Opening today, from the New York Times:

It’s as eye-opening as it is elegant, especially among the later works on the upper ramps, which push well past the obligatory Neo-Classicism and Analytic Cubism into bracingly sensual explorations of the figure, strident political cries de coeur à la Guernica and winking homages to Delacroix and Velázquez...

And in places that palette is more liberating than limiting. As Gertrude Stein put it, “There is infinite variety of gray in these pictures, and by the vitality of painting the grays really become color.” She was talking about Picasso’s early gray still lifes, but her words could easily describe later works like “Marie-Thérèse, Face and Profile” (1931), a portrait of the young and pliant muse we know from bold-hued paintings like “Le Rêve.”

The Guggenheim's exhibition website.

October 4 the Pace Gallery inaugurated a new space at Burlington Gardens, London with a joint exhibition of Rothko paintings and Sugimoto photography.

Mark Rothko, Black on Grey (1969)

From an October 3 report in The Guardian:

According to Rothko's children, their father did not like group shows, "feeling that they only detracted from the concentrated power of his work displayed in its own company". But in a joint statement, Kate and Christopher Rothko said they had made an exception because in Sugimoto they had found "not just a kindred spirit but a soulmate".

The eight Rothko paintings are from 1969, the year before his suicide, and are the artist abandoning the banks of colour for which he had become famous. Instead he limits his palette to mostly black and grey.

While Rothko's black and grey paintings were seen at a Tate Modern show in 2008, this is the first private gallery show of the artist's works in London for nearly 50 years.

Sugimoto has chosen his seascape photographs in which the colours are similar. One is of the English Channel, taken in 1994, where the sea is almost black and the sky is very dark grey. "There was no moonlight that night and I set up my camera and waited for the last remaining light of the day, a few minutes before complete darkness," he said. "You can still see the waves in the darkness."

Sugimoto said he was inspired by the Rothko show he saw at New York's Guggenheim in 1978 and it helped set him on the road to abstraction through photography.

Pace Gallery (London) Exhibition Website

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sea of Japan (1997)