Kandinsky @ Musée Guggenheim Bilbao

Kandinsky

Musée Guggenheim Bilbao

Jusqu'au 23 mai 2021

Le Musée Guggenheim Bilbao présente Kandinsky, une exposition exhaustive de peintures et d’oeuvres sur papier de l’artiste VASILY KANDINSKY (Moscou 1866 – Neuilly-sur-Seine 1944) issue principalement des collections de la Fondation Solomon R. Guggenheim. Avec le soutien de la Fondation BBVA, l’exposition retrace l’évolution esthétique d’un pionnier de l’abstraction et d’un théoricien de l’esthétique de premier plan. Dans sa volonté de libérer la peinture de ses liens avec le monde “naturel”, Kandinsky devait découvrir un nouveau type de sujet exclusivement fondé sur la “nécessité intérieure” de l’artiste, une préoccupation majeure qui l’accompagna tout le long de sa vie.

C’est à Munich dans les années 1900 et au début des années 1910 que Kandinsky commença à explorer les possibilités expressives de la couleur et de la composition, mais il se vit contraint de quitter précipitamment l’Allemagne lors du déclenchement la Première guerre mondiale en 1914. Il revint alors à Moscou, sa ville natale, et son vocabulaire pictural commença alors à se faire l’écho des expérimentations utopiques de l’avant-garde russe dont les recherches se concentraient sur les formes géométriques en vue d’élaborer un langage esthétique universel. Par la suite, Kandinsky devait rejoindre le Bauhaus, une école allemande d’art et de design appliqué avec laquelle il partageait la conviction que l’art a le pouvoir de transformer l’individu et la société. Forcé de quitter l’Allemagne lors de la fermeture du Bauhaus sous la pression nazie en 1933, Kandinsky s’installa près de Paris où le surréalisme et les sciences naturelles influencèrent le développement d’une iconographie biomorphique dans ses oeuvres.

Plus qu’aucun autre artiste, Kandinsky est inextricablement lié à l’histoire de la Fondation Guggenheim, créée en New York en 1937. En 1929, l’industriel et fondateur du Musée, Solomon R. Guggenheim, commença à collectionner les oeuvres de Kandinsky, dont il fera la connaissance une année plus tard au Bauhaus de Dessau. Parcourant les étapes-clés de son développement artistique en quatre sections géographiques qui se déroulent tout au long de trois salles, cette exposition illustre l’évolution complète de sa trajectoire.

Les débuts : Munich

Kandinsky passe son enfance entre sa ville natale, Moscou, et Odessa (actuellement en Ukraine), au sein d’une famille qui encourage l’amour de l’art et de la musique. Il étudie le droit et l’économie, mais en 1895, il décide de changer de cap et devient l’un des responsables de la société moscovite d’arts graphiques Kushnerev. Uneannée plus tard, inspiré par une exposition d’impressionnistes français et par l’opéra Lohengrin de Richard Wagner, il se rend à Munich pour se consacrer à l’art. Les souvenirs de la Russie, des meubles décorés de couleurs vives ou des icônes chez les paysans, ainsi que l’historicisme romantique, la poésie lyrique, le folklore et la fantaisie, alimentent alors ses premières oeuvres.

Entre 1904 et 1907, Kandinsky et sa compagne, l’artiste allemande Gabriele Münter, voyagent dans toute l’Europe et en Afrique du Nord avant de revenir s’installer à nouveau à Munich en 1908. Les paysages multicolores bavarois que peint Kandinsky en 1908–09 présentent des éléments de composition liés à la gravure, comme les formes clairement tracées ou la perspective aplatie. Ces tableaux sont sensiblement différents de ses exercices néo-impressionnistes précédents, réalisés à base de légères touches de couleur. A partir de 1909, Kandinsky adopte un style toujours plus expressionniste. S’éloignant de la représentation de scènes naturelles, il se tourne vers la peinture d’histoires apocalyptiques. Quelques-uns des motifs récurrents de son travail, comme le cheval et le cavalier, symbolisent sa croisade contre les valeurs esthétiques conventionnelles et sa quête d’un futur plus spirituel au travers du pouvoir transformateur de l’art. Dans son combat contre les règles de la figuration, Kandinsky est convaincu que la couleur, la forme et la ligne peuvent traduire la “nécessité intérieure” de l’artiste en affirmations universellement compréhensibles et ainsi offrir une vision régénératrice du futur.

