Top Art Shows of 2023

Bill’s Art Shows 2023

Here is my list of top ten notable art shows of the past year.

Eduardo Basualdo at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires

The solo show by Argentine artist Eduardo Basualdo at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires featured his introspective drawings, and a nightmarish installation of what looks like a monster and figures buried in magma.

image: ‘Pupil’, aluminun ‘fabric’ by Eduardo Basualdo

Philip Guston at The National Gallery

Philip Guston Now at The National Gallery in Washington DC charts the painter’s 50-year career as one of America’s most influential modern artists through more than 150 paintings and drawings. Particularly moving are his Hood paintings. In 2020, four major museums postponed this retrospective. They misinterpreted his depictions of metaphorical KKK figures, post Black Lives Matter.

image: Three paintings by Philip Guston

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art

SUPER-SILLY-US at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Hamilton, California displayed iconic super graphics and conceptual drawings by nonagenarian superstar Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Nellie King Solomon.

image: Super Graphic by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

Tiki Dreams at the Napa Valley Museum

Tiki Dreams: From Far-Away Fantasy to Pop-Culture Phenomenon of California displayed a vast and fun collection of iconic tiki objects and ephemera at the Napa Valley Museum in Yountville.

image: Tiki mugs

Deborah Butterfield at the Anderson Collection

Deborah Butterfield delivers a poignant message about the detritus that ends up in our oceans. It was part of Convergence Zone at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The installation shows us one of her iconic ghost horses, made of salvaged driftwood with discarded plastics surrounding it.

image: Three Sorrows (quake, tsunami, meltdown from Gretel Ehrlich’s Facing The Wave) by Deborah Butterfield

Mark Bradford at the Hirshhorn Museum

At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC Mark Bradford’s large torn paper mural of Pickett’s Charge depict the final Battle of Gettysburg. It lies between abstraction and narrative engaging contemporary America ideas of race, class, and gender.

image: Detail from Pickett’s Charge by Mark Bradford

John Singer Sargent at the Legion of Honor

Celebrated as the society portraitist, John Singer Sargent and Spain at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco showed us how much he loved Spain and Spanish culture, with his dazzling oil paintings and photographs, including his two oversized, handmade books of reference materials and Moorish tile patterns.

image: Alhambra, Court of the Myrtles, 1879 by John Singer Sargent

Kerry Vander Meer and Bill Russell at Sofie Contemporary Arts

At Sofie Contemporary Arts in Calistoga, California, my paintings of florals, slot canyons and icebergs were paired with the lush colors and joyous shape-making found in Kerry Vander Meer‘s abstracts.

image: Paintings by Bill Russell and Kerry Vander Meer

Guy Diehl at Dolby Chadwick

Guy Diehl elegantly arranged vessels and objects in his sublime photorealist paintings in a show called About Time at Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco.

image: Take-Out Only No.14 by Guy Diehl

Jane Kim at the Monterey Museum of Art

With Migrations at the Monterey Museum of Art artist Jane Kim showed us her passion for wildlife with her meticulous drawings, paintings and installations.

image: Residents by Jane Kim and drawings of wildlife on wall