Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - Exhibition curated by Achim Hochdörfer with Lena Tilk

Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes  

Museum Brandhorst, Munich  

Through 16 February 2025 

ALEX KATZ, who celebrates his 97th birthday this year, is one of the most important representatives of contemporary painting. During his long career, which has now spanned more than 70 years, he has dedicated himself to depicting the here and now, which is why he has described his art as “painting in the present tense.”

Alex Katz has donated two paintings to Museum Brandhorst. An early work from 1958, showing the painter and sculptor George Ortman, and a recent, very personal double portrait of his wife Ada and his son Vincent. To mark this generous donation, Museum Brandhorst is presenting the exhibition “Alex Katz: Portraits and Landscapes,” which, in addition to the two new acquisitions, also presents the rich inventory of work by the artist held by the Brandhorst Collection. Following the major monographic exhibition Alex Katz in 2018-2019, the current show once again brings together major works from all his creative phases.

ALEX KATZ: PORTRAITS

In his portraits, Alex Katz depicts family members, acquaintances and artist friends – whether individually or in groups – with an almost simple monumentality. His flair for painterly surfaces stands in an exciting relationship to the formal language of film, fashion and advertising. This is one of the reasons why Alex Katz is also celebrated as a forerunner of Pop Art.

One of Alex Katz’s major works is “The Black Dress” (1960), in which he depicts his wife Ada six times, each time in an elegant black cocktail dress. The repetition of one and the same figure is reminiscent of a film strip, comparable to the serial character of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor and Jackie Kennedy, created a few years later.From an early stage, Katz found important allies and aesthetic inspiration among contemporary poets, musicians and dancers. Museum Brandhorst owns two iconic pictures of the choreographer Paul Taylor (1930–2018) and his Dance Company. Taylor stands before us in this 1959 portrait with a sense of challenging calm. His tense strength suggests that he could jump out of the picture at any moment and start dancing. As Alex Katz later recalled, “I had seen Paul dance for the first time shortly before we met... and thought his choreography was one of the most surprising things I had seen as an artist. Paul’s dancing seemed to be a real break with that of the previous generation: no expression, no content, no form, as he said, and with great technique and intelligence.”

ALEX KATZ: LANDSCAPES

Alex Katz celebrated his first successes in the New York art scene at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Yet he always remained committed to figurative painting. It was only late, in the mid-1980s, that he approached gestural abstraction in his landscapes and cityscapes. The branches, twigs and leaves in his paintings are reminiscent of the spontaneous gestures and ‘drip paintings’ of Jackson Pollock. Each individual brushstroke can be read figuratively and at the same time appears as an autonomous visual sign.

In some of these paintings, the light itself – whether direct, reflected, or diffuse – becomes the defining theme. Reflections in water and depictions in fog or at dusk often serve as a means of capturing the moods of different times of day.  “These are all very fleeting things, quickly over,” says Alex Katz. “I have captured twilight in landscapes that can only be seen for a quarter of an hour. That fascinates me because it’s real high-speed perception.”

ALEX KATZ: STUDIES

With their clear design and masterful technique, Alex Katz’s paintings convey the impression of great ease, as if they had come naturally into the world. However, their creation process is much more complex. Alex Katz’s large-format paintings on canvas usually develop from smaller oil studies that are created on prepared hardboard. For his landscapes, he usually sketches the same scenery at the same time in the same place on successive days and finally selects the one that seems most interesting to him in order to enlarge it to scale. Due to their sketch-like spontaneity, these studies have a special aesthetic appeal.

THE DONATIONS OF ALEX KATZ: “George Ortman” and “Ada and Vincent”

Even at the age of 96, Alex Katz is still an enormously productive artist, as the more recent of his two donations, “Ada and Vincent,” proves. There are 65 years between "Ada and Vincent" from 2023 and "George Ortman" from 1958. The donations bridge the gap between his early and late work and enable an examination of aesthetic and thematic leitmotifs over the course of his 70-year career. Both works provide insights into Alex Katz’s very personal family environment and are also contemporary documents of the social and artistic milieu in downtown New York in the 1950s. A juxtaposition of landscapes and portraits shows how virtuously and playfully Alex Katz navigates between improvised gestures and cool realism, traditional painting and the exploration of photography and film.

Alex Katz, who was born in 1927 and has since inspired generations of painters, is one of the most important artists in the Brandhorst Collection alongside Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly – both of whom were born in 1928. Anette and Udo Brandhorst were passionate admirers and supporters of Alex Katz from an early age. The artist’s generous donation is due not least to this close relationship.

Curated by Achim Hochdörfer with Lena Tilk.

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

ALEX KATZ: PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES 

MUSEUM BRANDHORST, MUNICH - 22 MARCH 2024 - 16 FEBRUARY 2025

Judy Chicago: Revelations @ Serpentine, London - Judy Chicago largest solo presentation in a London institution

Judy Chicago: Revelations

Serpentine Galleries, London

23 May – 1 September 2024

Serpentine presents Revelations, an exhibition of trailblazing artist, author, educator, cultural historian and feminist JUDY CHICAGO (b. 1939, Chicago, USA); lives and works in New Mexico, USA). Named as one of Time Magazine's most influential people in 2018, she has garnered an enduring stature. Born Judy Cohen, and know biefly after her first marriage as Judy Gerowitz, Judy Chicago attented the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1970, the artist adopted the surname 'chicago' and initiated the United States' first Feminist Art Programme at California State University, Fresno. The exhibition Revelations, on view at Serpentine North, is Judy Chicago’s largest solo presentation in a London institution.

Judy Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective. An artistic polymath, Judy Chicago’s work is defined by a commitment to craft and experimentation, either through her choice of subject matter or the method and materials she employs.

Throughout her six-decade career, Judy Chicago has contested the absence and erasure of women in the Western cultural canon, developing a distinctive visual language that gives visibility to their experiences. To this aim, Judy Chicago has produced both individual and collaborative projects that grappled with themes of birth and creation, the social construct of masculinity, her Jewish identity, notions of power and powerlessness, extinction, and expressed her longstanding concern for climate justice.

