Best Exhibitions in Late 2024: Asia, Africa, Australia & the Middle East
A series of global exhibitions, from René Magritte’s Australian retrospective to Olafur Eliasson’s installations in Istanbul, offer a rich exploration of art and culture across time and place.
René Magritte (1898-1967), Le faux miroir (The False Mirror), 1929 (detail). Oil on canvas. 54 x 80.9 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Copyright Agency, Sydney 2024. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence 2024. On show in Magritte at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, from 26 October 2024 to 9 February 2025
Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong KongUntil 16 October 2024
For thousands of years, scent has played a key role in Chinese culture, and the use of fragrance has intertwined with artistic creation.
A new show organised by the Hong Kong Museum of Art in collaboration with the Shanghai Museum explores this connection through 160 artefacts, spanning ceramics, bronze, jade, bamboo, calligraphy and painting. More than 100 of the objects have been declared national treasures — and more than half have of these have never been shown outside mainland China before.
One highlight is a grey pottery and bamboo censer dating from the Liangzhu culture, which flourished between 3300 and 2300 B.C. Smoke from incense would have diffused through the 18 holes in its lid, purifying the air and repelling insects. Another masterpiece is a 17th-century hanging scroll by the Ming dynasty master painter Chen Hongshou. It shows an elegant woman leaning over a cage, which contains a bird-shaped censer that wafts her robe with aromatic fumes.
Hanging censer carved with openwork floral design and six loop handles, Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Jadeite. Collection of Hong Kong Museum of Art
Neolithic period grey pottery censer with bamboo joint design, Liangzhu culture (circa 3300-2300 B.C.). Shanghai Museum Collection. Unearthed in 1983 from the Fuquan Shan tomb site, Qingpu District, Shanghai
The exhibition is accompanied by a series of lectures, workshops and meditation sessions, and includes commissions by contemporary Hong Kong artists — among them a display of 50 fragrant plants and materials, emitting scents representing dawn, noon and dusk.
Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech, MoroccoUntil 2 February 2025
In 1924, the French Orientalist painter Jacques Majorelle purchased a plot of land in the Moroccan city of Marrakech. Inside its walls, over the course of the next 40 years, he grew one of the world’s most famous gardens, filled with tropical succulents, arabesque fountains and architectural details painted his signature cobalt-blue. Following a period of neglect lasting three decades, it was rescued in the 1980s by the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé. Today, it’s run as a non-profit operation bearing the couple’s name.
Installation view of Jardin Majorelle: Who Are We? at Museé Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech. Photo: © Jaimal Odedra
As part of the garden’s 100th anniversary celebrations, a new show tracing its history is being staged in the adjoining Musée Yves Saint Laurent. It is curated by Alexis Sornin, the museum’s director, and the celebrated garden designer Madison Cox, who is also president of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle.
The exhibition includes archival photographs, maps and historical documents relating to Marrakech and the garden, alongside a suite of unpublished sketches by Saint Laurent and the interior designer Bill Willis, who decorated San Laurent’s villa. To provide a bird’s-eye view of the estate, the wire-craft artist Monim Sabyh has also created a scale model in which each plant is made from hand-twisted gold thread.
Istanbul Modern, IstanbulUntil 9 February 2025
The Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is best known for large-scale, immersive works that explore his deep and longstanding interest in perception, colour, light, geometry and the environment.
Your unexpected encounter, Eliasson’s first solo show in Turkey, brings together around 40 works from across his three-decade career, which interact with their surroundings or require visitor participation to complete them.
Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967), Dusk to dawn, Bosporus, 2024. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles; © 2024 Olafur Eliasson
Shown alongside iconic light installations are new works inspired by the Bosphorus and Istanbul Modern’s distinctive architecture. Look out for Your pluralistic coming together (2024), a celebrated installation that casts cascading silhouettes across the wall when a visitor enters the space and passes through beams of light; and Room for one colour (1997), which transports visitors into a monochrome world.
The exhibition also includes sculptures, watercolours and a selection of artworks addressing the climate crisis, among them The glacier melt series 1999/2019, which demonstrates the rate at which Iceland’s glaciers are retreating.
Zeitz MOCAA, Cape TownUntil 2 March 2025
Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, or Zeitz MOCAA, is turning over its second floor to a residency for one of the city’s foremost artists, Berni Searle.
