Solo Shows

Iwona Blazwick
Christoph Büchel: Simply Botiful, Hauser & Wirth Coppermill, London. A warehouse off an East End street was transformed into a vast storehouse of white goods, a porno portakabin and an archaeological dig. Visitors climbed through a fridge, disappeared down a tunnel and re-emerged to face a woolly mammoth.

Connie Butler
I was moved by René Daniëls’ paintings and drawings at the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg, and a completely fabulous show of Tony Conrad’s ‘Yellow Movies’ at Greene Naftali.

Richard Flood
Sherrie Levine had a tiny show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, that knocked my socks off. A new bronze sculpture titled The Three Furies (2007) was the most powerfully compacted triad of energy I’d encountered all year. Three frantic, tortured/ecstatic dervish divas swirl into a roil of Apollonian refinement and Dionysian wilding.

Gary Garrels
‘A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s’, organized by Constance Lewallen at the Berkeley Art Museum, distilled the essence of Nauman’s work by integrating sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, videos and films, sound and text works without hierarchy. The installation captured both the wild inventiveness but also the logic and elegance of the work. This was a museum show in which art history and the wearing down of art by exposure was completely cast off, so that the raw and bristling invention of Nauman’s early work vividly renewed an understanding of one of the most dazzling and profound of contemporary artists.

Martin Herbert
Spike clean reductivism with indeterminacy for implausibly satisfying art experiences, argued Martin Creed in his Hauser & Wirth Coppermill show. At Frith Street’s sumptuous new space on London’s Golden Square the sunset tones of Tacita Dean’s flickering filmic study of a translator and poet, Michael Hamburger (2007), left one drenched in opulent, incipient loss and veered close to being nostalgia-porn; Dean remains a powerful spellbinder, however, and quibbles were quashed. Meanwhile, the Thomas Bayrle/Monica Bauer show at Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin might as well have been a Bayrle solo, thanks to his new film Motorway Intersection (2007): myriad miniature polygonal views of highways tessellating, indelibly, into the body of Christ.

Enrico David’s show at London’s ICA was a fiercely political challenge to stupidity and repression.

Matthew Higgs
Paul Graham’s series of melancholic photographs shown at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, took the form of quasi-cinematic narratives or ‘filmic haikus’. These open-ended mini-dramas displayed a profoundly emphatic relationship to their subjects: people going about their daily business at the margins of American society.

Chrissie Iles
Marcel Broodthaers’ installation Décor: A Conquest was made for London’s ICA in 1974. Shown again in New York’s Michael Werner Gallery, in one room, representing the 19th century, cannons sat on an artificial grass carpet surrounded by objects including potted palms, a candelabra, two lobsters playing cards, a gun, a stuffed python poised to strike and two velvet chairs. In the ‘Salon de XXe Siècle’ a jigsaw puzzle of the Battle of Waterloo on a garden table with chairs and striped sun umbrella gave the impression of generals fiddling while Rome burnt, surrounded by cases containing guns and a hand grenade.

Udo Kittelmann
Two shows in 2007 were made especially interesting by the dialogue that developed between them: Thomas Demand at the Fondazione Prada in Venice and Andreas Gursky at Haus der Kunst in Munich. ‘The only way to portray reality’, Gursky has said, ‘is by constructing it’ – and perfecting it. Demand’s series ‘Yellowcake’ (2007) depicts sculptural reconstructions of interiors at the embassy of Niger in Rome. The artist was permitted only to enter the rooms, not to photograph them. As a result, these works remedy a lack of images by reconstructing reality from memory.

Carol Yinghua Lu
Sui Jianguo is celebrated for his works challenging the academic realist tradition in Chinese sculpture. His new project, shown at Beijing’s Arario Gallery, departed even further from his previous works. Speeding Up (2007) was a multi-part video installation: a huge turbine rotated in synergy with a train shown travelling at a speed of 3,000 metres per minute.

Francis McKee
João Penalva’s show at Coventry’s Mead Gallery betrayed a reworking of the found and appropriated material in the exhibition. Toby Paterson’s exhibition, ‘Generosity’, at Stroom in the Hague demonstrated how his work is maturing.

Hans Ulrich Obrist
One of the most extraordinary moments of 2007 was the unveiling of Gerhard Richter’s stained-glass window in Cologne Cathedral, which was complimented by the show ‘4900 Farben’ at the Ludwig Museum. The window contains 72 different shades of glass, each of which appears 72 times in one horizontal band. A computer running a random number generator determined the arrangement of colours in one half of the window; the other half is a mirror image of the first. In the Ludwig Museum, Richter displayed the panel painting 4900 Farben (4900 Colours, 2007). This outstanding work gives a new dimension to Richter’s earlier ‘Farbtafeln’ (Colour Charts) from the 1970s.

