Viggo Rivad Photographs Exhibition at Copenhagen Airport

Viggo Rivad large-format photo exhibition in the rail terminal at Copenhagen airport The state-of-the-art Kastrop station at the airport of the same name in Copenhagen is now playing host to a most unusual photo exhibition for about two years. Black-and-white pictures taken by Danish photographer Viggo Rivad with Leica cameras have been enlarged to a size of 2.20 x 3.30 metres and hung there over a stretch of 300 metres. The 32 photos were taken between 1948 and 1994 and were previously on display in the famous photography musuem in Odense. It is the first time that exclusive use has been made of photos for artistic decoration in a public building in Denmark. However, Viggo Rivad, born in Copenhagen in 1922, is no stranger in Scandinavia. After winning first prize in a photo competition as far back as 1948, he went on to compose photographic essays with pictures of Poland, Israel, Spain, Morocco, Mexico, Venice, the Sahara, China , the Soviet Union, Yemen, Venezuela, Egypt and naturally his own country Denmark. In 1974 he was awarded a three-year grant by the Danish Association of Artists.

Andy Warhol: A Factory, Kunsthalle Wien

Andy Warhol: A Factory
Kunsthalle Wien
Through May 2, 1999

I wish I could invent something like bluejeans. Something to be remembered for. Something mass.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol: A Factory is a multidisciplinary examination of Andy Warhol’s production which encompasses an unprecedented range of art and archival material in a multimedia framework is presented at the Kunsthalle Wien. This panoramic exhibition utilizes Andy Warhol’s seminal paintings and sculptures as the basis for an investigation of his work in diverse areas, expanding the prevailing perspective on this harbringer of post-war American culture.

Andy Warhol dubbed the three successive studios he kept during his lifetime Factories. Thus the term “factory” in the exhibition’s title designates Andy Warhol’s Factory as a geographical site and a historical concept as well as a traditional factory with numerous contributors. Each Factory was a nucleus for innovative and frequently iconoclastic endeavors – prolifically creative microcosms where Andy Warhol and the Factories’ participants generated a panoply of works embracing paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photography, film, fashion, video, television, and music. Spanning from the 1950s to the late 1980s, Andy Warhol: A Factory surveys the cross-current of activities that constituted the Factories’ artistic output.

The exhibition is organized as a segmented labyrinth, presenting overlapping components of art in multiple media which break down the traditional hierarchy of disciplines. This methodology serves to illustrate the manner in which Andy Warhol pursued the same subject matter with different artistic vehicles and underscores the numerous approaches which can be taken to consider his endeavors. Andy Warhol: A Factory covers: Graphic and Commercial Art; Publications, Celebrities; Disasters; Brillos; Flowers; Silver Factory Films; Superstars; The Velvet Underground and Nico; Television and Video; Maos; Skulls; Hammers and Sickles; Oxidations; Shoes; Dollar Signs; Rorschachs; Ads; Stitched Photographs; Art-Historical Appropriations; Portraits; and Self-Portraits.

Andy Warhol: A Factory is conceived by Germano Celant, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, with Vivien Greene, Assistant Curator. John Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, is supervising the video and film components, the latter in consultation with Callie Angell, Adjunct Curator, Andy Warhol Film Project, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The acclaimed architect, Gaetano Pesce, has designed the installation. 

A catalogue with an introductory text by Germano Celant and 600 illustrations accompanies this presentation of the exhibition.

Extensive programming, including lectures, special film screenings and a 24 hour film night, from March 27 to March 28, with the presentation of the films Lonesome Cowboys (Andy Warhol, USA 1967/68, color, 16 mm, 105 min., OV), Empire (Andy Warhol, idea: John Palmer, realisation: Henry Romney, camera: Jonas Mekas,  USA 1964, b/w, 16 mm, 8 h 5 min., OV), and Sleep (Andy Warhol, USA 1963, b/w 16 mm, 5 h 21 min., OV, with John Giorno) will accompany the show.

Andy Warhol: A Factory has been organized by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. 

Following the presentation at the Kunsthalle Wien, the exhibition will tour to the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (May 31–Sept. 19, 1999); the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Oct. 19, 1999–Jan. 13, 2000); and the Fundação de Serralves, Porto (Feb. 11–May 14, 2000). The exhibition will conclude in New York as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s millenial program in Summer 2000.