Pendant son séjour à Munich, Kandinsky dirige les principaux groupes de l’avant-garde de la ville, comme Phalanx (la Phalange) et la Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Nouvelle association d’artistes de Munich). Il publie plusieurs traités fondamentaux dont Du spirituel dans l’art. En 1911, il fonde avec Franz Marc Der Blaue  Reiter (le Cavalier bleu), une société hétérogène d’artistes qui s’intéressent au potentiel expressif de la couleur et à la résonance symbolique (souvent spirituelle) de la forme.

En 1913, les thèmes récurrents dans son œuvre, comme le cheval et le cavalier, les collines ondulées, les tours et les arbres, passent sous l’empire de la ligne et de la couleur. Au fur et à mesure que leurs contours calligraphiques et leurs formes rythmiques perdent peu à peu toute trace de leur origine figurative, Kandinsky commence à cultiver l’abstraction et à formuler ce qu’il appelle “la puissance insoupçonnée de la palette”.

Domaines cosmiques : de la Russie au Bauhaus

Lorsque la Première guerre mondiale éclate en 1914, Kandinsky se voit contraint de quitter l’Allemagne en raison de sa nationalité russe. Il revient à Moscou, sa ville natale, où l’avant-garde tâtonne en cherchant à formuler un langage esthétique universel au moyen de formes géométriques. Après avoir rompu avec Gabriele Münter et d’autres artistes allemands, Kandinsky observe les expérimentations de ses contemporains russes, mais se rend compte que leur démarche objective et matérialiste de ces derniers ne correspond pas à sa propre quête artistique de spiritualité.

En 1922, Kandinsky retourne en Allemagne avec sa femme, Nina, et commence à enseigner au Bauhaus, l’école d’art et de design appliqué fondée par l’architecte Walter Gropius et financée par l’État. Kandinsky y découvre une atmosphère favorable à sa conviction que l’art peut métamorphoser l’individu et la société. Il poursuit ses recherches sur la correspondance entre la couleur et la forme et sur leurs effets psychologiques et spirituels, et sur les formes géométriques, qu’il utilise en plans superposés, qui envahissent peu à peu son vocabulaire pictural. Ce changement est en partie dû à l’influence du type d’oeuvres qu’il avait vu en Russie. Toutefois Kandinsky continue à prendre ses distances de ce qu’il appelle l’art “mécaniste” des constructivistes et de l’art “pur” des suprématistes comme Kazimir Malevich, en insistant sur le fait que même les formes les plus abstraites possèdent un contenu expressif et émotionnel. Pour Kandinsky, le triangle incarne l’action et l’agressivité, le carré signifie la paix et le calme et le cercle, le royaume du spirituel et du cosmique.

C’est à ce moment que le travail de Kandinsky attire l’attention du collectionneur Solomon R. Guggenheim, qui, avec sa femme Irene et sa conseillère artistique Hilla Rebay, lui rend visite dans son atelier au Bauhaus de Dessau en 1930. Il y achète la monumentale Composition 8 (1923), ainsi que d’autres pièces. Kandinsky continue à enseigner au Bauhaus jusqu’en 1933, date à laquelle l’école est fermée sous la pression des nazis.

Mondes minuscules : Paris

Kandinsky passe les onze dernières années de sa vie près de Paris, à Neuilly-sur-Seine. Il arrive en France en décembre 1933 en provenance de l’Allemagne nazie après la fermeture du Bauhaus de Berlin où il enseignait. La période est remarquablement féconde pour Kandinsky, en dépit de l’instabilité politique et des pénuries qui vont suivre. L’artiste expérimente avec les matériaux (par exemple en combinant sable et pigment) et son vocabulaire formel présente une palette adoucie et des formes biomorphes. Même si Kandinsky collectionne les spécimens organiques et les encyclopédies scientifiques dès son séjour au Bauhaus, il n’introduit pas ce type d’iconographie dans son travail avant 1934. Les compositions complexes de cette étape qui évoquent les univers minuscules d’organismes vivants sont clairement influencées par ses relations avec le surréalisme, avecl’art de Jean Arp et de Joan Miró, et par son intérêt pour les sciences naturelles, notamment pour l’embryologie, la zoologie et la botanique. Kandinsky montre une claire prédilection pour les tons pastel (rose, violet, turquoise et doré) qui rappellent les couleurs de ses origines russes.

