Paul Gauguin’s utopian Tahiti, his renderings of a people as primitives, his life of free love in the tropics … it’s all not so innocent or pretty anymore. Gauguin sits at the center of contemporary reconsiderations—sexual, cultural, postcolonial—and drums up the old skirmish over whether or not great art is its own justification. This exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie comes at Gauguin from a number of angles, and places his work in dialogue with contemporary artists such as Angela Tiatia (New Zealand/Australia), Yuki Kihara (Samoa/Japan) and Nashashibi/Skaer (United Kingdom), along with the Tahitian activist and multi-artist Henri Hiro (French Polynesia). —Laura Jacobs