Elisabeth Johs is the Danish-born founder and director of JOHS Gallery. A curator and art advisor who has lived in London, New York, Geneva, and Mexico City, she has spent the last five years building JOHS into one of the most talked-about emerging galleries. She spends her year moving between fairs, biennales, and openings, which makes her the perfect person to write this. You can purchase the print magazine here.
The art world moves on a clock most people never see. Certain cities reveal themselves only if you know when to arrive. These are the weeks when galleries open their doors, collectors descend, and entire neighborhoods transform.
Here’s your insider guide.
February — Zona Maco, Mexico City
Every February, Zélika García convinces the art world to descend on Mexico City, and Mexico City, graciously, lets them think they discovered it.
The mezcal flows before noon. Your usual hushed gallery opening turns, without warning, into a late-night rave in a courtyard that may or may not be someone’s grandmother’s house.
Go to the fair, yes, but save yourself for the city. Wander La Roma. Push open every unmarked door. Leave time for lunches that last until the light changes. Don’t miss the Barragán Houses, austere and soul-splitting. Don’t leave without seeing Museo Anahuacalli, Diego Rivera’s volcanic stone temple to his own obsessions.
The city will reward slowness.
Spring — The Venice Biennale (every two years)
Founded in 1895 and still, improbably, the greatest show on earth. Every two years the art world boards planes and ferries to a city that is literally sinking, which feels, in some years, entirely appropriate.
The National Pavilions are mandatory, but the Biennale’s real gift is what spills beyond them: shows in deconsecrated churches, palazzos dripping with faded grandeur, former warehouses that smell of the lagoon.
One year Rick Owens rented an abandoned airport and threw an 80th birthday party for his wife Michèle Lamy. This is the register we’re operating in.
Between pavilions: visit Peggy Guggenheim’s home on the Grand Canal, which she never left and which still feels entirely like hers. Have a Bellini at Harry’s Bar without apology. Let the city’s particular light — liquid, refracted, nowhere-else-on-earth light — do its work on you.
Early Summer — Naoshima, Japan
Take the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Okayama. Stop at 7-Eleven for egg salad sandwiches. This is not optional. Then a local train to Uno Port, the ferry across to Naoshima.
The small island in the Seto Inland Sea that Soichiro Fukutake and architect Tadao Andō transformed into one of the most extraordinary places on the planet: art, architecture, and landscape in genuine coexistence.
Sleep at the Benesse House, where Andō designed your room and the museum wraps around you as you drift off. At night, the galleries are yours. By day, rent a bicycle. Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkin sits by the water like it always has. James Turrell has filled rooms with light in ways that will rearrange something in you permanently.
Take the ferry to Teshima. The art museum there by Ryue Nishizawa is a concrete shell open to sky and wind and a single thread of water on the floor.
June — Basel, Switzerland
Before Miami, before Paris, before Hong Kong, there was the original. Art Basel in the city that gave it its name — rigorous, exhilarating, the fair the other fairs measure themselves against.
Having grown up in Geneva, Basel always felt like coming home with better art. See the main fair but don’t neglect the satellites: Liste, Basel Social Club, June Art Fair. Take the train to Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, remove your shoes, and walk barefoot in the grass in front of a Monet that goes on forever.
In the evenings you will find yourself at Les Trois Rois, at a table that keeps getting more crowded, ordering wine you can’t quite justify.
June–July — Copenhagen, Denmark
Not a fair, not a biennale. Just a city that has quietly built one of the world’s most compelling contemporary art scenes and doesn’t make a fuss about it. I was born here and I still find new things every time I return.
Start at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, an hour north of the city along the Øresund coast. Back in the city, explore the galleries around Bredgade and Kødbyen, where the art scene shares walls with restaurants and nightlife in ways that feel genuinely alive rather than curated. Visit the Glyptoteket on a grey day. Eat smørrebrød somewhere without a waiting list.
Copenhagen is the art world’s idea of the good life made physical: beautiful things, taken seriously, without performance.
Late Summer — The South of France
Grab your lover, a suitcase, and a tolerance for roads that wind through lavender.
Land in Nice. Drive to Antibes. Musée Picasso first, a fortress above the sea. Oysters. Cold white wine. A small table by the water you don’t want to leave.
The next morning, La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the hotel that Picasso, Matisse, and Calder paid for in art when they couldn’t afford the bill. There is a Calder mobile by the pool. You will swim under it.
Then Château La Coste, where Andō, Bourgeois, and Serra exist among vines.
End in Aix. Walk to Cézanne’s atelier. Drive out to Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain he painted over two hundred times, the motif that made the twentieth century possible.
October — Art Basel Paris
Post-Brexit, Art Basel expanded to Paris. No one is sad about it.
The fair is held at the Grand Palais. Arrive early when the light through the glass ceiling is doing something extraordinary. In the evenings: vernissages in Le Marais, long dinners, the institutional shows that time their openings for this exact week. Bourse de Commerce, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo.
Paris in October is the art world at its most civilized. Which is to say, champagne at 11am is not only acceptable but expected.
Elisabeth Johs is the founder of JOHS Gallery in New York. Follow her on Instagram at @elisabethjohs and the gallery at @johsgallery. This piece originally appeared in The Taste Issue of The Galconomist. You can purchase your copy here.