KUNSTHALLE WIEN
Karlsplatz, Treitlstr. 2, 1040 Vienna
www.kunsthallewien.at

Updated 04.07.2019

Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Forum: Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley 

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh 

February 20 - May 9, 1999 

Carnegie Museum of Art presents Forum: Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, John Wesley, an exhibition of sculpture, photographs, and paintings organized by Contemporary Art Curatorial Assistant Alyson Baker. The works in this exhibition share a common visual language, one of human colonization from the fringes of the city to the furthest reaches of suburbia. 

Artists Robert Grosvenor, Andreas Gursky, and John Wesley use a contemporary visual vocabulary that they set within a Minimalist framework that is concisely and meticulously constructed to describe the space, both physical and psychic, between the urban and rural landscapes. Unlike Minimalism, where art is reduced to its essentials, these artists bring psychological and social messages to their work, and inject their compositions with metaphorical meaning and implied narrative. They draw from the real material of the everyday world as the source for their objects and images, and their work feels immediately familiar. Robert Grosvenor’s Untitled (1997), a stone and concrete wall-like sculpture that is over 30 feet long supports two lawn balls and an arrangement in steel that appears to be a fallen television antenna. John Wesley’s painting New Work (1990) silhouettes, from a view out the window of a home too close to the airport, three jet planes looming large as they pass through the sky. Andreas Gursky’s crystalline photographs show us the worlds of recreational, residential, and industrial zones at the city’s edge.

Born in New York City in 1937, Robert Grosvenor studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Ecole Supérieure des Arts Decoratifs in France and the Universitá di Perugia in Italy. He began exhibiting his work in the early 1960s during the formative years of Minimalism and was included in exhibitions that defined the movement alongside artists like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, whose works have come to exemplify that art style.

Robert Grosvenor evolved away from the ideologies of pure Minimalism towards a more expressive visual language that is grounded in the real world. His sculptures are often arranged as abstract, geometric compositions imbued with complex metaphorical content. John Wesley was born in Los Angeles in 1928. His paintings have been exhibited extensively since the early 1960s, when he was identified with the first group of Pop artists. Since then, his work has been included in many survey exhibitions of Pop Art, with important recent solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Although John Wesley shares with Pop Art a flat, graphic presentation derived from commercial and mass market sources, his concerns have always been far more private and introspective, examining icons of middle-class America to find their emotional and psychological centers.

Andreas Gursky was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1955 and was a student of the influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy. He had his first one-person show in 1987 and has since exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Andreas Gursky produces photographs that are fully conceived before the images are transcribed onto film. The subjects are not found, but are purposefully sought out. Although the photographs have the appearance, at times, of quickly executed snapshots, they are preceded by careful observation and are carefully composed and constructed. Viewed from a distance, they often have an overall form that appears minimal, monochromatic and simply structured. When viewed closely, however, the detail and sharpness of his images reveal a complex accumulation of individual parts.

CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART

4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

www.cmoa.org

Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969, Guggenheim Museum, New York City

Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969 

Guggenheim Museum, New York 

February 12 - May 16, 1999 

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969, the first major survey on the earlywork of this important American artist. The exhibition traces Jim Dine's multi-faceted exploration of personal identity through more than 100 works, including photographs of his environment and performance pieces. During the first ten years of his career, Jim Dine seized on the idea of self-exposure to forge new territory for the possibilities of expression. In doing so, he created a formidable visual language of corporeal motifs that tested the conventions of representation and perception. 

The exhibition encompasses many of the major mixed-media works Jim Dine created between 1959 and 1969, the same time-frame that traces the trajectory of the increasing use of popular imagery in American art. Though Dine's signature motifs of clothing, tools, painter's palettes, and hearts dovetailed with the familiar images of Pop art, his use of such commonplace objects was deeply personal, derived from his interior world of memories rather than from Pop art's preoccupation with the conceits of mass culture. Dine's work is thus marked by a deep sense of introspection and an abiding interest in the act of painting as a means of unveiling the self.

By bringing together works from Jim Dine's various series, the exhibition provides a striking view of the magnitude of Dine's early achievements and their formidable contribution to the succeeding generation of artists concerned with the politics of the body. The exhibition investigates how Jim Dine developed his personal iconography by drawing on the vernacular of children's art and the carnivalesque to foster a sense of profound psychological resonance in his works.

