The Top Ten Shows in Europe in 2023

2023 has been a great year for retrospectives in Europe, from a once-in-a-generation presentation of Mark Rothko’s paintings at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, to James Lee Byars’s posthumous sculptural take-over of Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. When it comes to emerging artists, there were plenty to be found at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, during the museum’s stacked relaunch event, while in Zurich a solo exhibition at Galerie Peter Kilchmann cemented Paul Mpagi Sepuya as a rising star. In no particular order, these were some of the standout shows of the past year.

Mark Rothko

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France

Even before I knew anything about art, Mark Rothko’s paintings made me feel something. I haven’t yet made the pilgrimage to see the artist’s once-in-a-generation retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton, but Robert Longo spent three hours there in November – an experience he described as ‘overwhelming’. Reflecting on Rothko’s enduring influence, Longo remarked: ‘When you say 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?”’

James Lee Byars

Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy

A big personality with a penchant for even larger sculptures, James Lee Byars didn’t do anything by halves. In the first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the artist since his passing in 1997, at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBiccoca, viewers are confronted with the full scale of his ambition. Of The Golden Tower (1990), Byars’s largest work at 21 metres tall, Ana Vukadin wrote: ‘Against the dark walls of HangarBicocca, the tower appears to reach endlessly heavenwards […] the artist had referred to it as his “monument to humanity”, its verticality symbolizing the human figure on a quest to some mystical rapture.’

Rosemarie Trockel

MMK, Frankfurt, Germany

One of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year, Rosemarie Trockel’s retrospective at Museum für Moderne Kunst displayed work from all periods of the artist’s oeuvre across all three floors of the museum. In his review, Mitch Speed called Trockel: ‘A singular chameleon’ who ‘surfs styles and techniques while never succumbing to superficial mimesis. Imagine the knowing visual seductions of pop art combined with Marcel Duchamp’s impishness and the gravitas of Joseph Beuys.’

Isa Genzken

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

 It would be hard to name a more iconic pairing than Isa Genzken and the Neue Nationalgalerie. Almost everyone I spoke to about the artist’s exhibition at the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed glass and steel building was rapturous about the way that light changed the viewing experience of her sculptures depending on the time of day you visited. As fashion designer Phoebe Philo pointed out in September: ‘There is an architectural aspect to Genzken’s practice. [Her] work is something I go back to for the scale, the forms, the lines, the piecing together, the reflections.’

Dayanita Singh

MUDAM Luxembourg

Ahead of the opening of her survey at MUDAM Luxembourg in May, Dayanita Singh reflected on the beginning of her career. ‘I didn’t choose photography,’ she told frieze associate editor Vanessa Peterson. ‘I chose to be free. I realized that photography could liberate me from all the social expectations that there were of an 18-year-old woman.’ Given this starting point, it isn’t surprising that Singh is drawn to outsiders. At MUDAM, the artist’s long-time friend Mona Ahmed, who is part of the hijra community, is a recurring guest, appearing in Singh’s Museum of Chance (2013) – a selection of her arresting images displayed on movable wooden supports.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland

‘As a metaphor for the fragmented and sedimentary nature of selfhood, or as an excavation into the origins of portraiture, there is much to consider,’ wrote Ian Bourland of the photographs of Paul Mpagi Sepuya in 2017. ‘In Push/Pull’, the artist’s third solo exhibition at Zurich’s Galerie Peter Kilchmann, allusions to the decorative settings of early photographic studios are pervasive. In his images, nude men – artist friends and the occasional stranger – cavort amongst plush pillows and velvet curtains. It was without a doubt the sexiest show I saw all year.

Autostrada Biennale

Various locations, Prizren, Prishtina and Mitrovica, Kosovo

In a year without any major art events in Europe, the return of Autostrada Biennale was very welcome. It featured 17 new commissions spread across three neighbouring Kosovar cities: Prizren, Prishtina and Mitrovica. Curated by Övül O. Durmuşoğlu and Joanna Warsza, ‘All Images Will Disappear, One Day’ was a fitting title for an exhibition set in a country where, ‘amid a frenzied drive for modernisation’, as Barbara Casavecchia noted in her review for frieze, ‘sites and expressions of collective significance can easily vanish.’

‘Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality’

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany

One of the highlights of Berlin’s art calendar this year wasn’t an exhibition, but an institutional re-launch. Organized to celebrate incoming director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s inaugural programme, ‘Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality’ featured two days of blessings, performances, readings and rituals. According to Louisa Elderton, it was quite the party: ‘Bodies pulsing to the rhythm, skin glistening with sweat and illuminated by strobe lights […] This is not a scene you’d usually expect to see in a museum.’

Ali Cherri

Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy

Ali Cherri may have won the Silver Lion for ‘Promising Young Participant’ at the Venice Biennale in 2022, but he is hardly a newcomer. Throughout the course of his career, he has produced ten films which, as Wilson Tarbox pointed out in his recent profile of the artist for frieze, have received nine nominations at international film festivals and won five awards. His solo exhibition at Bergamo’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, ‘Dreamless Night’, centres on his newest film, The Watchman (2023), which follows a soldier guarding the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Doris Salcedo

Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland

As frieze assistant editor, I commission reviews from across Europe and, while I do my very best to feature the most important exhibitions on view, occasionally things slip through the cracks. So was the case with Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at Basel’s Fondation Beyeler, which I am still kicking myself for not writing about. I saw the exhibition just after the Messenia migrant boat disaster, which lent an almost unbearable pathos to installations such as Palimpsest (2013–17), which spells out the names of deceased refugees in water on the museum floor. Writing about the piece in 2018, Alice Bucknell observed: ‘Visitors must step over names to navigate the space; a careless foot can cause puddles of grief in wayward places.’

_{Main image: Isa Genzken, 'Isa Genzken. 75/75', 2023, exhibition view. Courtesy: Galerie Buchholz © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023; photograph: Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jens Ziehe}