Judy Chicago: Revelations charts the full arc of Judy Chicago’s career with a specific focus on drawing, highlighting rarely seen works. Several immersive, multi-media elements, including an AR app, a video recording booth, and other audio-visual components, set this show apart from previous surveys of Judy  Chicago’s work. With never-before-seen sketchbooks, films and slides, video interviews of participants from The Dinner Party (1974–79), audio recordings, and a guided tour of The Dinner Party by Judy  Chicago herself, this novel approach to exhibiting Judy Chicago’s work makes the artist’s presence felt throughout the gallery.

The exhibition takes its name from an unknown illuminated manuscript Judy Chicago penned in the early 1970s which will be published for the first time in conjunction with the exhibition by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson. Titled Revelations, this visionary work is a radical retelling of human history recovering some of the stories of women that society sought to erase, and one that Judy Chicago never imagined would be published in her lifetime. Audio excerpts from the book can be heard in each of the galleries through an accompanying audio guide, seamlessly creating a link between visual art and written word that has occupied the artist’s practice since the 1970s.

"Revelations, both the exhibition and book, expresses my lifelong commitment to gender equality and my deeply held belief that people must come together to change the patriarchal paradigm, which–at this point in history–has become lethal to all creatures, human and nonhuman, as well as to the planet" - Judy Chicago

Organised thematically and inspired by the chapters of the manuscript as its framework, the exhibition opens with In the Beginning (1982) which measures a staggering nine metres in length. Executed in Judy Chicago's signature Prismacolor pencils, the work reimagines the Genesis creation myth from a female perspective. As a benchmark representation of Judy Chicago's foundational philosophy, In the Beginning attempts to dismantle patriarchal structures but also draws on the ways in which feminism intersects with ecology, making this the perfect work to open both the exhibition and accompanying manuscript, which also serves as the exhibition's catalogue.

In the mid-1960s, Judy Chicago developed a significant body of abstract and minimalist drawings, paintings and sculptures that explored colour and form. Revelations brings together a focused sélection of works on paper from this period. By the late 1960s and 1970s, Judy Chicago began to expand on what she termed 'central-core' imagery whilst also developing her expertise in the male-dominated discipline of pyrotechnies. Works such as The Great Ladies Transforming Themselves into Butterflies (1973) and Peeling Back (1974} combine text and image and explicitly reflect on her experience of being "a woman, with a woman's body and a woman's point of view." An immersive video installation of footage from Judy Chicago's celebrated site-specific performances, Atmospheres (1968-74), that combined coloured smokes and fireworks is presented in one of the historic powder rooms of Serpentine North. As one of several digital and online experiences presented in the exhibition, visitors are also encouraged to interact with Rainbow AR (2020), a free downloadable app commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, Germany, which allows visitors to create their own smoke pieces.

One gallery draws on the significance of Judy Chicago's monumental installation The Dinner Party that celebrates and symbolises the heritage and achievements of 1038 women. Here, rarely seen drawings, studies and sketchbooks reveal the working process and components that led to this installation, now permanently housed at Brooklyn Museum, NY. Interviews with luminaries such as Maria Grazia Chiuri, Kevin Kwan, Roxane Gay and Massimiliano Gioni contextualise the relevance of The Dinner Party today.

Also featured in the exhibition is Judy Chicago's séries, the Birth Project (1980-85), for which the artist studied creation myths from numerous cultures to chart history's transition from matriarchal to patriarchal societies. Struck by the lack of imagery related to the subject of birth in Western art, she collaborated with over 150 needleworkers who translated her drawings, paintings and designs into tapestries, petit points, crochets and more. Central to these works is the image of the Goddess figure which has been reworked across Judy Chicago's career to present the idea of 'the divine' being female.

Whilst still engaged with Birth Project, Judy Chicago explored the cultural construction of gender and masculinity. Drawing on her continued commitment to challenging the patriarchal structures that govern society, Prismacolor studies and paintings on Belgian linen covered cavasses from PowerPlay (1982-87) highlight how the artist appropriated and reversed the male gaze. In a new drawing made especially for the manuscript, And God Created Life (2023) Judy Chicago seeks to challenge the conception of God as male and instead presents a figure that sits beyond the racial and binary gender spectrum.

The exhibition also highlights Judy Chicago's enthusiastic interest in the relationship between ecological justice and feminism. Among the works presented are a selection of mixed média drawings from the séries Thinking About Trees (1993-96) as well as studies from The End: A Meditation on Death and Extinction (2015-16) that reflect on the plight of animals. Stranded (2013), depicting a polar bear, was the subject of #CreateArtforEarth, an ongoing global campaign that brought together Judy Chicago with the artist Swoon, Jane Fonda and her environmental initiative Pire Drill Friday. Alongside other partners, this project encouraged individuals to submit art or messages that respond to the climate crisis and inspire action for protecting our planet. For Revelations, visitors are invited to continue contributing to the global campaign. This is one of three ways that people Worldwide can collaborate with the artist to create change via digital projects including the most recently conceived participatory project in the exhibition, What If Women Ruled the World? (2022).

What if Women Ruled the World? was developed in close collaboration with Pussy Riot founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, and DMINTI (a leader in the industry that curates, produces, and positions innovative works and experiences at the intersection of art and technology). The project was first imagined in 1977 and realised for Dior's Spring-Summer 2020 Haute Couture show at the invitation of the fashion house's first female creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. Visitors are invited to enter a participatory booth to provide a video response to a series of questions. Each response becomes part of a growing international archive that is underpinned by a proof of participation token powered by Tezos, the open source project and a scalable, energy efficient, public blockchain chosen by artists across the world for their creative projects. This is the latest project in the multi-year partnership between the Tezos Foundation and Serpentine which celebrates the Serpentine Arts Technologies Team's endeavors to foster artist-led blockchain projects and educate the public, alongside the Tezos ecosystem's dedication to innovation and creativity in the arts and culture sector.

