped Maori of their rights during its formation. New Zealand (Aotearoa) now. Karaka’s Sharjah Art Foundation retrospective shows how the artist skillfully layered text, indigenous symbols and bright, abstract patterns to critique the history of colonialism, sometimes even shifting her focus beyond the South Pacific. For example, one of the new paintings in the exhibition refers to Palestine, whose struggle she clearly identifies as a Māori struggle.
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Britta Malacat-Raba
Photo credit: Ina Weisenberg
Britta Marakatt-Labba is one of the most important Sami artists and her appearances at Documenta 14 in 2017 and the Venice Biennale in 2022 significantly enhanced her visibility. Some of her spare textiles and drawings chart Sweden’s national history, showing how the country deliberately took steps to dispossess the Nordic region’s indigenous people of their land and livelihoods, but the majority of her work functions differently. Among her numerous works, including her critically acclaimed history (2003-07), she focuses on the survival of the Sami people and records their centuries-old legends. The National Museum in Oslo hosted the 73-year-old star’s biggest show of the year so far.
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Djura Kosice
Image source: provided by MALBA
Until this year, Djura Košice was primarily known for one piece of work: his room-filling installations water space city (Aquaspace City, 1946-72), featuring suspended Plexiglas works, he meant as a vision of how humans could persevere after leaving this planet. Yet Kosice is much more than that, as his retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires (MALBA) attests. The exhibition shows how Košice, who was born in Slovakia and spent much of his career in Buenos Aires, helped found the movement known as Madi, which in the 1940s aspired to prove that abstraction could be a a form of liberation. His MALBA retrospective positioned Madi as an important turning point in the history of Argentine art, inspiring generations of artists to follow.
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Jinlin
Image credit: ©Kim Lim/DACS, 2024/Courtesy of the National Gallery Singapore
“For me,” Singaporean-British artist Kim Lim once said, “a sculpture has to have a presence and I want people to be able to immediately see it as a whole.” This seems like an ironic statement, since she makes The metal and wood sculptures are quiet, largely colorless, and often modest in scale—not the kind of art typically thought of as taking up space. But Lim’s National Gallery Singapore retrospective, the first touring exhibition to be shown at Hepworth Wakefield in the UK, shows how the artist breathed life into minimalism, making it appear tangible at times. For Lim, this show is a comeback. She was born in Singapore in 1936 and died sixty years later in London, where she first came to attention.
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Anna Lupas
Image source: Photo Carlo Favero/Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
During the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, when experimentalism was hampered in Romania, Ana Lupas bravely worked in an avant-garde way, creating brilliantly unconventional works such as solemn process (1964-2008), consists of a metallic structure made of steel, straw and wire mesh that is reminiscent of ancient objects indigenous to the country. These rings and triangles were first exhibited outdoors in the mid-1960s and then gradually disappeared. Thank God she recreated works like this with a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum. The exhibition, currently on display at the Liechtenstein Museum of Art, explores how the 84-year-old artist revived local traditions, effectively keeping ideas and rituals on the verge of being lost alive.