Au cours de sa dernière période, Kandinsky conçoit une synthèse entre les thèmes de prédilection qui ont jalonné sa carrière, son passage par le Bauhaus et la pratique de ses contemporains. Il travaille à grande échelle dans des formats dont les fonds sombres rappellent ses toiles expressionnistes et ses peintures inspirées des légendes russes. Il y incorpore aussi des motifs qui renvoient à Paul Klee et aux surréalistes qui restent actifs à Paris, en dépit de sa réticence à s’associer à eux. Dans Autour du cercle (1940), cette influence est perceptible dans la composition complexe et dynamique de formes biomorphes ludiques. Vers le milieu de 1942, les pénuries de la guerre conduisent l’artiste à réaliser de petites oeuvres sur panneau, très éloignées des grandsformats de son travail  antérieur à Paris. Mais il continue à creuser le sillon de compositions imaginatives qui reflètent de plus en plus son intérêt pour les sciences, en s’inspirant d’illustrations de biologie parues dans revues et encyclopédies.

Pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les autorités allemandes confisquent l’oeuvre de Kandinsky et d’autres peintres modernes qu’ils considèrent comme de l’“art dégénéré”. En Union Soviétique, le stalinisme ferme des musées et relègue les toiles de Kandinsky dans des réserves. L’artiste décède en 1944 à 78 ans, en laissant derrière lui une oeuvre abondante.

L’industriel et fondateur du Musée qui porte son nom, Solomon R. Guggenheim, commence à collectionner le travail de Kandinsky en 1929, et son engagement pour l’art moderne le conduit à inaugurer à New York en 1939 le Musée de peinture non objective (Museum of Non-Objective Painting), précurseur du Musée Solomon R. Guggenheim. Aujourd’hui, la Fondation Guggenheim détient plus de 150 pièces de cet artiste fondamental.

Commissaire de l'exposition : Megan Fontanella, conservatrice au département « Modern Art & Provenance » du Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

KANDINSKI

Catalogue de l'exposition

A l’occasion de cette exposition, le Musée Guggenheim Bilbao publie un catalogue illustré avec un essai de Tracey Bashkoff et une série de brèves entrées signées par Karole P.B. Vail.

MUSEE GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO

Avenida Abandoibarra, 2 - 48009 Bilbao

www.guggenheimbilbao.es

Tales of Our Time @ Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Tales of Our Time
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
November 4, 2016 – March 10, 2017

Chia-En Jao (b. 1976, Taichung, Taiwan)

Taxi, 2016

Color UHD video, with sound

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Chia-En Jao

Sun Xun (b. 1980, Fuxin, Liaoning Province)

Mythological Time, 2016 (details)

Two-channel color HD animated video, with sound, and ink, graphite and acrylic on mulberry bark paper

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Sun Xun

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Tales of Our Time, an exhibition featuring eight newly commissioned, large-scale works by artists born in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. This is the second exhibition of The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative, a long-term research, curatorial, and collections-building program at the Guggenheim Museum.

Though diverse in subjects and strategies, the works are united by the artists’ use of storytelling to propose alternative ways of looking at place. Working in drawing, animation, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and participatory intervention, the artists in the exhibition address the concept of geography and territory in ways as specific as where they are based or as big as China itself, which they see as a concept constantly being questioned and reinvented. These artists freely cross divides to examine the tensions between past and present, myth and fact, reality and dreams, rationality and absurdity, and individuality and collectivity.

The artists represented in Tales of Our Time are Chia-En Jao, Kan Xuan, Sun Xun, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Tsang Kin-Wah, Yangjiang Group, Zhou Tao.

Tales of Our Time is organized by Xiaoyu Weng, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art, and Hou Hanru, Consulting Curator, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative. The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative is part of the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative, directed by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art and Senior Advisor, Global Arts. Kyung An, Assistant Curator, Asian Art, provides curatorial support. All commissioned works will enter the Guggenheim’s collection.

“Curators Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru have taken a dynamic and collaborative approach, as they worked closely with the commissioned artists to explore the questions and insights that drive these art practices. We hope that these works will inform new understanding of global contemporary art through the lens of Chinese culture today,” stated Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “The Guggenheim is grateful to The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation for its sustained commitment to this effort.”

“The artists represented in Tales of Our Time vary greatly in their practices and viewpoints,” says Xiaoyu Weng. “But they share a broad perspective, one that places China’s culture, history, and social reality in the context of the wider world. And like so many artists today, they register acute discomfort with the tension between the personal experiences of regular people and the dominant narratives and conventions of power.”