Revelations is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director; and Chris Bayley, Associate Exhibitions Curator; with Liz Stumpf, Assistant Exhibitions Curator; and produced by Halime Özdemir-Larusso, Production Manager.

Judy Chicago: Revelations 

Co-published by Serpentine and Thames & Hudson

Alongside the illuminated manuscript, the publication features an introduction by Judy Chicago as well as contributions from Serpentine Associate Exhibitions Curator Chris Bayley and scholar Martha Easton whose research centres on illuminated manuscripts, gender and medievalism. It also includes a conversation between Judy Chicago and Serpentine's Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist that traces the beginnings of Revelations and the ways in which it, unbeknownst to Judy Chicago until recently, was foundational to the work she would conceive over the following four decades. It is designed by Jessica Fleischmann (Still Room) and Phil Kovacevich.

Judy Chicago: Revelations is published in hardback by Thames & Hudson in collaboration with Serpentine and on sale in the UK on 30 May 2024 and in the US on 18 June 2024.

 

Limited Edition: To celebrate the exhibition, a special Judy Chicago Limited Edition will be available via the Serpentine Shop. All proceeds directly support the Serpentine's Exhibition, Architecture, Design, Education and Digital programmes.

SERPENTINE Galleries London

Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

www.serpentinegalleries.org

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North @ Buffalo AKG Art Museum + Gammel Strand, Copenhagen

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North

Buffalo AKG Art Museum

April 26 - August 19, 2024

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum presents After the Sun—Forecasts from the North, a new exhibition that surveys a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment. Organized by Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large and Curator of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is on view in the new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, after which it will travel to Gammel Strand in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Featuring the work of twenty artists with strong ties to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, After the Sun considers how emergencies at a Northern latitude reverberate globally. The exhibition presents new artistic engagements that build on the Nordic region’s tradition of depicting the natural world, and asks what art is generated in response to the intensifying global climate crisis.

“As the inaugural exhibition of the Nordic Art & Culture Initiative at the Buffalo AKG, After the Sun is a fitting example of the prescient, global projects that define the Buffalo AKG,” said Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elvin Director. “The Nordic Art & Culture Initiative creates an unprecedented international platform for new art and pressing subject matter. We are honored to present After the Sun and to partner with Gammel Strand in Copenhagen to extend the exhibition’s reach across the Atlantic.”

Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, observed, “This remarkable exhibition envisions the scope of our vulnerability as a species, as we navigate an existence that is increasingly, consistently in extremis. Encompassing artists who approach the pressing subject of climate change from vastly different perspectives, it is a case study for the ways artists can help us see otherwise opaque aspects of life in a time of natural and manmade crises.”

The exhibition’s title is drawn from Danish writer Jonas Eika’s collection of short stories Efter Solen (After the Sun), winner of the Nordic Literature Prize in 2019. Eike has said that the book emerged from a sense of personal and political exhaustion, a feeling that he believes is shared by many: “That the way we imagine the future is mostly just a continuation of what there is today. The future, as a potential for change and a source of political energy, seems to be missing.” 

As Eika’s book addresses the profound challenge of responding to forces that pull us apart, the artists included in After the Sun grapple with how artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.

Occupying the entire first floor of the Buffalo AKG’s new Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building’s special exhibition galleries along with outdoor space on the museum campus, After the Sun presents artistic responses to the climate crisis that range from the analytical to the speculative, the poetic to the political. Some artists consider the repercussions of temporary solutions to climate change, among them Lea Porsager (born Frederikssund, Denmark, 1981, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), in whose hands a sequence of massive disused windmill blade fragments become poignant ruins. Amitai Romm’s (born Jerusalem, 1985, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) slight but throbbing sculptures and sound work are among several in the exhibition to approach science and data related to the environment from a visceral, embodied position. Olof Marsja’s (born Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, 1986, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden) plant-human hybrid sculptures are contemporary guardian figures, related to indigenous knowledge and the artist’s own Sámi tradition. These, and all the artists in After the Sun explore what a meaningful engagement with nature might mean today and how we might forge practical, theoretical, and metaphysical paths forward.

Participating Artists

Sigurður Ámundason (b. 1986, Reykjavik, lives in Reykjavik, Iceland),  

Felipe de Ávila Franco (b. 1982, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, lives in Helsinki, Finland), 

Á. Birna Björnsdóttir (b. 1990, Reykjavik, lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands), 

Ragna Bley (b. 1986, Uppsala, Sweden, lives in Oslo, Norway), 

Sara-Vide Ericson (b. 1983, Bollnäs, Sweden, lives in Älvkarhed, Sweden),  

Carola Grahn (b. 1982, Jåhkåmåhkke, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Malmö, Sweden), 

Alma Heikkilä (b. 1984, Pälkäne, Finland, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980, Jeju Island, South Korea, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen (b. 1982, Helsinki, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Linda Lamignan (b. 1988, Stavanger, Norway, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 

Timimie Märak (b. 1988, Stockholm, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  

Olof Marsja (b. 1986, Gällivare, Lapland, Sweden, lives in Gothenburg, Sweden), 

Santiago Mostyn (b. 1981, San Francisco, lives in Stockholm, Sweden),  

Lea Porsager (b. 1981, Frederikssund, Denmark, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark), 

Amitai Romm (b. 1985, Jerusalem, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark),  

Vidha Saumya (b. 1984, Patna, India, lives in Helsinki, Finland),  

Inuuteq Storch (b. 1989, Sisimiut, lives in Sisimiut, Greenland),  

Jenna Sutela (b. 1983, Turku, Finland, lives in Berlin),  

Apichaya [Piya] Wanthiang (b. 1987, Bangkok, lives in Oslo, Norway),  

Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (b. 1988, Hamburg, lives in Oslo, Norway)  

After the Sun—Forecasts from the North is the inaugural exhibition of the Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative. It is co-organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Gammel Strand, Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Buffalo AKG Nordic Art & Culture Initiative is a unique platform in North America for art of the Nordic region in a broad sense, encompassing artists whose practices are tied to a landmass that includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the Åland Islands. The Initiative is dedicated to organizing programs and exhibitions at the Buffalo AKG and in the Buffalo community with artists and cultural producers across disciplines who are substantively associated with the Nordic region. As part of the Initiative, over the next sixty years the Buffalo AKG will develop North America’s leading collection of contemporary art from the Nordic region.

BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM

1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222

buffaloakg.org

Andy Warhol & Keith Haring Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - "Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life"

Andy Warhol & Keith Haring 

Party of Life

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

28 June 2024 - 26 January 2025

Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life

Museum Brandhorst

28 June 2024 - 26 January 2025

Design: Parat.cc

Nan Goldin 

Keith Haring & Andy Warhol at Palladium, 1985

© Nan Goldin, Courtesy Nan Goldin, New York

Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Undated

Polaroid, 10.8 x 8.35 cm

© Collection: Keith Haring Foundation, New York, NY

They were pop stars, social butterflies and (self-)marketing geniuses: Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were not only two of the most famous artists of the second half of the 20th century. They also revolutionized established ideas about art and its distribution. Andy Warhol’s pop paintings and Keith Haring’s dancing figures are part of our collective visual memory and are still omnipresent to this day in the areas of advertising, fashion, music and film. Despite the large age gap and their different styles, the two artists were friends and companions. In New York's art and clubbing scene, they met and influenced each other—and many others besides.

With “Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life,” Museum Brandhorst presents the world’s first comprehensive institutional exhibition dedicated to the two artists. The title of the show is borrowed from the motto of Keith Haring’s birthday celebrations: “Party of Life” tells of the cosmos of the 1980s, of MTV, discos, voguing, hip-hop, New Wave and graffiti. Within this context, the exhibition traces the two artists’ friendship. It reveals parallels in their artistic identity, their openness to cooperations and community projects, and their inclusive attitude: Art and its messages should reach as many people as possible.

Keith Haring

Andy Mouse, 1985

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 122,4 x 122,4 cm

Rogath Family Collection, courtesy of Prince & Wooster

© The Keith Haring Foundation

The exhibition shows over 120 works by Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, collaborations between the two as well as works realized together with artists, performers, authors or music and fashion icons of the time. Alongside key works, it focuses on film and photography, archival material as well as posters, records and everyday objects designed by the artists. “Party of Life” will open up new perspectives on both artists at Museum Brandhorst, which houses the largest Andy Warhol collection outside the United States with more than 120 works, as well as a growing body of Keith Haring works.

Curated by Franziska Linhardt in collaboration with Arthur Fink

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

Artist Thu-Van Tran @ Almine Rech New York — "In spring, ghosts return" Exhibition

Thu-Van Tran 

In spring, ghosts return 

Almine Rech New York 

May 7 — Jun 15, 2024 

Almine Rech New York, Tribeca presents In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Forming the focal point of her exhibition In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran’s Colors of Grey evokes a world of intense paradox. Vivid hues enact their own negation, their multiplicity eclipsed through their mixing by the emergence of a gray singularity. Differentiation morphs into that which is almost indistinguishable. Begun in 2012 as a poetic reckoning with the so-called Rainbow Herbicides that the United States weaponized against Vietnam during Operation Ranch Hand, the series has taken many forms, from wall-sized frescos to monumental paintings. In her most recent expression, the artist explores expanded vistas on a more intimate scale. These works engage the legacies of Renaissance perspective, 19th-century panoramas, and Christian devotional painting only to subvert them through a meditation on landscape that unfurls across metaphoric and geographical registers.

Arranged at the height of windows with a shared horizon line, the paintings in the exhibition offer a 360-degree view onto a compositionally and conceptually complex miasma of colorful abstraction. Their astounding beauty is rooted in horror. Indeed, the gestural washes that veil the canvas belie the steely logic of Tran’s politically encoded color theory. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed 19 million gallons of chemical weapons onto the jungles of Vietnam. Agent Orange was the most notorious, but Agents White, Blue, Pink, Green, and Purple were also unleashed in an act of chemical warfare that caused decades of ecological and human devastation. Limiting her palette to the colors used to identify these lethal herbicides, Tran paints each color alongside its opposite, gradually producing a shroud of gray pigment that floats above its originally colorful substrate. Her systematic approach results in a painterly negation that poetically figures the trauma of neocolonial occupation. This is a landscape twice abstracted. First, through the familiar gestural marks of nonobjective painting and, second, through the coda waiting to be deciphered in the very colors that Tran initially employs. 

The resulting panoramic installation that encircles the viewer formally echoes a system of visual representation popularized at the height of colonial expansion. Offering the public an immersive, even cinematic viewing experience, the panorama technique was patented in 1787 to instant acclaim. Visitors flocked to spectacles such as the “panorama du commerce” at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, where seamlessly fused canvases hung in the round detailed scenes of colonial trade across the French empire. Commissioned to coincide with the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the panorama was a magnum opus of Orientalist painting. Allegories representing each country left no room for doubt as to the hierarchy of civilizations according to the French: Europe was represented as the arts and architecture, while Asia was reduced to elephants and a hookah. 

Conversely, Tran’s installation works against the panorama’s historical roots in imperialist expansion. Traditional panoramas borrowed a compositional style adopted from military protocols used to survey enemy land. They delivered scenes of heightened realism, typically from a bird’s-eye view. Tran immerses the viewer in a shifting landscape of suggestion and abstraction. Rather than indoctrinating viewers through an illusionistic palimpsest deployed to conceal violent conquest, the artist confronts the perpetual unfolding of imperialist aggression through the enigmatic commingling of color, form, and perception.

In In spring, ghosts return, Tran introduces an additional structural element that mitigates the surveilling mode of observation courted in 19th-century panoramas. Interrupting the revolving pan of paintings are two triptychs, whose triple-paneled format borrows from Christian devotional painting. An altar is a threshold to divine mystery. In the Christian tradition, it illustrates the apotheosis toward which all other elements in the church, such as the stations of the cross, narratively progress. Its appearance here is a reminder of forces greater than the visible world and its conquest. This formal intercession in the rhythm of the panorama suggests space for contemplation. The panoramic effect, in turn, exerts reciprocal pressure on the altarpieces, confounding the notion of chronological time fundamental to the Christian worldview. Rather than an explicit narrative mapped onto an advancing timeline, the horizon line that laces across Tran’s panorama suggests a continual cycle akin to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. In spring, ghosts return reminds us that everything circles back to a point of origin only to begin again.

