Give the people what they think. Not what they want, but what they think they are seeing. Do this, and fantasies are no longer fiction. Fiction becomes reality, the fake outdoes the familiar—it replaces it. History becomes more real, more believable, more infectious, when it’s done with invention. Fiction lasts longer; it creates its own history, and rewrites existing narratives. As I wrote in another piece from this year, images speak longer than words. The visual has staying power, and these five exhibitions from 2014 made exceptional contributions to the power of the image. Each exhibition was challenging, elegant, singular, and had a minimal attitude toward both concept and form.

In these shows, the form of the exhibition was not left last, as an afterthought, but foregrounded. From retrospectives, to debut shows, to mid-career immersive installations, the importance of experience was not lost on these artists. In an art world exploding with ephemera and temporary installations, each of these exhibitions solidified the importance and absolute necessity of the solo show.

While I have written about each of these exhibitions in long-form, I have grouped them together again here—if not for their outstanding quality, then for their shared efforts in raising the standard for the solo exhibition.

In no particular order:

Gabriele Beveridge | Elizabeth Dee

Gabriele Beveridge, Gold Diamond Park, 2014, Installation view; Courtesy the Artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

Experiencing Gold Diamond Park was like a fantasy that had all the aesthetics of a weightless world, of minimal perfection. The sterility of Health Goth, and its synthetic and clinical idealism, was met with the imagined affect of girlishness—its marketed accessories, its glossy precision—that combined the rigorous aesthetic of athletic excellence with the soft airbrushed touch of fashion editorial. The exhibition—which featured stark white mannequins, black athletic rings suspended from the ceiling in gold chain, faux crystal balls, white feathers, and pseudo-magazine advertisement reproductions—was an important aesthetic move toward redefining minimalism in the twenty-first century. From the stripped down geometric abstractions of the 50s and 60s to the sleek design of visual merchandising geared toward selling a “female aesthetic,” Beveridge suggested that the decorative is ultimately as empty as a white canvas.

Sarah Ortmeyer | Dvir 

Sarah Ortmeyer, KISH KUSH, 2014, Exhibition View at Dvir Gallery; Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski; Courtesy of Dvir Gallery and the artist 

Beveridge was not the only artist attempting to re-write a predominantly male history from the twentieth century. In KISH KUSH, Vienna-based Sarah Ortmeyer took on chess as performance—think Duchamp—in an over the top installation of female chess champions, photographed at life-size and scattered throughout the gallery in a floor to ceiling array resembling centerfolds and pinups. Among these hottie grandmasters, knights, queens, rooks, and pawns were pictured in many of the images—tossed, strewn, held as props, staged suggestively. Oversized marble pieces occupied the floor in clusters, sometimes in proximity to the images plastered on the wall, other times in independent huddles in the center of the space.

Of Ortmeyer’s exhibition, I first asked: What happens when you don’t play by the rules? The entire point of KISH KUSH is that it did not adhere to any rules whatsoever. Rather, undermining the idea of strategy as a whole was at the center of Ortmeyer’s tactic. The best way to feature the absence of these female chess champions from the male history of chess was, in this case, to attack the gendered intellectualism of the game in a way that was so sexualized, so explicitly objectified, that it appeared just short of genius.

Give the people what they think.

Jordan Wolfson | David Zwirner

Jordan Wolfson, Raspberry Poser, 2012, Projected video animation, 13:54 min (loop), color, sound, Dimensions vary with installation; Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York, and Sadie Coles HQ, London

You can be a sweet dream, or a beautiful nightmare. Beyoncé’s offer has been ringing in my ears since I saw this exhibition in March. Wolfson’s first solo at Zwirner’s Chelsea location was a stunner—haunting, romantic, sweet, and menacing. Wolfson’s version of fantasy was not tame, always on the verge of restraint, on the edge of control. The soundtrack of the floor-to-ceiling screening of Wolfson’s Raspberry Poser was essential, alternating between "Sweet Dreams" and Mazzy Star’s "Fade Into You." Recurring animations were spliced on top of various scenes: a condom filled with bright red hearts bounced up and down superimposed over a little girl’s stuffed animal-filled bedroom, through sleek catalogue sets for Ikea or Pottery Barn, or against the blue sky of a pedestrian crosswalk.

Like a dream of 90s counterculture, the protagonist of the film was a type of Calvin character, smug and predatory, who after numerous on-screen suicide attempts never dies. The exhibition delivered an implacable feeling of badness. As Wolfson points out, naughtiness knows no bounds when everything is perverse.

Christopher Williams | Art Institute of Chicago

Christopher Williams, Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide, © 1968, Eastman Kodak Company, 1968, (Meiko laughing), Vancouver, B.C., April 6, 2005, 2005. Glenstone; © Christopher Williams. Courtesy of the artist; David Zwirner, New York/London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

If happiness can be bought, or at least if its idea can be up for sale, then Christopher Williams is your guy. His sprawling retrospective, Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness, which occupied more than just the photography galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago from January through May, asked what it meant to represent an image. In my review, I quoted fellow artist David Hartt for his concept of the “Great Sorting” in relation to our current moment, which he coined in a keynote address aligned with the opening of the show. Hartt suggested that we are still digging through the twentieth century index of images, which is to say, if the twentieth century was responsible for inventing the image, the twenty-first century is still sorting through it. We categorize, repurpose, reinvent what has already been discovered, and do so knowing that newness is not the same as freshness. In a world where nothing is novel, Williams keeps it fresh.

Laurent Grasso | Galerie Perrotin

Laurent Grasso, Installation view of Soleil Double, Galerie Perrotin, Paris, 2014

What if the world had a second sun? How would our history have been changed, major events have been altered, or our trajectories be different? These questions are at the center of Grasso’s Soleil Double, which toured at Galerie Perrotin in Paris after its run in New York at Sean Kelly. Here, invention did not look forward, but crept into the past. The exhibition very tamely suggested the possibility of alternate universe, picturing a second sun to dismantle, if not literally than in context, the historical representation of our earth. Calling accuracy into question, the exhibition presented the subtle but inescapable possibility of another world.

In this exhibition, as in all of the above, the imaginary is not far-fetched. Instead, its fiction is quiet and suggestive, yet persistent. Turning the path of our learned history over stone by stone, the exhibitions deliver what you already hoped was true. In 2014, more than any other year, the urge for invention is to alter the past, letting those slight adjustments to an already told story manifest into something different altogether, expanding exponentially until (hopefully) the future is unrecognizable to the past.