10 Artists Set to Have a Major Moment This Fall

After two years of interrupted programming, museums and art institutions worldwide are still playing catch-up with their major exhibitions. And for artists with upcoming fall presentations, this means their moment comes with heightened expectations. Conversely, as many of these genre-bending artists set to present projects and shows on the global stage demonstrate, the power of great art lies in its ability to speak beyond the bounds of time and the limits of circumstance.

Joël Andrianomearisoa

B. 1977, Antananarivo, Madagascar. Lives and works between Antananarivo, Paris, and Magnat-l’Étrange, France.

Joël Andrianomearisoa has been a quiet and steady presence in the international art scene over the last decade. His predilection for working with black hues aesthetically unites his diverse practice that’s interested in the enduring, both metaphysically and materially. Though steadfast in his dedication to exploring themes of desire, dreams, multiplicity, and memory, Andrianomearisoa is far from a one-trick pony. In fact, he’s something of an artistic polymath.

In the last year alone, the Malagasy artist designed a handbag for Dior; opened the multifunctional arts center Hakanto Contemporary in his hometown of Antananarivo, Madagascar; and unveiled a site-specific commission in the atrium of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town. The atmospheric installation, The Five Continents of All Our Desires (2022), is comprised of six large-scale sculptures meticulously crafted with Andrianomearisoa’s signature black silk paper, and is on view through July 25, 2023.

But Andrianomearisoa’s biggest achievement is perhaps yet to come. This fall, he will be the first artist to present a monographic show at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL). The works that will be featured in “Our Land Just Like a Dream” were all made in Marrakech using local artisanal techniques, including wickerwork, metalwork, ceramics, and embroidery, in homage to Morocco’s rich, vibrant artistic past and present. The exhibition will open on September 24th and showcase Andrianomearisoa’s ability to capture both the perplexing beauty and bleakness of our contemporary existence.

Zadie Xa

B. 1983, Vancouver, Canada. Lives and works in London.

At the Whitechapel Gallery this autumn, visitors will encounter a reconstruction of a hanok, or a traditional Joseon Dynasty home, with its wooden beams covered in colorful geometric textiles. Its patchwork design is reminiscent of the jogakbo style that utilizes leftover fabric scraps to make bojagi—wrapping cloths that were historically used during Buddhist rites to protect everyday objects, and, according to traditional Korean folk religions, usher in prosperity. The beguiling installation, designed with longtime collaborator Benito Mayor Vallejo, will lie at the center of artist Zadie Xa’s solo show “House Gods, Animal Guides and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness.”

Moving fluently between various media—including sculpture, performance, painting, textile, audio, and light works—the exhibition will unite the strands of Xa’s enthralling practice to create a limitless space of possibility. The show, which opens September 20th, will offer a chance to dive deeper into Xa’s rich and complex visual language that draws on science fiction and repeated symbols related to ecology and marine life. In November, Xa will also present work in the third Jeju Biennale, “Flowing Moon, Embracing Land,” in South Korea.

Cecilia Vicuña

B. 1947, Santiago, Chile. Lives and works in New York and Santiago.

If 2022 belongs to anyone, it’s the inimitable artist, activist, poet, and eco-feminist pioneer Cecilia Vicuña. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2022 Venice Biennale in March; picked up by Xavier Hufkens for representation in June; and in September, her first institutional solo exhibition in New York will close after a three-month run at the Guggenheim Museum. The year isn’t over, though, and neither are her accomplishments.

On October 11th, Vicuña will reveal her Hyundai Commission at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London—the city where Vicuña sought asylum and continued her studies after she was exiled from Chile in 1973, following the military coup against elected president Salvador Allende. The commission represents a homecoming of sorts for Vicuña, though her work has always addressed her country of origin, from its ancient and Indigenous art-making practices to the political turmoil that led to Vicuña’s own departure.

Precarity, fragility, and instability permeate all of Vicuña’s work materially and ideologically, whether in the form of sublime paintings and miniature sculptures or surreal assemblages and immersive site-specific installations. Expect to see something spectacular and unforgettable at the Tate.

Henry Taylor

B. 1958, Ventura, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Henry Taylor had already accomplished a lot in life by the time he earned a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1995 at the age of 37. He was a father and had worked for a decade as a psychiatric technician where he’d occasionally draw his patients. Admired for his sense of freedom as much as his sense of humor, Taylor has since gained popularity as an artist’s artist, but it’s the fullness of his understanding of the human condition that makes him stand out.

Defining his process as akin to a hunter-gatherer, Taylor traverses the gamut of the American experience at a breakneck pace in his paintings and sculptures. His subjects, mostly people he respects profoundly but may not know personally, collide with the detritus of quotidian landscapes. Taylor visually references music and history through song snippets and news clippings, while painting objects he’s collected at flea markets and words people have said to him.

With two blue-chip galleries behind him—Blum & Poe, which first showed the artist in 2011, and Hauser & Wirth, which announced co-representation in 2020—Taylor is set to make his institutional solo show debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and become even more widely appreciated.