Tran’s incorporation of altars in the form of dual triptychs invites a spiritual dimension into what might otherwise stand as an exercise in history painting. As the exhibition title suggests, there are ghosts in this landscape. Apparitions coalesce and evanesce in the swirling veils of paint, pointing to mourning, mystery, and the possibility of communion. Tran has previously described her preoccupation with “the melancholy of a shifting landscape into which we must project and construct ourselves.”1  For centuries, Western painting prized various perspectival systems developed in the Renaissance, whose power lay in the promise of projection. These systems relied on the metaphor of the window, placing the viewer in a fixed position relative to the scene before them. A window might provide a view, but Tran’s panorama invites us to choose our own perspective. In this haunted terrain, the act of seeing is also a radical act of reconstruction that forges a future through the vivid condensation of history in the present. 

— Katherine Rochester, PhD, art historian and curator 

1  Hélène Guenin,“Interview: Thu-Van Tran and Hélène Guenin,” in Thu-Van Tran: Nous vivons dans l’éclat, ed. Hélène Guenin (Nice: MAMAC; Paris: Editions Dilecta, 2023),141.

ALMINE RECH NEW YORK

361 Broadway, New York, NY 10013 

www.alminerech.com

Artist Movana Chen @ Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong - Words Heartbeats / Love Letters Exhibition

Movana Chen

Words Heartbeats / Love Letters

Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong

28 March - 11 May 2024

MOVANA CHEN

Love Letters #15 (1998 - 2010), 2023

Knitted shredded love letters, 13 x 21cm

© Movana Chen, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

MOVANA CHEN

Old letters from 1989 to 2023

© Movana Chen, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

MOVANA CHEN

Love letters #11, (1995) (Shredded), 2023

© Movana Chen, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery presents Love Letters, a new body of work by MOVANA CHEN. Representative of her practice, Chen has meticulously archived the written communications from her loved ones spanning over three decades. Delving into a deeply personal aspect of communication, Movana Chen aims to reflect the female labour, personal and shared memories by way of materials transformation and decontextualization.

Love Letters is a collection of over 180 hand-written letters sent to the artist between 1989 - 2023 from friends, family and loved ones. The letters are shredded, deconstructed and knitted into visceral sculptural forms, locking old memories away in a suspended moment while threading them into a renewed manifestation of love.

Movana Chen explains:"These works are the reminder of an older time, when life had a slower pace, allowing more intimacy to be appreciated through the rich expressions contained in each letter and the joy of waiting."

Love letters #5 was created from a series of letters dated in 1991 when Movana Chen moved from Shenzhen, China to Hong Kong with her family. Re-visiting these old letters is a gesture of connecting with past memories. Assembled from the fragments of paper, the process of reconstructing is a journey of healing and meditation for Movana Chen.

MOVANA CHEN  陳麗雲

Movana Chen (b.1974) is a Hong Kong-based artist who studied at the London College of Fashion and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Hong Kong.

Movana Chen's multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the exploration of communication across cultures, deconstructing and reconstructing dictionaries, maps and paper forms to create sculptural installations and wearable works that represent new forms of language. Her work is a fusion of media, performance, installation and sculpture.

Movana Chen's works are in public and private collection globally, including the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Hong Kong; Louis Vuitton, Hong Kong; Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong; William Lim Collection, Hong Kong; The Burger Collection, Switzerland & Hong Kong; M+, Hong Kong and CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong. Movana Chen is currently participating in the Thailand Biennale (The Open World) in Chiang Rai, Thailand.

In February 2024 a monumental installation Knitting Conversations by Movana Chen was presented at the Focus Gallery of M+.

FLOWERS GALLERY HONG KONG

49 Tung Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

www.flowersgallery.com

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century @ Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

THE CULTURE: HIP HOP AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Through May 26, 2024

Monica Ikegwu  

Open/Closed, 2021 

Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 91.4 cm each, 

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis 

© Monica Ikegwu

Monica Ikegwu  

Open/Closed, 2021 

Oil on canvas, 121.9 x 91.4 cm each, 

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis 

© Monica Ikegwu

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century 

Exhibition view © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024 

Photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI Crew

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip hop, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt dedicates a major interdisciplinary exhibition to hip hop’s profound influence on our current artistic and cultural landscape

Hip hop first emerged in the Bronx, New York, in the 1970s as a cultural movement among Black and Latinx youth. It quickly proliferated through large-scale block parties to encompass an entire culture that focuses around four pillars: MCing (or rapping); DJing; breaking (or breakdancing); and graffiti writing and visual art. From its inception, hip hop critiqued dominant structures and cultural narratives and offered new avenues for expressing diasporic experiences and creating alternative systems of power—which lead to a fifth pillar of social and political consciousness and knowledge-building. Hip hop has now evolved into a global phenomenon that has driven numerous innovations in music, fashion, and technology, as well as the visual and performing arts.

Grounded in the origins of hip hop in the US yet with a focus on art and music, the exhibition “THE CULTURE” features over 100 artworks mainly from the last twenty years, including paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos, and fashion, by internationally renowned contemporary artists such as Lauren Halsey, Julie Mehretu, Tschabalala Self, Arthur Jafa, Khalil Joseph, Virgil Abloh, and Gordon Parks. It is structured around six themes: Pose, Brand, Adornment, Tribute, Ascension, and Language. “THE CULTURE” illuminates hip hop’s unprecedented economic, social, and cultural resources that have made hip hop a global phenomenon and established it as the artistic canon of our time. The exhibition furthermore addresses contemporary issues and debates—from identity, racism, and appropriation to sexuality, feminism, and empowerment.