The exhibition’s title refers to the 1936 book Gushi xin bian (Old Tales Retold) by the influential Chinese modernist, social activist, and literary giant Lu Xun. In the book, Lu reinvents Chinese legends, as he considers these tales to be not only a literary genre, but also a strategy for critiquing social conditions and reconstructing history through storytelling.

Tales of Our Time is installed on two Tower Levels of the museum. Visitors may enter Tower Level 4 through a passageway lined with fantastic visions inspired by the natural world, drawn in the classical Chinese style on traditional bark paper by Sun Xun (b. 1980). Sun’s installation Mythological Time (2016) centers on his hometown of Fuxin in northeastern China, a coal-mining town that was once the pride of modern-era Chinese industrialization, but which the artist portrays as merely a fleeting scene over many millennia. A second monumental wall-size painting by Sun Xun depicting a surreal prehistoric landscape is also on view. Two video streams are projected onto its surface, sending animated creatures cavorting next to those drawn on paper with ink and acrylics.

Taxi (2016), a video installation, presents conversations conducted by the artist Chia-En Jao (b. 1976) with taxi drivers in Taipei. The artist asked drivers to take him to historically contested destinations in the city, such as a branch of Chang Hwa Bank where a mass protest was suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek’s military regime in 1947, the Presidential Office Building, the Grand Hotel, or the National Taiwan Museum. Recorded documentary style, the conversations meander through difficult memories of the Japanese occupation and martial law to present-day concerns. The artist has also created a flag for the installation, a traditional coat of arms representing many aspects of Taiwanese society, including its aboriginal communities. Through this investigation into the powerful connection between history and storytelling, Jao creates a mental map of Taipei that honors individual memory and experience.

Zhou Tao (b. 1976, Changsha, Hunan Province)

Land of the Throat, 2016

Installation with two-channel color HD video, with sound

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Zhou Tao

Nearby Taxi on Tower Level 4 is a futuristic, pod-like video installation by Zhou Tao (b. 1976).  Land of the Throat (2016) evokes a phenomenon characteristic of China’s urbanization today: the construction of the new and the consequential transformation of the land. Two synchronized videos composed of footage recorded in Guangdong, China and Arizona are projected onto opposite sides of an enclosed structure in the gallery space.  A cow chained to an abandoned industrial washing machine moos in an otherwise silent, desolate landscape; workers pour out of construction sites; children play aimlessly; dogs and rats roam near fishing holes; and rescue workers in Shenzhen care for survivors injured in the city’s 2015 landslide.

Kan Xuan (b. 1972, Xuancheng, Anhui Province)

Ku Lüè Er, 2016 (details)

13-channel color video installation, with sound, and sandstone and marble

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Kan Xuan

Kan Xuan (b. 1972) is an artist who splits her time between Beijing and Amsterdam. She traveled for more than five months to far-flung parts of China to photograph and research the remains of 110 ancient cities to create the multi-media installation Ku Lüè Er (2016), on view on Tower Level 4. On one gallery wall, eleven flat-screen monitors rhythmically loop videos of various lengths, each featuring hundreds of the thousands of mobile-phone images Kan took while traveling. The artist manipulated the color of the images and edited them in a stop-motion style. A lone video monitor is stationed on the floor, leaning over a floor projection of simple, notational maps created by the artist from her memories of site locations. The floor monitor sends out smacking, splashing sounds from balls of clay being thrown in a children’s game. A few stone sculptures hang nearby, their knotted forms echoing the fences that guarded these lost cities. Instead of providing historical knowledge or factual statistics, Kan Xuan engages China’s vast history of dynasties and evolution of territories through her intimate personal emotions and experience as a reminder of our collective memory and oblivion.

