What to See Across Europe This December

Larry Stanton | APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia | 6 October – 6 January

It’s impossible to examine Larry Stanton’s work without having the spectre of AIDS front of mind. Curated by the late artist’s estate and installed across four rooms of APALAZZOGALLERY, ‘IMAGES’ presents the first substantial global overview of Stanton’s practice, which teems with urgent lust and whimsical style. Alongside personal mementos of queer intimacy, the show is further contextualized by insights into the artist’s friendship with British painter David Hockney, positioning his works within the art-historical framework of the Western gay canon. – Joe Bobowicz

Lucy McKenzie |  Z33, Hasselt | 29 September – 23 February

A replica of a shop front displays a series of mannequins dressed in sports attire, posed as if playing golf or in the middle of a game of tennis (Sports Shop, all works 2024). The canopied entrance to this faux store, nestled between the two window displays, looks like the perfect shelter for two lovers caught in a rainstorm. Here, in this seemingly innocuous space, everything might change and tension, sexual or otherwise, might bubble to the surface. Sports Shop – part of artist Lucy McKenzie’s ongoing collaboration with designer Beca Lipscombe, Atelier E.B – reminds me of how desire and yearning can become entwined with public architecture and how such spaces can be incorporated into the narratives of our own relationships. – Lisette May Monroe 

Thomas Eggerer | Capitain Petzel, Berlin | 2 November – 21 December

Central to Thomas Eggerer’s latest show at Capitain Petzel, ‘Galeria’, is a monumental new painting depicting the interior of a large gym in which figures stretch, jog, box and lift weights. The characters in Fitness (2024) are dispersed across the flat, wide-angled scene in such a way as to give compositional punctuation; limbs, extended at diagonals, direct the eye around the picture plane. Two joggers near the base of the work exercise together; the rest attend to their regimes alone. The viewer observes from above, at a vantage point higher than the neon strip lights that hang from the ceiling. The stillness of the scene contrasts starkly with the muscular activities on display. – Oliver Osborne

‘Tituba, Who Protects Us?’ | Palais de Tokyo, Paris | 17 October – 5 January

In 1692, an enslaved Caribbean woman named Tituba was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned for over a year in Salem. Almost three centuries later, through a combination of historical documentation and imagination, Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé published I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1986). Condé’s novel is a tale of yearning, as Tituba gradually loses the things she loves – from her parents to her homeland – and grasps at reconnection with the help of ‘invisibles’: ancestors who accompany her throughout literal trials and tribulations. In Palais de Tokyo’s latest group show, ‘Tituba, Who Protects Us?’, her story is echoed in the work of 11 contemporary artists, each of whom asks where and with whom refuge can be found in moments of vulnerability. – Yaa Addae 

Gisèle Vienne | Haus am Waldsee, Berlin | 27 September – 6 February

Sleek and serial, Gisèle Vienne’s arsenal of crafted teenage dolls lies inert inside glass vitrines displayed along Haus am Waldsee’s main hall. Part of her installation Dolls in glass boxes (2003–21), these life-sized figures – eyes wide open, heads turned to one side – resemble corpses. Their gloomy configuration hints at a distressed response to an out-of-shot calamity. In their radical stillness, they evoke anything but silence, emanating instead a tacit scream prompted by some unrevealed horror. Vienne uses this voicelessness to develop a discourse around violence, positioning teenage bodies as archetypes of innocence whose developing political opinions encounter social expectations and influences beyond parental control. – Gabriela Acha

^{Main image: Larry Stanton, Untitled (detail), c. 1978, pastel and crayon on paper, 43 × 35 cm. Courtesy: the Estate of Larry Stanton and APALAZZOGALLERY}