“B Side” opens on November 6th in L.A., a city inextricably fused with the artist’s work. Taylor’s downtown studio is the nexus of his activity and has become a kind of community space where he might cook for sitters. “B Side” will bring together three decades of remarkable and rhythmic work, including syncretic large-scale paintings; assemblages of painted, found objects; and more recent sculptural pieces, each imbued with love and limitless in experimentation. Now is deservedly Taylor’s time.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

B. 1959, Matanzas, Cuba. Lives and works in Nashville.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s work stems from an early experience at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana, where she noticed an absence of Black Cubans both in and behind the art. Since the 1990s, the narratives Campos-Pons has centered in her practice have been deeply connected to her personal and familial history. She grew up on a sugar plantation in La Vega, Cuba, as the descendant of enslaved Yoruba people and Chinese indentured laborers.

Campos-Pons often honors her ancestors while considering the wider implications of her own story. “When I was very young and I had very few resources, I discovered that I needed to depend very much on my own agency,” she said in a 2019 interview with The Creative Independent. “One of the things that I came up with at that time was that I could always find a way to work within my scale. My scale meaning my size, my body. I would still be able to accomplish things larger than my scale.”

Though Campos-Pons now works in interrogative and invigorating ways across multiple media, her practice first began with large-format photography and remains firmly rooted in photography’s relationship with performance, painting, sculpture, and audiovisual media. Her work will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition in the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography in Mali from October 20th through December 20th.

Anne Imhof

B. 1978, Gießen, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin.

This fall, Anne Imhof will take over the Stedelijk Museum’s 1,100-square-meter basement with the kind of brooding, dark labyrinth you’d expect from the artist, who’s been hailed as a leading voice of her generation. Imhof is perhaps best known for her exhibitions involving choreographed live performance and experimental installations, such as “FAUST,” for which she was awarded the 2017 Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, and “Sex,” which was first shown in 2019 at the Tanks at Tate Modern.

Opening October 1st, “YOUTH” will imagine a dystopian underworld with narrow passages, strobe lights, and obstacles designed to disorient and unsettle the viewer. The exhibition will showcase the full, diverse range of Imhof’s constantly evolving practice, which has grown from drawings to now include installation, sound, film, and haunting abstract paintings. “YOUTH” builds on feelings of FOMO, loneliness, angst, and anxiety—emotions that have always been elicited by Imhof’s work and have only compounded in the last two years. The exhibition will come to a head in January 2023 with a series of performances. Expect Instagram to go wild.

Toyin Ojih Odutola

B. 1985, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Lives and works in New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola has a unique talent for spawning alternate atmospheres where time and place collapse in intricate layers of pastel, charcoal, pencil, and ballpoint pen. Her most recent exhibition—the epic, sprawling fiction “A Countervailing Theory” that unfolded a fragmentary myth over the space of 40 drawings and a sound installation—has made its way from the Barbican in the United Kingdom to the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg in Denmark, and finally to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., where it closed earlier this year, leaving eager viewers keen for more.

Opening on September 3rd at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ojih Odutola’s solo exhibition “New Work” is sure to delight. Transporting audiences to the year 2050 in Eko—the Yoruba name for Lagos—the works will imagine how minds, bodies, and buildings in this possible and not-so-far-off future might be shaped by the strains of overpopulation. A visual author, Ojih Odutola imaginatively blends speculative fiction with a technical mastery, demonstrating her scintillating ability for storytelling that seems to burn ever brighter. As Octavia E. Butler wrote in the epigram of her never-completed novel Parable of the Trickster, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

Zhang Ruyi 張如怡

B. 1985, Shanghai. Lives and works in Shanghai.

Drains, domestic tiles, industrial pipes, chunks of concrete rubble—you may recognize some of the elements found in Zhang Ruyi’s sculptures. The residues of urban landscapes are recast alongside their organic counterparts, such as cacti and the human body. Zhang’s work could be read as sculptural still lifes of Shanghai, but in a broader sense, they convey the difficult task of balancing urban existence with natural environments through a sometimes humorous sensibility.

Steadily on the rise since she was nominated for the Frieze Artist Award in 2018, Zhang made her U.S. debut at François Ghebaly in 2019 after exhibiting with Shanghai’s Don Gallery for multiple years. Her upcoming show “Speaking Softly” at the UCCA Beijing opens on December 17th and will be the largest institutional exhibition of Ruyi’s work to date.

Wolfgang Tillmans

B. 1968, Remscheid, Germany. Lives and works in Hamburg.

Wolfgang Tillmans is an artist imprinted on the public consciousness. Whether through book covers such as Olivia Laing’s 2018 novel Crudo, album art like Frank Ocean’s 2016 record Blonde, or political campaigns via anti-Brexit posters, Tillmans’s images are embedded in the fabric of contemporary visual culture.

The hugely influential German photographer continues to create works that pierce the soul, and this fall will bring another opportunity to engage with his extensive and expansive practice. On September 12th, the Museum of Modern Art will open “To look without fear,” Tillman’s first monographic presentation in an American museum. Taking over the museum’s entire sixth floor, the show will feature more than three decades worth of art and move between some of Tillmans’s most groundbreaking and iconic pieces, as well as his lesser known but equally masterful meanderings into the seemingly desultory and illusory. The task of curating the exhibition has taken eight years of conversation.

“To look without fear” will shed light on some of Tillmans’s prominent achievements over the years and examine exactly why he remains such a vital imagemaker today. Presenting more than 350 works—from his Berghain nudes and nightclub pictures to windowsill still lifes—the exhibition will showcase Tillmans’s sculptural approach to presenting photography, the way photographic impulse comes to define the philosophical tendencies of our time, and the blurring of the personal into the political.

Richard Mosse

B. 1980, Kilkenny, Ireland. Lives and works in New York.