Sebastian Baden, director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, says: “Hip hop is a socially formative and influential cultural movement. The Schirn is presenting ‘THE CULTURE’ for the first time in Germany in an artistic exhibition context. In collaboration with our international partners, we show the immense influence that hip hop has had on contemporary art and pop culture in the past twenty years. With an extensive accompanying program, the Schirn additionally features the local hip hop scene—both its connections and its differences to US history, as well as contemporary debates around empowerment and identity.”

The cocurators of the exhibition Asma Naeem (Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director, Baltimore Museum of Art), Gamynne Guillotte (former Chief Education Officer, Baltimore Museum of Art), Hannah Klemm (former Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Saint Louis Art Museum) and Andréa Purnell (Community Collaborations Manager, Saint Louis Art Museum) note: “Hip hop’s influence on culture is so significant that it has become the new canon—an alternate set of ideals of artistic beauty and excellence centered around Afro-Latinx identities and histories—and one that rivals the Western art historical canon around which many museums orient and develop exhibitions. The exhibition ‘THE CULTURE’ shows that many of the most compelling visual artists working today are directly engaging with central tenets of this canon in their practices. Across such vastly disparate fields as painting, performance, fashion, architecture, and computer programming, the visual culture of hip hop, along with its subversive tactics and its tackling of social justice, surface everywhere in the art of today.”

El Franco Lee II

DJ Screw in Heaven, 2008 

Acrylic on canvas, 96.5 x 121.9 cm 

Private Collection, Houston 

© El Franco Lee II

Tschabalala Self

Seta's Room 1996, 2022 

Photo transfer, paper, acrylic paint, thread 

and painted canvas on canvas, 243.8 x 213.4 cm 

Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corris, London 

© Tschabalala Self

Zéh Palito

It was all a dream, 2022 

Acrylic on canvas, 170 x 175 cm 

Courtesy of the artist, Simões de Assis and Luce Gallery 

© Zéh Palito

EXHIBITION THEMES

In six themed sections, “THE CULTURE” presents artworks in dynamic dialogue with fashion and historical ephemera. Several of the works are directly related to hip-hop songs, which can be accessed and listened to in the exhibition via QR codes. Among the fashion highlights are looks from Virgil Abloh’s collections for Louis Vuitton, legendary streetwear brand Cross Colours, and Dapper Dan’s collaboration with Gucci. Highlights of the historic ephemera include a copy of the Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rammellzee album, Beat Bop / Test Pressing (1983), a Vivienne Westwood Buffalo hat (1984) made famous by Pharrell Williams at the 2014 Grammy awards, and several of Lil’ Kim’s iconic wigs recreated by the original hair stylist, Dionne Alexander.

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century 

Installation view Dionne Alexander, Lil’ Kim Wigs, 1999-2001 

© Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, 

Photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI Crew

POSE

The works in this section explore what one’s gestures, stance, and mode of presentation can communicate to others. Artists like Michael Vasquez, Nina Chanel Abney, and Tschabalala Self explore and explode stereotypes of gender and race, examine the line between appreciation and appropriation, consider the relationship between audience and performer, and ask which bodies are considered dangerous or vulnerable—and who decides. For some, self-presentation is a means of survival, for others a way to claim space in a hostile world, and for still others a tool for changing dominant narratives about what can be communicated through the body.

BRAND

The concept of a brand is not limited to differentiating and marketing commercial goods but extends to how an individual uses available communication technologies—including social media—to position oneself in the public sphere. In previous decades, hip-hop artists have functioned as unofficial promoters of major brands that aligned with their style and desired public persona. The borrowing of luxury brands to create something unique questions the notion of the “original,” as in the fashion by the legendary designer Daniel R. Day, better known as Dapper Dan—in turn underlining the uneasy relationship between symbols of luxury and those that brands deliberately exclude. Whether designing fashion, recording music, or making art, artists blur the boundaries between these art forms, between being in business and being the business. The exhibition presents works by Kudzanai Chiurai, Larry W. Cook, and a video produced in a collaboration between Arthur Jafa, Malik Sayeed, and Elissa Blount Moorhead, which address consumerism, the ostentatious flaunting of luxury goods, and the complex and entrenched notions of masculinity that are common among many hip-hop stars.

Hans Willis Thomas

Black Power, 2006 

Chromogenic print, 40.6 x 50.8 cm 

Barret Barrera Projects 

© Hank Willis Thomas

ADORNMENT

While style often signifies class and politics, almost no culture dresses as self-referentially—or as influentially—as hip hop. From Lil’ Kim’s technicolor wigs to the exuberant, excessive layering of gold chains by Big Daddy Kane and Rakim, some of the most important and unique styles have originated in hip hop. Artists such as Miguel Luciano and Hank Willis Thomas use imagery of jewelry flashing, grills glinting in smiling mouths, and iconic Air Force One sneakers. Works by Murjoni Merriweather, Yvonne Osei, and Lauren Halsey celebrate synthetic hair as a confident means of adornment in Black communities, as well as hairstyling as an art form in its own right. Adornment in the culture of hip hop can resist Eurocentric ideals of beauty and challenge concepts of taste and decorum. 

Derricks Adams 

Heir to the Throne, 2021 

Non fungible token, Duration: 11 seconds 

Private Collection

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century 

Installation view, Derrick Adams, Style Variation Grid 10, 2019  

© Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, 

Photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI Crew

Roberto Lugo

Street Shrine 1: A Notorious Story (Biggie), 2019 

Glazed ceramic, 137.2 x 68.6 cm 

Collection of Peggy Scot and David Teplitzky 

© Roberto Lugo 

Photo: Neal Santos, courtesy Wexler Gallery

TRIBUTE

From name-dropping in a song to wearing a portrait of a deceased rapper on T-shirts, tributes, respects, and shout-outs are fundamental to hip-hop culture. These references proclaim influence and who matters, honor legacies, and create networks of artistic associations. Elevating artists and styles contribute to hip hop’s canonization—as certain artworks, songs, and rappers are collectively recognized for their artistic excellence and historical impact. Carrie Mae Weems photographs the musician Mary J. Blige wearing a crown for W Magazine, the non-fungible token (NFT) Heir to the Throne (2021) by Derrick Adams is inspired by Jay-Z’s debut studio album, Reasonable Doubt (1996), and Roberto Lugo creates the ceramic work Street Shrine 1: A Notorious Story (Biggie) (2019). Hip hop as a global art form has become a touchstone for artists of the twenty-first century. As visual artists trace hip hop’s conceptual and social lineage through tribute, they engage with the idea that the art historical canon—previously homogenous, white, and stable—is fluid depending on your own background and preferences, questioning what is beautiful, who is iconic, and whose histories are valued.

