I t’s the end of another busy season, and if you have already celebrated 100 years of the Bauhaus, reveled in the personal artefacts of Frida Kahlo, explored the Treasures from Chatsworth, and zipped through the many pavilions in Venice, fear not: there are myriad more exhibitions to see. Start in Sydney with the mesmerizing works of Shaun Gladwell, and meet us back in New York, where three new sculptures by 104-year-old Carmen Herrera will be on display, courtesy of the Public Art Fund.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia
19 July–7 October
Sydney

In Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art is staging a major survey exhibition – in fact, the largest to date, of the work of Australian artist Shaun Gladwell. Titled, Pacific Undertow, the show shares its name with one of Gladwell’s key film pieces and will feature work spanning two decades of his career.

Working predominantly in video performance that often features skateboarding, biking, surfing, and other feats of physicality, Gladwell explores the moving figure and the relationship between body and landscape. His oeuvre includes works in a myriad of media and makes full use of the technologies of today, as exemplified in this exhibition. The MCA will celebrate one of Sydney’s own and showcase the rich variety of the artist’s career, from early paintings and the renowned video, Storm Sequence (2000), through to newly commissioned augmented and virtual reality works.

Shaun Gladwell: Pacific Undertow is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia from 19 July–7 October.

12 July–7 October
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian
Lisbon

In Portugal, the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian is turning its attention to Orientalism, which fascinated its founder and many of his contemporaries. As one of the more prolific oil-barons-cum-art-collectors of the 20th century, Calouste Gulbenkian’s passion for the art of the Middle East saw him amass, between circa 1900–30, arguably one of the most significant collections of Islamic art ever to be housed in Western Europe.

Entitled, The Rise of Islamic Art: From the end of the Ottoman Empire to the Age of Oil, this show aims to interrogate and draw parallels between the nature of collecting and the social and political climate in the first half of the 20th century, tracing the influence of Gulbenkian’s collecting and philanthropy concurrently alongside the evolutions in Middle Eastern politics and Islamic art.

The exhibition will be on view at the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, from 12 July–7 October.

18 July 2019–7 June 2020
Pérez Art Museum Miami

The Pérez Art Museum, Miami is looking ahead to an uncertain future in a thematic group show. Entitled The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, the exhibition will showcase works by 14 contemporary artists from the region and its diaspora, grappling with the task of re-visualising and making tangible new images of the region’s future.

Through a variety of different media, their work will interrogate and imagine times to come in the Caribbean, looking beyond the catastrophic tropes and traumatic history that often color its image, and offering up alternative perceptions. The artists will face the challenge of innovatively demonstrating a Caribbean ‘present-future’, designed and devised on their own terms.

The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art will be on view at the Pérez Art Museum from 18 July 2019–7 June 2020.

11 July–8 November
City Hall Park, New York

The Public Art Fund is staging the first major exhibition of outdoor sculptures by the Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera, who is 104 years old and still working. Well-known for her colorful, geometric paintings, Herrera will present five monumental outdoor sculptures in City Hall Park, New York.

Herrera first conceptualised her paintings as three-dimensional forms in the late 1960s, but only a few of her designs were ever sculpted into reality. Now, the exhibition Estructuras Monumentales will include three newly realised sculptures based on the artist’s historic designs and two sculptures never-before-seen in the U.S., including Angulo Rojo. The five Estructuras are to be sited throughout the park, inviting the public to reflect on their bold colors, geometric presence and the tranquil, balanced relationship they hold with the vibrant nature of their surrounding environment.

Carmen Herrera: Estructuras Monumentales will be on view at City Hall Park, Manhattan from 11 July–8 November.