Jim Dine arrived in New York from Ohio in 1958 and quickly established himself in the avant-garde art scene. In 1959, along with several other artists, Dine began showing his work at the newly established Judson Gallery located in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. It was there in 1960 that Dine created the first of his interiors, The House, as part of "Ray-Gun," a two-person exhibition with Claes Oldenburg that also featured the latter's environment The Street. During the course of the show Dine performed his first theatrical piece, The Smiling Workman, as part of "Ray Gun Spex," three evenings devoted to individual theatrical pieces by Dine, Oldenburg, and several other artists. The notoriety that followed this showcase did much to validate this burgeoning art form. Jim Dine's association with Judson and the Reuben Gallery provided him with the opportunity to create other performance pieces and, in the course of one year, Jim Dine created three other theatrical pieces, Vaudeville, Car Crash, and A Shining Bed, which added to his growing renown as one of the brightest new stars of his generation. It was during this time that Dine created such totemic works as Green Suit (1959), Untitled (Winged Victory) (1959), and Bedspring (1960), assemblages that incorporate discarded clothing, bedsprings, and other trash salvaged from the city's streets.

Choosing to immerse himself in painting, Jim Dine quickly gave up creating performance art. By the end of 1961, he had completed a series of childlike, collage-style paintings, many of which incorporated quotidian objects and their written equivalents on the canvas. In works such as Teeth (1960-61), Hair (1961), Coat (1961), and Pearls (1961), Jim Dine conjoined the explosive quality of abstraction with the peculiarities of real life. Like his Green Suit, these works and others that followed are imbued with an eccentric quality that evokes the freakish quality of nature. Jim Dine's deep-seated personal phobias, along with the burden of fame, forced him to seek comfort in the isolation of his studio, and he withdrew from the social scene of the New York art world. By 1962, he was immersed in psychoanalysis, an experience that would inform his subsequent work. His series of Tool paintings, made over the course of one month, were bound up with the artist's vivid memories spent working in his family's hardware stores in Ohio and Kentucky. In his next series, based on his own childhood recollections and the wallpaper and objects of his children's rooms, items such as mirrored medicine cabinets, toiletries, and metal fixtures involve the viewer physically in his remembrances.

In the final years represented by this exhibition, references to the artist himself become even more direct, as in his 1963 canvases featuring painter's palettes and his 1964 group of self-portraits inspired by men's suits; these were later followed by works based on the image of an uninhabited bathrobe, which he first saw in a newspaper advertisement. In 1965, Jim Dine began making three-dimensional bronze and aluminum casts of familiar objects, continuing his trajectory from using junk to employing store-bought items to finally making his own objects. Jim Dine seized on the processes of duplication, repetition, elongation, and enlargement to create a series of hybrid realities in his sculptures of body parts, clothing, furniture, tools, and passageways. His sculptures became increasingly large and his interest in manipulating the space of the viewer became more pronounced. This tendency is evident in his two monumental pieces incorporating images of a heart and hand, from his series of works entitled Nancy and I at Ithaca (1966-69). By 1967, Jim Dine finally had the emotional stability to leave his studio in New York and move to London. In the year that followed he did no painting, instead throwing himself into printmaking, drawing, and writing. Memory was still Jim Dine's driving force, and when he returned to the canvas to create Name Paintings (1968-69), he began to use its surface as a vast journal for his recollections. Jim Dine's concerns during this decade are summed up in Colour of the Month of August (1969), in which bold strokes of paint are juxtaposed with the names of the colors scrawled on the canvas. This piece is a culmination of Jim Dine's work from the period and of the uniquely personal visual language that he created to reference the self.

Jim Dine: Walking Memory, 1959-1969 has been co-curated by Germano Celant, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and Clare Bell, Associate Curator for Prints and Drawings at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Publication: A fully-illustrated catalogue, published by the Guggenheim Museum and distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., will accompany the exhibition. It is the first catalogue to document the early years of Jim Dine's career and includes rare documentary photographs. In addition to essays by Mr. Celant and Ms. Bell, the book provides an interview with the artist charting his initial development. The catalogue also includes rarely published materials on each of Jim Dine's theatrical pieces, as well as an essay by Julia Blaut on Jim Dine's performances and environments. A chronology of Jim Dine's career from 1959 to 1969 and selected bibliography are also included.

The exhibition will travel to The Cincinnati Art Museum, where it will be on display from October 22, 1999, to January 9, 2000.

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1071 Fifth Avenue (at 88th Street), New York City

www.guggenheim.org