The Venice Biennale has traditionally been viewed as a survey of the present, but this year, it was arguably an exhibition about the past. More than half the 331 participants were dead, as sure a sign as any that a long-running trend for canonizing the uncanonized may finally have reached its apex. Many of those artists were from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the South Pacific, and that too is proof that the Western art world has officially begun undoing its Eurocentric bias.
How permanent will all this rewriting be? Will the canon of, say, 2084 reflect the changes seen at the Venice Biennale 50 years earlier? It’s too soon to know. One telling factor will be whether museums and galleries begin offering shows to these new entrants to the canon. Another will be whether this Biennale’s detractors—there were some, even before the show opened—maintain their sizable audiences.
What is obvious, right now, is that the under-recognized are officially recognized. This much was clear not only at the Biennale but also in institutional programming this year. Below, a look at 10 artists who got their due in 2024.
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Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá
Image Credit: Marco Zorzanello Where most of the dead artists in the Venice Biennale were represented by one work each, in Salon-style presentations grouped by painterly genre, curator Adriano Pedrosa wisely featured several of Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá’s gorgeous pieces in a gallery beyond the historical sections. Àjàlá, who died in 2021, crafted batik paintings that feature doubling and intersecting figures, their colorful bodies made possible by the Nigerian artist’s knowledge of herbology, which moved him to utilize a spread of plants to obtain a variety of hues. Though his paintings veer toward total abstraction, the figures contained within always remain in focus, asserting a beguiling presence against their deep black backgrounds. Àjàlá made a living as a Shango priest; he was not an artist by training or profession. But his labor-intensive paintings suggest that he is worthy of a museum survey all the same.
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Mavis Pusey
Image Credit: Christopher Garcia Valle for ARTnews Dead artists have not historically played a starring role in the Whitney Biennial, an exhibition known mainly for spotlighting young artists worthy of attention, but this year, Mavis Pusey featured prominently alongside artists who came generations after her. Born in 1928 in Jamaica, Pusey came to New York when she was 18 and remained there for several decades, producing semiabstract paintings based on sights seen in disused and impoverished neighborhoods. One such canvas featuring a smattering of hard-edged strips—a reference, perhaps, to boarded-up windows—took center stage here, where it acted as the logical precursor to contemporary artworks focused on withholding, obfuscation, and communities shut out of the mainstream. Next year, Pusey will be the subject of a survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia.
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Tapta
Image Credit: ©Lola Pertsowsky/Private Collection, Brussels Excitement around Tapta, a Polish-born artist who lived in Belgium for much of her life, has been building steadily over the past few years, with a WIELS Contemporary Art Centre survey in 2023 followed by a proper retrospective this year at the Muzeum Susch in Switzerland. Tapta’s small but growing fan base tends to favor her fiber art, for which she used rope to create hanging textiles and structures recalling junglelike canopies that loom above viewers’ heads. But this retrospective showed that Tapta was more than just a fiber artist—she innovatively used materials such as rubber, forming equally grand sculptures that cause hard materials to appear soft, and vice versa. Tapta died at 71 in 1997 following a heart attack, but it’s fair to say she has officially found a second life.
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Hamad Butt
Image Credit: Tate The small but formidable oeuvre left behind by Hamad Butt qualifies him as an important, if under-known, artist adjacent to the Young British Artist group of the 1990s. At long last, the Pakistani-born British artist has the retrospective he has long deserved, at Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is currently showing a range of Butt’s sculptures, many of which are fragile by design. Take the case of one 1992 sculpture in which a tube of iodine is trapped within a glass vessel and lit with an infrared light. The piece could easily be damaged or destroyed; it is delicate in a way not dissimilar to Butt’s body, which had by then already begun battling HIV. Around two years after making the work, Butt died of AIDS-related complications, relegating his work to semi-obscurity. Now, it is poised for more attention.
