Visual Art

In five sections, Contesting Modernity surveys twenty years of work in Venezuela by numerous artists, some of whom a Houston audience will already know from curator Mari Carmen Ramírez’s extensive catalog of groundbreaking, research-driven exhibitions at the MFAH.

The story of Nicolas Moufarrege is a sad one. Lost to the AIDS crisis in New York City at the age of 36, the artist had only been in practice for a decade and undoubtedly had much left to produce. Curated by Dean Daderko and on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston through Feb. 17, 2019, Nicolas Moufarrege: Recognize My Sign is the first solo museum exhibition for Moufarrege.

On view through Jan. 27, The Condition of Being Here at the newly-inaugurated Menil Drawing Institute (MDI) in Houston includes a selection of Jasper Johns’s drawings dating from 1954 to 2016, many of which get at the fragility of the body and its musings.

Millennia before mapping the universe became the purview of the scientist, the first artists scratched marks, lines and shapes onto cave walls, perhaps to make some sense of the world around them through pictorial representation.