Searle is a local icon, celebrated for her photography and moving-image work — largely informed by the hangover from apartheid — in which she uses her own body to explore South Africa’s socio-political legacy. She received a UNESCO award in 1998, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2005, is currently a professor at the University of Cape Town and features in Phaidon’s book Great Women Artists.
Berni Searle (b. 1964), Enfold, from the Seeking Refuge series, 2008. Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper. 102 x 144 cm. Photo: Tony Meintjes, assisted by Flora Barrow. Courtesy of the artist
Across her eight-month stint at the museum, previous bodies of work will be on show, including her landmark Seeking Refuge and Colour Me series. Visitors can also stop by her on-site atelier, and watch her cook up new ideas for future installations.
Mona — Museum of Old and New Art, TasmaniaUntil 21 April 2025
For its latest show, Tasmania’s Mona, founded by the professional gambler David Walsh, has brought together 200 objects that collectively ask why we put certain things on a pedestal.
Alongside artworks by Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer are an ancient Egyptian ancestor figure, a Mai mask from the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea and a cricket bat owned by Walsh and signed by some of the biggest stars of the sport.
Jenny Holzer (b. 1950), Untitled, from the Living Series, 1980-82. Courtesy of the artist and MONA; © Jenny Holzer
The most talked about item, however, is the only copy in existence of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin — an album that the New York rap collective Wu-Tang Clan spent six years recording in secret. Legally, the owner, who paid several million dollars for it, can’t release it in public until 2103, but Mona has secured permission to play snippets to visitors for the first time.
‘We Mona curators aren’t scientists, but we do understand that status has served useful purposes in human societies over evolutionary time,’ says the museum’s senior research curator, Jane Clark. ‘In fact, competition both for mates and social position may be key to the very origins of human creativity.’
Hoam Museum of Art, Yongin, South Korea3 September 2024 to 19 January 2025
The Swiss artist Nicolas Party only graduated from his MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2009. Thanks to the instant recognisability of his surreal, colour-drenched, pastel-on-linen portraits, still lifes and landscapes, however, he has already had several important exhibitions in North America: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum have each held solo shows his work.
Installation view of L’heure mauve by Nicolas Party at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2022. © Nicolas Party, Photo: Jean-François Brière
Now, more than 80 of Party’s works are going on show at the Hoam Museum of Art — around 40km south of Seoul, and originally opened in 1982 to house the personal collection of Samsung Group founder Lee Byung-Chull — for the artist’s first exhibition in South Korea.
Its theme is the longevity and final extinction of nature and civilisation. Among the works will be five pastel murals drawn directly onto the gallery’s walls. These build on the artist’s recent practice of creating ‘environments’. Others include a mosaic installation in the swimming pool of Le Sirenuse hotel on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, and a 200ft-long mural adorning a hallway in Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo25 September 2024 to 19 January 2025
Louise Bourgeois hasn’t had a solo show in Japan since 1997, but the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is making up for it with a magnificent survey charting her extraordinary life and career.
The exhibition, which is organised into three main chapters, explores Bourgeois’s relationship with her family, a life-long source of creative inspiration, as well as the enduring influence of certain traumatic events in her early childhood. It spans seven decades and includes around 100 artworks, more than half of which are being shown in Japan for the first time.
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), The Runaway Girl, circa 1938. Oil, charcoal and pencil on canvas. 61 x 38.1 cm. Photo: Christopher Burke. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by JASPAR and VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Arch of Hysteria, 1993. Patina on bronze. 83.8 x 101.6 x 58.4 cm. Photo: Christopher Burke. © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by JASPAR and VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Rarely seen early paintings made in New York between 1938 and 1948 will be shown alongside her skinny, totem-like figures known as Personnages (1946-49) and the later, larger sculptures depicting Bourgeois’s signature motif: the spider. Complementing these will be drawings, fabric works, installations and excerpts from the artist’s diaries, letters and writings. It will be a chance to see the scope of her creative output and to celebrate an artist of fabulous talent.
Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan12 October 2024 to 2 February 2025
Gouache painting — the art of delicately building up layers of pure mineral pigments mixed with gelatine on paper or silk — has a deeply politicised history in Taiwan.
Introduced to the country after its annexation by Japan in 1895, the skill was initially known as nihonga (Japanese painting). Following the end of the colonial period, in 1946, it was relabelled guohua (national painting), which sparked a controversy about its origins that became known as the ‘Orthodox National Painting Dispute’. As a result, it was subsequently banned from government-run national exhibitions.
