From the Austrian bad boy painter who ripped up the rule book to the last chance to see the Benin Bronzes in Germany; Rendez-vous is Euronews Culture's guide to some of the best art shows across Europe this week.
ADVERTISEMENTThis week our round-up of some of Europe's best art shows begins in the UK capital with a large white artwork made from plaster and string.
It is fair to say the sculpture is not widely recognised and nor is its creator. But London's Tate Modern museum wants to change that.
It's staging the first ever major UK exhibition of Maria Bartuszova's work. There are 80 of her plaster works as well as bronze and aluminium sculptures. Many have never been shown in the UK before.
According to Tate Modern's international art curator Juliet Bingham, the exhibition covers the breadth of Bartuszova's long career.
"We're really pleased to be opening the exhibition of the work of Maria Bartuszova. She was a Prague-born artist who spent most of her career in the Slovak city of Kosice," she said.
"It's a 30 year career survey spanning work from the early sixties to the late eighties and really explores her continual experimentation to find a new sculptural language."
Benin Bronzes get final Berlin show
Stolen during the colonial era, dozens of Benin Bronzes that once decorated the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin are going on show for one last time in Germany before being repatriated to Nigeria.
The renowned pieces of African art and their tumultuous journey up to the exhibition at Berlin's Humboldt Museum speak to Germany's gradual reckoning with the colonial era and the injustices of the past.
The move to return some of the bronzes is the latest in a series of steps taken by Berlin to admit responsibility for the crimes of the colonial era, including the official recognition in May 2021 of a genocide perpetrated by Germany in Namibia.
Among the items being exhibited are a pair of thrones and a commemorative bust of the monarch of the Kingdom of Benin, in modern-day Nigeria.
Oskar Kokoschka retrospective revisits the 20th century
His works have scandalised as much as they have revolutionised art. Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka was a "punk" before his time and a champion of freedom. Now he has a major exhibition in Paris.
Nearly 40 years after Bordeaux's Musée des Beaux-Arts held the only real French retrospective dedicated to him, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAM) is presenting 70 years of his work.
"With the ambition to make people discover the whole of the work" of the man who was also a poet, writer and playwright, and "the incredible richness of his career which spanned the 20th century", exhibition curator Fanny Schulmann told AFP.
Widely known as the "enfant terrible" of Vienna, his contemporaries included Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus.
The exhibition features 150 works, including 75 major paintings, drawings, lithographs, posters, documents and rare photographs.