ASCENSION

Death—or the specter of it—along with notions of ascension and the afterlife frequently appear in hip-hop lyrics, from pouring one out for a friend who has passed, to the precarity of being Black in an urban environment, to meditations on the kind of immortality conferred by fame. The exhibition features works inspired by themes of ascent in the culture, such as Ascent (2018) from the DuRags series by John Edmonds. Kahlil Joseph’s video work m.A.A.d. (2014) paints a lush, contemporary portrait of Compton, California, the hometown of Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar. A song title by Lamar also provides the title for the collage Promise You Will Sing About Me (2019) by Robert Hodge. Hip hop is a cultural form that artists use to process, grieve, and remember those lost. 

LANGUAGE

Hip hop is intrinsically an art form about language: the visual language of graffiti, a musical language that includes scratching and sampling, and, of course, the written and spoken word. Call-and-response chants, followed by rap rhymes and lyrics overlaid on tracks, form the foundations of hip-hop music. In addition to the poetry of music, one of the most recognizable markers of hip hop is graffiti. Since the 1970s, graffiti writers have colored city trains, overpasses, and walls with vibrant hues of spray paint. Many writers sign their works with recognizable “tags.” Their explorations take the recognizable shapes of letters and numbers, pushing their forms to—and beyond—the limit of legibility. The Schirn is showing works by, among others, Jean-Michel Basquiat, RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ (Rammellzee), Adam Pendleton, and Gajin Fujita, who implement core elements of graffiti on paper, canvas, or large-format wooden panels. Some messages are meant for anyone to understand, while others are coded in references, technologies, or forms that require insider knowledge—asserting the right to not be universally understood.

The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century 

Installation view Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola 

CAMOUFLAGE #105 (Metropolis), 2020 

© Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, 

Photo: Emily Piwowar / NÓI Crew

Hassan Haijjaj

Cardi B Unity. 2017/1438 (Gregorian/Hijri)  

From the series My Rockstars 

Lambda metallic print on aluminum sheet, 

wood, and plasic green tea boxes 

140.3 x 101.6 x 10 cm 

Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

Yvonne Osei

EXTENSIONS, 2018 

Single-channel video (color, sound), 6:04 min., film still 

© 2018 Yvonne Osei. All rights reserved 

Courtesy of the artist and Bruno David Gallery

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

Abbey Williams, Adam Pendleton, Adrian Octavius Walker, Alex de Mora, Alvaro Barrington, Amani Lewis, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Babe Ruth, Baby Phat, Bruno Baptistelli, Carrie Mae Weems, Chance the Rapper, Charles Mason III, Cross Colours, Daniel “Dapper Dan” Day, Damon Davis, Deana Lawson, Derrick Adams, Devan Shimoyama, Devin Allen, Dionne Alexander, El Franco Lee II, Ernest Shaw Jr., Fahamu Pecou, Gajin Fujita, Hank Willis Thomas, Hassan Hajjaj, James Brown, Jayson Musson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jen Everett, John Edmonds, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Jordan Casteel, José Parlá, Joyce J. Scott, Julie Mehretu, Kahlil Joseph, Kahlil Robert Irving, Kudzanai Chiurai, LA II, Larry W. Cook, Lauren Halsey, Luis Gispert, Maï Lucas, Malcolm McLaren, Maxwell Alexandre, Megan Lewis, Michael Vasquez, Miguel Luciano, Miquel Brown, Monica Ikegwu, Murjoni Merriweather, Nina Chanel Abney, NIA JUNE, Kirby Griffin, and APoetNamedNate, Nicholas Galanin, Pharrell Williams, Rammellzee, Rammellzee and K-Rob with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rashaad Newsome, Robert Hodge, Robert Pruitt, Roberto Lugo, Rozeal, Shabez Jamal, Sheila Rashid, Shinique Smith, Shirt, Stan Douglas, Tariku Shiferaw, Telfar Clemens, Texas Isaiah and Ms. Boogie, The Isley Brothers, TNEG (Arthur Jafa, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Malik Sayeed), Travis Scott, Troy Lamarr Chew II, Tschabalala Self, Virgil Abloh, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Wales Bonner, Willy Chavarria, Wilmer Wilson IV, Yvonne Osei, Zéh Palito.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum, and is presented in collaboration with Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

Stan Douglas 

ISDN, 2022 

Two-channel video, 6:41:28 hours (video variations) 

82:02:52 hours (musical variations), film still 

© Stan Douglas 

Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner and Victoria Miro 

The exhibition at the Schirn continues at the Kunstverein Familie Montez with the video installation ISDN by Stan Douglas, and is supplemented by an exhibition on the milestones of hip hop at MOMEM, an event organized by the Diamant Offenbach: Museum of Urban Culture and a film series on the fifty-year history of hip hop at the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum.

