02/01/2013

Shows To Be Excited About In 2013

Shows To Be Excited About In 2013

While everyone is finishing their ‘best’ and ‘worst’ of 2012 lists and while we are slowly becoming more aware of the fact that yet another year has past, we thought that the best way to fight melancholia and resentment in not meeting our 2012 goals is setting a new list of those for the upcoming year. Well, here is a short list of exhibitions that shouldn’t be missed in the new 2013 year.

Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things
The end of January welcomes the first of our beautiful 2013 shows. With quite a geeky design title “Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things” this exhibition at Design Museum in London aims at unveiling the key designs that have shaped the modern world, tracing the history and processes of contemporary design. This exhibition should run for two years offering a comprehensive view on design and includes furniture, product, fashion, transport and architecture alongside a selection of prototypes, models and films.

Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth

This February will see the opening of a retrospective of Dieter Roth’s particularly dense print work at our beloved MoMA in New York. One of the fathers of the contemporary artist’s books ‘genre’, Roth has through the years (and this show is particularly focused on the period between 1960 and 1975) created numerous works that played with the idea of books as objects. From book-sausages filled with paper instead of meat (Literaturwurst) to pieces dipped in melted chocolate or a series of postcards, this exhibition tries to gather all of his major book-works among which a particular relevance is given to the book Snow. This is the show many of the contemporary publishers trying to delve in the artist’s books world should really look up to!

David Bowie Is
As the year marches further, even the shows get spicier! Hence, this March, precisely March the 23rd, will see another grand opening: the already much talked about David Bowie retrospective. The V&A has been granted the exclusive access to David Bowie Archive in organizing a truly amazing show that will explore “the creative processes of Bowie as a musical innovator and cultural icon, tracing his shifting style and sustained reinvention across five decades”. More than 300 objects, including handwritten lyrics, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments and album artwork are bound to reveal almost everything about this amazing artist and on of the greatest icons of the 20th century.

If these shows don’t amaze you and are not worthy of your 2013 list of goals, please make sure you anyhow manage to squeeze some art and design in it, it should make your life a bit better!

Rujana Rebernjak