Lin Chih-Chu (1917-2008), Recess, 1939. Gouache on Paper. 195.5 x 152 cm.
Collection of Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
During the late 1970s, in order to distance themselves from ideological arguments, artists such as Lin Chih-Chu started calling their medium ‘glue painting’, then later ‘Eastern gouache painting’. It wasn’t until 1985 that the country’s art schools began to grant the technique formal recognition.
A new show at Taipei Fine Arts Museum charts this fascinating history, while presenting some of the finest examples of Taiwanese gouache paintings created during the past 100 years, by Lin, Kuo Hsueh-Hu, Lu Tieh-Chou and others.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, UAE16 October 2024 to 9 February 2025
Presented in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Post-Impressionism: Beyond Appearances focuses on a time of cultural upheaval between 1886 and 1905. It was a period when many European artists — most famously, Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh — broke with the naturalism of Impressionism and sought alternative modes of expression.
Their radical experimentations with simplified colours and definitive forms paved the way for avant-garde movements such as Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism. The forthcoming show at the Louvre Abu Dhabi traces the evolution of these nascent artistic styles through more than 100 works by leading Post-Impressionists.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Bedroom at Arles, 1889. Oil on canvas. 57.3 x 73.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) — Hervé Lewandowski
Among the star exhibits will be Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles (1889), one of three almost identical paintings depicting the artist’s bedroom in his house in the French town, where he set up his studio and lived from 1888. The version on display, which is the smallest of the three canvases, was painted as a gift for his family. Of the bold, colourful composition, he wrote in a letter to his brother Theo: ‘I wanted to express utter repose with all these very different colours.’
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney26 October 2024 to 9 February 2025
Australia’s first major exhibition of René Magritte offers a comprehensive overview of his life and art. It features more than 100 works, from his first avant-garde and commercial paintings of the 1920s to his groundbreaking Surrealist compositions exploring the link between the subconscious and the external world.
René Magritte (1898-1967), L’heureux donateur (The Happy Donor), 1966. Oil on canvas. 55.3 x 46.4 cm. Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels. © Copyright Agency, Sydney 2024. Photo: Musée d’Ixelles, Brussels
In some of these, objects are undergoing a transformation, depicted as they change from one state or identity to another. In others, Magritte’s signature motifs and symbols — such as tobacco pipes, apples, bowler hats and eggs — are presented in absurd scenarios, challenging our logical perception. One such work in the show is The False Mirror from 1929, which depicts an eye filled with fluffy clouds in a powder-blue sky.
The exhibition also includes celebrated late works and rarely seen photographs, films and archival materials that shine a light on the lesser-known aspects of his practice. Shown together, they reveal Magritte’s subversive humour, innovative artistic vision and profound influence on visual culture today.
M7, Doha, Qatar31 October 2024 to 13 February 2025
Born in 1923 in New York, Ellsworth Kelly would go on to become one of America’s foremost Colour Field painters. For more than six decades, he created works featuring bright colours and simple geometric forms that challenged the traditional relationship between artist, object and viewer. ‘I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it,’ he once said.
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), Painting for a White Wall, 1952. Oil on canvas, five joined panels. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Kelly’s birth, M7 in Qatar is staging the artist’s first retrospective in the Middle East. Visitors will embark on a journey from his early days as a burgeoning artist in post-war Paris, through to his final years as a pioneer of modern art in New York.
The exhibition brings together around 70 works, including little-known photographs, drawings, works on paper and large-scale paintings from his Chatham Series (1971). It also features Yellow Curve (1990), his first floor-based painting, which blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation. Other notable highlights include Painting for a White Wall (1952) and Painting in Three Panels (1956), in which Kelly pared the medium down to its simplest form.
UCCA, Beijing16 November 2024 to 16 February 2025
The Belgian painter Luc Tuymans came to prominence in the 1980s with his figurative paintings based on pre-existing imagery drawn from diverse sources, including Northern Renaissance painting, films and photographs.
Luc Tuymans (b. 1958), Morning Sun, 2003. Oil on canvas, 156 x 180 cm. © Luc Tuymans, courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Tuymans’s paintings are characterised by a muted palette, choppy brushstrokes and blurred subjects that create a sense of intrigue and uneasiness in the viewer. His works have influenced many of his peers as well as subsequent generations of artists, including many in China who discovered his work in the 1990s.
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