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT 

Römerberg, 60311 Frankfurt am Main 

schirn.de

THE CULTURE - HIP HOP AND CONTEMPORARY ART IN THE 21ST CENTURY

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT - FEBRUARY 29 – MAY 26, 2024

Exposition Andres Serrano @ Musée Maillol, Paris - Portraits de l'Amérique - Photographies

ANDRES SERRANO 

Portraits de l'Amérique 

Musée Maillol, Paris 

27 avril - 20 octobre 2024

Andres Serrano. Musée Maillol 

© Tempora / dbcreation

Andres Serrano. Musée Maillol 

© Tempora / dbcreation

Andres Serrano. Musée Maillol 

© Tempora / dbcreation

Présenter l’œuvre d’Andres Serrano en Europe, à Paris, en cette année 2024 ne tient pas du hasard. La campagne qui se profile pour élire le 47e Président des États-Unis d’Amérique sera à n’en pas douter d’une violence extrême tant les lignes de fracture de la société américaine sont profondes et nombreuses. Tant les aspirations sont divergentes. Trump a longtemps passé pour un histrion isolé qui devait à sa seule fortune considérable d’avoir pu imprimer sa marque sur le Grand Old Party. L’image d’un Trump fou et solitaire a longtemps prévalu. Justifiant même au lancement de sa campagne pour la Présidence que ses propos, généralement outranciers, soient relégués aux pages « Entertainment » d’organes de presse aussi peu clairvoyants que le New York Times. Trump n’est pas un joueur solitaire. Andres Serrano en a fait la démonstration jubilatoire en 2019 avec l’installation The Game : All Things Trump et Jerry Saltz en a détaillé les enjeux dans le livre qui accompagnait l’exposition. Ce même Trump présent, en 2004, dans une des séries les plus populaires de Serrano, America, initiée au lendemain du 11 septembre, constitue un point d’ancrage à partir duquel la présente exposition a été conçue : d’un drapeau témoin du traumatisme à un autre, plus ancien, inscrit dans la série Infamous de 2019.

ANDRES SERRANO

Chuckling Charlie The Laughing Robot (The Robots), 2022 

© Andres Serrano, Courtesy de l’artiste et de la 

Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris / Bruxelles

ANDRES SERRANO

"Flag Face" Circa 1890 American Flag (Infamous), 2019 

© Andres Serrano, Courtesy de l’artiste et de la 

Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris / Bruxelles

ANDRES SERRANO

Ruger.22 Long Rifle Mark II Target II (Objects of Desire), 1992 

© Andres Serrano, Courtesy de l’artiste et de la 

Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris / Bruxelles

ANDRES SERRANO

Piss Christ (Immersions), 1987 

© Andres Serrano, Courtesy de l’artiste et de la 

Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris / Bruxelles

Tempora et le Musée Maillol proposent donc un voyage dans l’œuvre « américaine » d'Andres Serrano depuis ses premières réalisations, au mitan des années 1980, jusqu’à ses plus récentes créations. Les séries s’articulent sans nécessairement obéir à une chronologie stricte. Native Americans (1995-1996) introduit Nomads (1990) pour rendre compte du double regard que l’artiste porte sur la société. Les Homeless constituent un sujet permanent dans l’oeuvre de Serrano comme en témoigne l’installation des cartons achetés à des sans-abris et exposés, au sein de ses propres expositions, depuis une dizaine d’années. Si Nomads explore la marginalité des laissés-pour-compte du rêve américain, The Klan (1990), d’une certaine manière, explore une autre facette de l’exclusion: celle des suprémacistes blancs dont les valeurs ont été de plus en plus largement rejetées par une Amérique moderne sans que leur sentiment de déclassement n’ait trouvé de réponse. De son regard objectif Andres Serrano nous invite à réfléchir à ce que l’image donne à voir, au-delà du piège que constitue son esthétisme raffiné. Derrière la beauté d’une croix, la souffrance ; au-delà de l’acier lumineux d’un Colt, la mort ; passé la forme picturale de la robe et du capuchon, la haine et le racisme. Étrangement, l’artiste qui avec le Piss Christ a été au cœur d’une des plus grandes polémiques liées à l’art aux USA, semble ne jamais vouloir prendre parti. Son regard revendique l’objectivité glacée du canon de revolver. Mais les sujets parlent d’eux-mêmes : The Morgue (1992) met en scène la mort comme ultime espace d’égalité devant la vie, Holy Works (2011) met en lumière l’hystérie religieuse ; Objects of Desire (1992), la pulsion mortifère galvanisée par le deuxième amendement qui assure la liberté du port d’arme ; Torture (2015), la violence d’État ; Infamous (2019) la permanence des préjugés aussi bien raciaux que sexistes…

De série en série, Andres Serrano livre un portrait de l’Amérique tel qu’il la croise au quotidien et tel qu’il la sent évoluer sous son objectif. La photographie devient ainsi un témoignage qui a largement conditionné la progression de son œuvre  : le choix du sujet renvoie désormais au projet d’inventaire qui traverse largement la création contemporaine. Puisant dans des plateformes comme Ebay ou dans des ventes publiques, Andres Serrano réunit un matériau anthropologique dont la photographie fixe le sens au-delà de la nomenclature. The Game: All Things Trump constitue à ce titre une expérience politique et artistique nouvelle. Nous espérons que les séries déployées ici permettront de mieux comprendre les enjeux qui déchirent l’Amérique dans l’attente de son 47e Président... dont dépendra largement le devenir du monde pour les années à venir. 

Le parcours de l’exposition traverse la carrière artistique d'Andres Serrano depuis la fin des années 80 jusqu’à aujourd’hui, non sur le mode d’une rétrospective chronologique mais bien en explorant les différentes facettes de son œuvre en lien direct avec la société américaine contemporaine dont il donne à voir ici un portrait multiple. A travers dix chapitres et quatre-vingt-neuf œuvres exposées, l’exposition parcourt quelques-unes des séries les plus emblématiques de l’artiste  : Native Americans, America, Nomads, Infamous, The Klan, Torture, Holy Works, Objects of Desire, Immersions, Bodily Fluids, Nudes, History of Sex, The Morgue, Robots, The Game : All Things Trump…

ANDRES SERRANO 

© Tempora / dbcreation

ANDRES SERRANO est né à New York (États-Unis) en 1950. Il vit et travaille à New York. Diplômé en 1969 de la Brooklyn Museum Art School de New York, Andres Serrano fait partie des artistes contemporains les plus reconnus de la scène internationale. Andres Serrano est représenté par la Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles, depuis 2012.

Commissariat collectif de l'exposition : Michel Draguet, Elie Barnavi, Benoît Remiche

MUSÉE MAILLOL

59-61 rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris

www.museemaillol.com