What to See Across Europe This Spring

‘Typologien’ | Fondazione Prada, Milan | 3 April – 14 July

In the age of AI deep fakes and disinformation, dissecting the context and influence of image production is more important than ever. ‘Typologien’, at Fondazione Prada, offers an inquisitive, non-hierarchical reading of 20th century German photography to highlight the similarities with and differences from our contemporary worldview. The exhibition assembles more than 600 photographs by 25 artists who examined nature and architecture, human presence and absence. Grey suspended walls segment the huge expanse of the Podium building to create a labyrinth of works that, eschewing chronology, share a commitment to photographic inquiry. – Ivana Cholakova

Berlinde De Bruyckere | Bozar, Brussels | 21 February – 31 August

A few months ago at a gallery dinner, I asked a German collector about the last work of art that had wowed him. He breathlessly described seeing Berlinde De Bruyckere’s installation of donkeys at the San Giorgio Maggiore church in Venice. It was only later I realized I’d misheard him, mistaking the German word Engel (angel) for Esel (donkey). To distract myself from my own embarrassment, I decided that my imagined installation was better. Celebrating the humble donkey – key to Jesus's story but rarely celebrated in sacred art – would have been subversive: Angels in a church? A kitschy mess. – Chloe Stead

‘Radical Software’ | Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna | 28 February – 25 May

Large panels filled with pages of zestfully handwritten notations set the tone for ‘Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing, 1960–91’ at Kunsthalle Wien. Covering much of the ground-floor wall space, Hanne Darboven’s Ein Jahrhundert ABC (One Century ABC, 1970–71), in which the artist sought to mark the passage of time using her own unique code, deftly connecting the renaissance origin of the term ‘computer’ – a person employed to calculate planetary positions for astronomers – to 20th-century artistic practices. 

Presenting more than 100 works from 50 artists grouped into five sections, the self-described ‘principally analogue exhibition about digital art’ is a mammoth project that aims to amend the historiography of media art by including some of its neglected female pioneers. – Kathrin Heinrich 

Leah Ke Yi Zheng | Layr, Vienna | 21 March – 10 May

In ‘Machine(s)’, her first solo exhibition at Layr, Wuyishan-born, Chicago-based artist Leah Ke Yi Zheng continues to confront the conventional role of canvas as passive support in works whose physical shape is integral to their meaning and whose mutable, translucent surfaces are imbued with an almost-bodily presence.

By stretching silk over handmade wooden frames to create irregular, parallelogram-shaped supports, Zheng transforms her paintings into delicate, sensuous objects. Unlike the substantial layers of paint that accumulate in traditional oil-on-canvas works, the artist’s acrylic-on-silk technique embraces a combination of brush control and fluidity, as the vibrant pigment seeps into the silk rather than resting on its surface. In this way, Zheng’s paintings do not merely hold an image; they absorb, stain and register traces of her every movement. – Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas

David Hockney | Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris | 9 April – 31 August

After a lifetime of gallivanting between London, Los Angeles and his hometown of Bridlington in the north of England, David Hockney found himself spending the COVID-19 lockdown in his farmhouse in the small Normandy village of Beuvron-en-Auge. To pass the hours of isolation, he began producing a series of landscapes on his iPad – an at-hand device he has been using since 2010 for observational drawings. Following a self-imposed rule, he created 220 images for the series later known as ‘220 for 2020’. – Sean Burns 

^{Main image: Thomas Struth, Einzelne rote Lilie - N° 51, Düsseldorf (Botanischer Garten) (detail), 1993. Courtesy:  © Thomas Struth and Viehof Collection, Mönchengladbach}