Free saxophonist Evan Parker will perform a concert at St James’s Piccadilly. This event is organised in conjunction with Thomas Struth’s exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, London (2 June – 29 July), dedicated to new photographs taken at CERN, shown for the first time in the UK. They form part of Struth’s 'Nature and Politics', a body of work which examines how ambition and human imagination become a sculptural, spatial reality.

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Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum 1, Berlin, 2001, 2001, is included in the group exhibition Civilization: The Way We Live Now, on view at the Saatchi Gallery, London, from 2 June 2023.

The exhibition tracks the visual threads of humanity’s ever-changing, extraordinarily complex life across the globe, through the eyes of 150 of the world’s most accomplished photographers. Featuring many previously unseen images, Civilization acknowledges the diverse material and spiritual cultures that make up global societies today, spanning Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas. Exploring a wide range of subjects, from our great united achievements to our collective failings, the exhibition highlights the complexity and contradictions of contemporary civilization.

Saatchi Gallery

Thomas Struth’s photograph of a lab at CERN in Switzerland, titled Decay Station, ISOLDE, CERN, Meyrin 2019, 2019, will be included in a group presentation at the newly established exhibition space Black Box, in Munich. The exhibition presents a selection of contemporary photographic works and installations which are dedicated to industrial worlds and technological developments. 

Alexander Tutsek Stiftung

Thomas Struth’s Paradise 19, Bayerischer Wald, Deutschland 1999, 1999, will be on view in the exhibition Parlament der Pflanzen II at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. Taking mankind’s relationship to nature as its starting point, the exhibition will consider plants as intelligent beings with whom humans are in intimate contact, thereby prompting visitors to reevaluate conventional boundaries between nature and culture.

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Thomas Struth’s early album of photographs of New York will be included in an exhibition at the CCA, Montreal. As part of a series of exhibitions investigating photography as an artistic and documentative medium, The Lives of Documents will invite visitors to consider photography’s relationship to architecture.

Canadian Centre for Architecture

Ai Weiwei’s first exhibition focusing on design will mix recent works with commissioned pieces, inviting visitors into a meditation on value and humanity, art and activism. This major exhibition at London’s Design Museum, developed in collaboration with the artist, will be the first to present his work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values. Drawing from material culture, historical Chinese artefacts, and the more recent history of demolition and urban development in China, Ai explores the tension between past and present, hand and machine, construction and destruction. The exhibition will include a number of site-specific installations, comprising hundreds of thousands of objects collected by the artist in the past year, from LEGO bricks to neolithic stone tools. The artist’s largest ever work made out of LEGO will also be on display.

Chief curator at the Design Museum Justin McGuirk expands: ‘[The show includes] things we think of as worthless in ordinary times, something as worthless as a toilet roll, which during the pandemic suddenly became precious… that for him was a real signal of how objects can gain and lose value depending on the context of our times [...] we are not presenting Ai Weiwei as a designer and architect... [but] using his work and his thinking to reflect on design and architecture.’

Work by Thomas Struth is currently on view as part of the group show ON STAGE at the mumok, Vienna. The exhibition explores the various theatrical and stage-related forms of expression in art since the 1960s, when a neo-avant-garde critical of tradition began focusing on performative and actionist art forms that endowed artists with a stage-like presence, often in front of an audience. The exhibition includes 150 works and work series, spanning Viennese Actionism, Dadaist theatre, the Fluxus-Movement, as well as cinematic and musical productions, most of which are culled from the holdings of the mumok collection.

mumok

Thomas Struth’s Crosby Street, Soho, New York 1978, 1978, will be on view in the exhibition BOHEMIA: History of an idea, 1950–2000. Bohemia is a real place that has also given its name to a cultural movement and way of living. From its origins in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, the idea of bohemia has been a powerful and persistent component of artistic identity, with a reputation for living outside societal norms.  This exhibition looks at the differences and continuities in a variety of bohemian scenes, concluding at the end of the twentieth century, when commodity culture began to undermine this way of life. Nevertheless offering an alternative to conformity, the bohemian idea still beckons with ways of living that continue to galvanise and inspire.

Kunsthalle Praha

Thomas Struth’s Paradise 03, Daintree, Australia 1998, 1998, will be included in a new exhibition at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. As part of an ongoing series of exhibitions investigating the concept of landscape in contemporary art, the only constant prompts new dialogues on the relationship between humans and nature, touching on questions of paradise, development, and technological aspirations.

NYUAD Gallery

On Monday, 30 January 2023, the organisation SQUARE will host an in conversation event with Ai Weiwei alongside art market expert Laura Noll and Square director Philippe Narval to discuss his his thought-provoking, socially conscious artwork, and provide insight into his ideas on how art and activism can shape politics and business.Following the discussion attendees will have the opportunity to meet with and speak to Ai Weiwei.

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Ai Weiwei’s new LEGO work, Untitled (Saint George slaying the dragon), is now on view in the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Commissioned for the altar of the Benedictine cloister’s conclave chapel, the project reimagines Vittore Carpaccio’s renowned sixteenth century altarpiece Saint George Killing the Dragon, which is usually housed in the chapel but is out on loan until June 2023. Constructed entirely of LEGO bricks, Ai Weiwei’s replacement communicates with the historical and spiritual context in which it is temporarily inserted, drawing a dialogue between the Benedictine tradition and contemporary art. 

The project takes as its title a quote from the Gospel of John inscribed along the frieze of the Chapel: Ego vici mvndvm (In this world you have troubles, but take heart: I have overcome the world!) 16,33. The artist thus establishes a link with the biblical episode represented, a paradigm of a definitive victory of Good over Evil, which can also be considered as an emblem of political and social activism in defence of human rights – a central tenet of the artist’s practice.

We congratulate Ai Weiwei on being awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize 2022 by the Japan Art Association.

Praemium Imperiale Prize

In collaboration with the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore – Benedicti Claustra Onlus, Berengo Studio and Fondazione Berengo, Ai Weiwei will present an array of never before seen glass sculptures as part of a new solo exhibition at the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Alongside the presentation of works in porcelain, wood, and LEGO, the centrepiece of the exhibition is La Commedia Umana, an enormous hanging sculpture comprised of over 2,000 pieces of black glass handcrafted by the maestros of Berengo Studio in Murano. Measuring more than six metres wide and almost nine metres high, the twisted monument is the largest hanging sculpture ever made in Murano glass in living history. The work is an ‘attempt to talk about death in order to celebrate life’, the artist explains.

Berengo

Ai Weiwei's iconic Arch, 2017, has been installed outside the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm as part of the Brilliant Minds foundation’s public art series in the Swedish capital. The monumental, 40ft tall cage sculpture was first shown in Washington Square Park, New York in 2017. 

Ai Weiwei additionally features among the speakers at the annual Brilliant Minds forum later this year. 

Brilliant Minds

Archive Matrix Assembly: The Photography of Thomas Struth 1978–2018 presents the first comprehensive, systematic theory of Thomas Struth’s main body of photographic work from its beginnings in the late 1970s until his most recent work in 2018. The book presents a unique, evolutionary understanding of the work, proposing that it has established three stages of production: archive, matrix, and assembly. Together the three stages form a developmental system that characterizes the individual photographs, their relation to their subject matter, and how they form larger, significant collections of images. The book project accomplishes three main goals: it develops a comprehensive critical reading of the work, it serves as a monograph of the artist, and it provides an extensive analysis of the photographs at all stages, including the less discussed, more recent photography, which is placed on par with the earlier work for which Struth first became internationally renowned.

Order a copy here.