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Liliane Lijn
Image Credit: Photo Stephen Weiss/Courtesy the artist For decades, Liliane Lijn has created bewitching works that deal with invisible forces: feminine beings, power, and the written word. International audiences have seen a good many of her sculptures, including at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where she showed three works from the 1970s and ’80s that looked variously like women’s bodies and imagined creatures. The American-born artist, who is in her mid-80s and has spent much of her life in London, is having her most comprehensive retrospective to date, organized jointly by the Munich Haus der Kunst and Tate St. Ives, and showing at the Haus Der Kunst and Vienna’s mumok museum. Appropriately, the show is titled “Arise Alive,” a reference to the way her sculptures often seem to be imbued with inner life.
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Emily Karaka
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist/Auckland Art
Gallery Toi o TāmakiThe blazing cheery colors of Emily Karaka’s paintings might seem to conflict with her subject matter, which is often the dispossession of Native land. But the artist, who is of Ngati Te Ahi Waru bloodlines and is now in her 70s, has never made art that is entirely dour, even though she frequently alludes to the Treaty of Waitangi, which deprived the Māori people of their rights during the formation of what is now called New Zealand (Aotearoa). Karaka’s Sharjah Art Foundation retrospective showcased how this artist has cleverly layered text, Indigenous symbols, and bright, abstract patterning to critique histories of colonialism, at times even directing her focus beyond the South Pacific. One new painting in the show, for example, refers to Palestine, whose struggle she clearly views as an analogue for the Māori’s.
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Britta Marakatt-Labba
Image Credit: Ina Wesenberg Appearances in Documenta 14 in 2017 and the 2022 Venice Biennale have done a lot to raise the profile of Britta Marakatt-Labba, one of the most important Sámi artists. Some of her spare textiles and drawings have acidly taken up Sweden’s national history, showing how the country knowingly took measures to strip the Nordic region’s Indigenous people of their land and livelihood, but the majority of her oeuvre functions somewhat differently. In vast works such as her acclaimed piece Historjá (2003–07), she has focused on the survival of the Sámi people, whose centuries-old lore she has recorded for time immemorial. The Nationalmuseet in Oslo gave this 73-year-old star her biggest show to date this year.
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Gyula Kosice
Image Credit: Courtesy MALBA Until this year, Gyula Kosice was known mainly for a single work: his room-filling installation La ciudad hidroespacial (The Hydrospatial City, 1946–72), featuring suspended Plexiglas creations that he meant as a vision of how humanity might persevere, were it to leave this planet. Yet Kosice was more than this one installation, and his Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) retrospective demonstrated as much. The exhibition showed how Kosice, who was born in Slovakia and based for much of his career in Buenos Aires, helped found a movement known as Madí, which aspired during the 1940s to prove that abstraction could be a form of liberation. His MALBA retrospective positioned Madí as a crucial inflection point in Argentinean art history, inspiring generations of artists to follow.
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Kim Lim
Image Credit: ©Kim Lim/DACS, 2024/Courtesy National Gallery Singapore “For me,” the Singaporean-British artist Kim Lim once said, “a piece of sculpture has to have a presence and I want it to be seen immediately as a whole.” This may seem an ironic statement, given that the metal and wood sculptures she made were quiet, largely colorless, and generally modest in scale—not the sort of art that is typically perceived as occupying space. But Lim’s National Gallery Singapore retrospective, a traveling version of a show that first appeared at the Hepworth Wakefield in England, showed how this artist breathed life into minimalism, causing it to appear corporeal at times. The show was a homecoming of sorts for Lim, who was born in 1936 in Singapore and died six decades later in London, the city where she first gained notice.
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Ana Lupas
Image Credit: Photo Carlo Favero/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam During the days of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime, at a time when experimentalism was discouraged in Romania, Ana Lupas bravely worked in an avant-garde mode, producing brilliantly off-kilter works such as The Solemn Process (1964–2008), that comprised metal structures made of steel, straw, and wire mesh recalling ancient objects native to the country. These loops and triangles from the mid-’60s were first exhibited outdoors, where they gradually wasted away. Thank goodness for her Stedelijk Museum retrospective, which re-created such works as this one. Now on view at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, the show explores how the 84-year-old artist revives local traditions, effectively keeping alive ideas and rituals at risk of being lost.