Sean O’Toole
Johannesburg is as a brash as a teenager and, visually, a real zero. Snarled highways connect an obese metropolis described by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall as fundamentally ‘elusive’. Drawing inspiration from the city Stephen Hobbs delivered the year’s most surprising show, at the University of the Witwatersrand’s makeshift (and now defunct) Substation art gallery. Titled ‘High voltage/Low voltage’, Hobbs eschewed literalness in favour of a more speculative evocation of Africa’s capital of commerce. Equally preoccupied with Modernist art history is Zander Blom, whose photographs of his home environment, shown at Rooke Gallery, recalled Kurt Schwitters’ fabled 1930s studio space. Blom’s output suggested the arrival of an embryonic talent.

Adriano Pedrosa
Nicolás Robbio is a young Argentinian artist living in San Paulo. His solo show at Galeria Vermelho comprised a group of playful and poetic works that dealt with the idea of drawing in an expanded field – appropriated from a stain on the gallery wall, stamped on a gridded wall with a football, chiselled on glass or performed on video.

Mark Sladen
Micol Assaël, Kunsthalle, Basel. Juliette Blightman, Whitechapel Project Space, London. Tacita Dean, Frith Street Gallery, London. Richard Hamilton, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice. Melvin Moti, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Tobias Putrih, Slovenian Pavilion, Venice

Trevor Smith
Tino Sehgal’s show at the Modern Art Museum in Frankfurt am Main, was revelatory both for what we know about the artist’s engagement with choreography, power and economics and for the depth of his fascination with the history of image-making. James Coleman’s presentation at documenta 12 came close to embodying the questions of memory, responsibility and articulation that haunted so many of the artists and exhibitions last summer. Star-making machinery, yes, but yoked to a higher purpose.

Polly Staple
Enrico David’s exhibition at London’s ICA, in which he psychoanalysed the externalization of his own subjectivity with an aesthetic flourish and unrelenting palette of sludgy brown, was a ludic and fiercely political challenge to stupidity and repression. The linguistics of marketing men and women gets short shrift as David’s memos declare: ‘I would like to fashion a bikini out of leaking porridge’ and ‘Galvanize Squirt Workshops’.

Silke Otto-Knapp's luminescent paintings at greengrassi, London, opened up a world of gestures and poses.

Eugenie Tsai
Kris Martin’s US début at PS1 presented contemporary memento mori, including a silver-plated bronze sculpture of the artist’s skull, a departure board and a saucer of milk. Lorna Simpson’s exhibition, organized by the
Miami Art Museum, illuminated the full range of her investigations of the interplay between images, language and narrative through the filters of race and gender. Mike Nelson’s ‘A Psychic Vacuum,’ commissioned by Creative Time, transformed an abandoned building on New York’s Lower East Side into a warren of rooms filled with relics and artefacts from the past. Negotiating this claustrophobic labyrinth was a journey through the residual memory of the city and one’s psyche.

Jan Verwoert
Social life has its patterns – modern ballet turned them into choreographies. In her recent paintings – monochromatic silver tones and luminescent watercolours – Silke Otto-Knapp appropriates these choreographies and transforms them into paintings. The works presented in her show at greengrassi, London, opened up a world of gestures and poses through which dance reflects the relation of the individual to the collective.

Anton Vidokle
The first time I visited Beirut I had the feeling that it was a set-up: a Borgesian city in which all artists were working on one work about the Lebanese Civil War yet each voice was sincere. Walid Raad’s Atlas Group project is a microcosm of such a collective. The Atlas Group/Walid Raad at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, had the feel of a retrospective, circumscribing the existence of the group to the years between 1989 and 2004 while keeping open a possibility that previously unknown works from that period may continue to surface.

Kit Wise
The most important solo show in Australia in 2007 was Julie Rrap’s 25-year survey show at the MCA, Sydney. The perfect counterpoint to this were Philip Brophy’s projects ‘Vox’ and ‘Fluorescent’, held jointly by Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, was saturated in popular culture, digital technologies and ‘vibrating with Glam’s essential fakeness and plasticity’. John Nixon’s industrial-strength investigation of hard-edged abstraction at TarraWarra Museum of Art, from his legendary, ongoing Experimental Painting Workshop, was also memorable.

Catherine Wood
Charles Ray’s sculpture Log (2007) at Regen Projects II in LA stuck in my mind for its brilliant conflation of the opposing qualities of utter singularity. The chance to see a significant grouping of Enrico David’s works for the first time in his self-professed ‘psycho-drama’ of a solo show at London’s ICA flaunted the artist’s perversely contrary approach to craft and was equally compelling.