Fall 2004 preview: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between September and December

ArtForum, Sept, 2004

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Glenn Brown

Serpentine Gallery

September 14-November 7

Curated by Rochelle Steiner

Since the early '90s Glenn Brown has copied reproductions of paintings by Auerbach, de Kooning, Fragonard, and Dali, as well as sci-fi book-cover illustrations, emphasizing the flaws in his source material (overripe color, weird cropping, flattened impasto--the latter rendered by Brown in spectacular trompe l'oeil) while seemingly equating grandness and schlock. Yet he's far from being just another frolicker at originality's wake: The British painter's increasingly unfaithful remakes suggest an interlaced articulation of subjectivity and deliberate misprision, while his vitrined objects smothered in thick agglutinations of paint offer a neat sideline in postheroic sculpture. This survey comprises some forty works and is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Alison Gingeras.--Martin Herbert

Faces in the Crowd

Whitechapel Art Gallery

December 3-February 5, 2005

Curated by Iwona Blazwick, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Andrea Tarsia

Like a good modernist, this show starts squarely with Manet, but like an even better deconstructionist, its roughly sixty works in various media propose alternate histories of this well-traversed terrain. Refusing a formalist privileging of abstraction and autonomy, the artists constellated here--a who's who from Picasso to Heartfield, Warhol to Sherman--have recourse to the figure. A comprehensive catalogue-cum-anthology penned by such contributors as Ester Coen, Charles Harrison, Jill Lloyd, Robert Storr, and exhibiting artist Jeff Wall accompanies the show. An imaging of the social in many guises, this exhibition can't help but feel resolutely avant-garde after all. Travels to the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Mar. 28, 2005-July 3, 2005.--SH

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BIRMINGHAM

Ian Davenport

Ikon Gallery

September 22-November 7

Curated by Jonathan Watkins

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." A proud example of the latter, Ian Davenport tests the properties of household paint--pouring it, dripping it, blowing it, using electric fans, anything but brushing it. He began this practice in the late '80s and in 1991 became, at twenty-five, the youngest-ever Turner Prize nominee. Having perfected a mode of colorful post-painterly abstraction that winks to theory-heads and aesthetes alike, he's lately gone gigantic: Davenport's recent fifty-nine-foot-long wall work at Tate Britain was a delirious multihued parade of syringed dribbles, and a similar centerpiece is planned for this, his first retrospective. Ikon director Jonathan Watkins and Tony Godfrey provide catalogue essays. Hedgehog? Sounds foxy to me.--MH

LIVERPOOL

Liverpool Biennial

Various venues

September 18-November 28

Curated by Lewis Biggs

A historically proud city, Liverpool will be European Capital of Culture in 2008 and already hosts the UK's largest visual-arts festival, so it's not surprising that the thematic focus of the biennial's third installment should be ... Liverpool. In practice it's a four-card flush. One component, "International 04," invites artists like Takashi Murakami, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Esko Mannikko to research the postindustrial northern metropolis as a context for public artworks, while "Independent" launches a flotilla of artists, architects, and filmmakers on galleries, temporary spaces, and disused buildings. Exhibitions for the city's prestigious open-submission John Moores painting prize and for the whippersnapper Bloomberg New Contemporaries round out the heady mix. Are you paying attention, London?--MH