The Top 5 Exhibitions to See in Europe This January

Michael Dean / Mendes Wood DM, Paris / 2 December – 20 January

Michael Dean confronts foregone conclusions with his exhibition at Mendes Wood DM’s new Paris address. The ensemble of works (all 2023) comprises sculpted spinal columns, figures of eight and painted wall-mounted pieces made up of black-daubed burlap, wire fencing and reinforced concrete. Together, they invoke a sense of growing foreboding, as though some final gambit has been played here and lost. The artist revisits and reinterprets tropes familiar from his wider corpus, again playing with collapsed dialectical binaries in which one signification clashes directly with its opposite without clear synthesis. – Andrew Hodgson

Emilio Prini / MACRO, Rome / 21 November – 31 March

Hailed in Italy as a nonconformist artistic genius, Emilio Prini – who died in 2016 aged 73 – pursued a relentlessly conceptual practice intrinsically linked to his enigmatic and impossibly cool persona. Comprising more than 250 works installed chronologically, ‘…E Prini’ attempts to pin down the artist’s subversively ephemeral actions – which included confirming his attendance at an exhibition via telegram and communicating works of art through telepathy – but, instead, offers a seemingly unedited trove of archival documentation that threatens to overwhelm the handful of works he left behind. – Ana Vukadin

Charlie Prodger / Secession, Vienna / 1 December – 25 February

‘The Offering Formula’, a monographic exhibition presenting work made by Charlie Prodger over a 14-year period, takes its title from a 2023 pencil drawing of a clear plastic box, on which is written a list of female names. Many – Agnes, Nancy, Ursula – seem to belong to artists and writers, perhaps those Prodger perceives to be her forebearers. Inside this box is a trove of hard drives bearing those names. An unlikely self-portrait, which withholds as much as it reveals, the drawing is a window into the artist’s work in its purest state: data and everyday ephemera. This description might be applied to several works in this richly rewarding exhibition at Secession, which brings into focus Prodger’s cross-disciplinary and long-term inquiries into how experience and memory can travel between eras, media and geographies. – Dylan Huw

Lin May Saeed / Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin / 14 September – 25 February

Caution: animal crossing. A flurry of six, stampeding, four-legged animals, frozen mid-run, serves as the entry to ‘The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise’ – a fitting pairing of Lin May Saeed’s zoological sculptures with works by her 20th century antecedent, modernist sculptor Renée Sintenis. At the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, Sintenis’s bronze oxen, camels and gazelles from another era affectionately nuzzle with Saeed’s expressively rendered, near-life-size Pangolin, Calf and Anteater (all 2020), giving a sense of exhilaration, and even urgency, to this playful exhibition with serious undertones. – Pablo Larios

Mark Rothko / Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris / 18 October – 2 April 

When you say Mark Rothko’s name, it is as if you are speaking of something so big that language cannot contain it. It’s like asking, ‘Where does the universe begin and end?’ On my first viewing of this extensive Rothko survey at Fondation Louis Vuitton, I spent about three hours going from room to room and back again, looking at details up close and then stepping away, losing myself in his works. Co-organized by the foundation’s artistic director, Suzanne Pagé, and the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, this Herculean adventure of an exhibition establishes the two as curators of epic mysteries. – Robert Longo

_{Main image: Charlie Prodger, ‘The Offering Formula’, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Secession; photograph: Lisa Rastl}