Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
Opens January 28

Be sincere! At last year’s gratifyingly strong New Museum Triennial in New York, the weary indifference of a few art world kids looked rather out of fashion; these days, theoretical sophistication and emotional conviction need not be at odds. (You can read Karen Archey’s review of the triennial, and of the New York cynicism it rebelled from, in Even No. 1.) One of the show’s standout participants was Njideka Akunyili Crosby, now 32, whose painstaking, visually dense compositions invest domestic space with geopolitical character. Her works are hybrids of painting, drawing, collage, and printmaking; hybrids, too, of painterly languages and imagistic registers. Styles, like cultures, get mashed into one another, but her art isn’t syncretic for syncretism’s sake. This is simply the way life is.

Many of the artist’s most impressive works depict her with her husband, in private moments and in half view. In Thread, he appears nude and face down on a lushly patterned bedspread, while the painter, her hair in narrow braids, kisses his naked white body. Akunyili Crosby is not the first artist to picture her own marriage as a medium of cultural mixing; think of Yoko Ono, whose Bed-In for Peace with John Lennon conjoined an Asian woman and European man to protest the war in Vietnam. But Akunyili Crosby’s skin, in Thread, isn’t black. Her flesh is overlaid with a silk-screened collage: bewigged judges and fashion plates in floral dresses jostle with movie stars and ministers walking a Lagosian step-and-repeat. The body, in Akunyili Crosby’s art, becomes a canvas in its own right. It’s a place on which history, and indeed the history of art, get projected and reconstituted.

The Norton’s exhibition will be the first proper survey of Akunyili Crosby’s painting, and it comes on the heels of two smaller shows in Los Angeles: a Hammer Museum project show, and a presentation of work at Mark Bradford’s new Art + Practice. Romare Bearden, that great collagist, looms as a key influence—but so do Bronzino, Degas and Vuillard. African signifiers and personal styles seep into the western representative tradition, remaking it as they circulate through Akunyili Crosby’s bodies and backdrops. Western painting, in any case, already became African a hundred years ago, ever since Picasso married Cézanne to the sculptors of Gabon. Nothing needs to be dismantled any more. All that’s to be done is to build the image you need to see out of everything around you, and to gobble up the entirety of western painting as your rightful inheritance.

 
Yuji Takeoka
National Museum of Art, Osaka
Opens January 16

For his first ever retrospective in his native Japan, the Düsseldorf-based artist—an alumnus of the city’s august art school—exhibits decades’ worth of sculptures whose superficial congruence with minimalism belies a deep, abiding commitment to form and material. Gleaming gold rods and enigmatic black polyhedra appear in display spaces that Takeoka subtly modifies, placing artwork and void on equal footing.

 
Karel Appel
Gemeentemuseum, The Hague
Opens January 16

A decade after his death, this major retrospective fetes a Dutch national treasure whose violent, at times childlike paintings stood at the forefront of the Low Countries avant-garde known as CoBrA. Appel was uninhibited in work and personality, but this exhibition promises a more tempered review of the artist: alongside his better-known churning canvases, expect early figure studies and a curious devotion, in the later years, to the old categories of landscape, portrait, nude. (Bonus: the Gemeentemuseum is one of the world's great museum buildings, older than MoMA by a few years and arguably the world's first purpose-designed modern art museum.)

 
Imogen Cunningham
gl Holtegaard, Copenhagen
Opens January 22

The forward-thinking Danes at this lovely museum, housed in a eighteenth-century country house to the north of the capital, are kicking off a series on great American female photographers with this retrospective of a Northern Californian pathfinder. Ballsy and largely self-taught, Cunningham shot landscapes, plants and nudes with a characteristic crispness that went some way to defining the style of modern photography in the 1920s. But only after she divorced did Cunningham pursue her groundbreaking editorial work with Vanity Fair, where she photographed everyone from Martha Graham to Herbert Hoover.

 
Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966)
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Opens January 29

The title is Nam June Paik’s, and this big-deal show takes a very long view of the artistic legacy of computer technology. John Cage and Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 experiments with Bell Labs set the stage for decades of interactivity, manipulation, avatars. We’re especially psyched to see a landmark work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, who scored a recent hit at Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York: Lorna, the very first interactive video art disc, starring a TV-addled agoraphobic.

 
Susan Philipsz
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Opens January 30

This is a new and site-specific commission by the Turner prize-winning Scotswoman, whose emotionally charged sound installation at the Kassel train station was a highlight of the last Documenta. Philipsz will present here an immersive sonic wandering of the western Austrian landscape, exploring again how the sculptural qualities of space and sound transfigure our experience of memory and loss.

 
Wolfgang Tillmans: On the Verge of Visibility
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto
Opens January 30

He nailed his first exhibition at David Zwirner in New York last year, but where that show was politically fraught and often bruisingly personal, this one promises to be a calmer affair, with a winking debt to the German Romantic tradition. Photographs of dividing atmospheric light on seascapes and horizons—a free mix, as is Tillmans's wont, of new images and of works two decades old—are accompanied by several new video works, spare and immersive.

 
Architecture of Life
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Opens January 31

The first show at this newly renovated museum—whose architect, Liz Diller, is interviewed in Even no. 2—could go either way. But the list of works has some appeal: tantric diagrams from Rajasthan, modernist provocations from Duchamp and Léger, and contemporary works from painters as unalike as Suzan Frecon and Qiu Zhijie.