Yangjiang Group (est. 2002, Yangjiang, Guangdong Province)

After Dinner Shufa: Tales of Our Time, 2015

Photograph, 150 x 300 cm

Courtesy the artists

© Yangjiang Group

Yangjiang Group, whose founding artists are Zheng Guogu (b. 1970), Chen Zaiyan (b. 1971), and Sun Qinglin (b. 1974), conjure a small utopia in Tales of Our Time. Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken (2016) is installed along a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed circular area overlooking Central Park. Here Chinese tea is to be shared on simple plywood furniture set amid calligraphic works and a temporary Chinese garden, which is visible on the outside balcony and contains bamboo, shrubs, a miniature bridge, and a pond. As part of the participatory installation, visitors are encouraged to measure their blood pressure and heart rate before and after they enter this area—a humorous means designed to calculate the purported relaxing effects of a tea gathering in an art exhibition. A green and white calligraphic mural is suspended several stories from the ceiling to the ground floor of the museum’s Thannhauser Gallery. Since 2002 this art collaborative has been inviting neighbors in Yangjiang, its small hometown on the southern coast, to drink tea, play soccer, practice calligraphy, and enjoy communal dinners. In symbolically transporting their small plot of land to New York, the Yangijiang Group has neither left behind its humor nor its desire to create a borderless, anarchist zone of citizenship and belonging.

The Tower Level 5 gallery houses Can’t Help Myself (2016), a massive robot with a mechanical arm created by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu (b. 1972 and 1974), two longtime collaborators based in Beijing. Placed behind clear acrylic walls, the machine is programmed to perform one very specific action: with its modified front arm, it guards a puddle of dark red viscous liquid. As the red substance slowly spreads on the ground, the robot frenetically shovels it back into place, leaving smudges reminiscent of contemporary surveillance warfare. Sun and Peng, who are known for using bold humor with undertones of violence to address provocative topics, neither pose nor answer the question of whether the repetitious dance of the robot in Can’t Help Myself is absurd, authoritarian, or both.

Sun Yuan (b. 1972, Beijing) & Peng Yu (b. 1974, Jiamusi, Heilongjiang Province)

Can’t Help Myself, 2016

Industrial robot, steel, rubber, visual-recognition sensors, acrylic wall with aluminum frame, and food-grade fiber with water

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Sun Yuan & Pen Yu

Photo: Courtesy the artists

In a darkened gallery, also on Tower Level 5, an immersive projection sends images of rocks, ships, oceans, and waves washing over the viewer. Entitled In The End Is The Word (2016), this six-channel video installation by Hong Kong–based artist Tsang Kin-Wah (b. 1976) interweaves found footage, sound, and light. The work begins with a rush of seemingly banal shots of a tsunami at sea near the site of an ongoing territorial dispute between China and Japan, the Diaoyu Islands (known as Senkaku Islands in Japanese). These images then begin to morph into abstractions. Synchronized videos projected onto the walls and floor of the dimly lit room create the illusion that animated, coiling strips of words and phrases are pouring out of the video images and into the gallery. Finally, rather than simply disappear, these images accumulate into a crescendo of blindingly bright light, a state the artist likens to sa?sara, a Sanskrit word meaning “perpetual wandering” in the sea of life’s suffering.

Tsang Kin-Wah (b. 1976, Shantou, Guangdong Province)

In The End Is The Word, 2016 (detail)

Six-channel video installation, with sound

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection, Acquisition in process

© Tsang Kin-Wah

In addition to In The End Is The Word, Tsang created No(thing/Fact) Outside (2016), a vinyl text installation that extends beyond the Tower galleries–climbing walls and snaking along floors in less prominent areas in the museum, such as elevators and stairwells. Reflecting Tsang’s ruminations on the exhibition, the work spatially and conceptually links the stories told by the artists in Tales of Our Time.

About the Exhibition Catalogue

A conceptual extension of the exhibition, the catalogue edited by Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru blends a traditional museum publication with a fiction anthology. Featuring scholarly essays and artwork descriptions, it unconventionally examines the exhibition artists, who all challenge current views about art from China. Interwoven with these essays are seven commissioned short stories by the Chinese and American fiction writers Han Song, Hon Lai-chu, Li Juan, Ken Liu, Lo Yi-chin, Wang Bang, and Brian Kuan Wood. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue offer a heterogeneous view of contemporary art and culture from China, highlighting tensions between individual narratives and mainstream history as well as showing how the gaps between the two can be transcended.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
www.guggenheim.org

Abstract Expressionism @ Royal Academy of Arts, London & Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Abstract Expressionism
Royal Academy of Arts, London
24 September 2016 – 2 January 2017
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
3 February – 4 June 2017

In September 2016, the Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition of Abstract Expressionism to be held in the UK in almost six decades. With over 150 paintings, sculptures and photographs from public and private collections across the world, this ambitious exhibition encompasses masterpieces by the most acclaimed American artists associated with the movement – among them, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Phillip Guston, Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Aaron Siskind, David Smith and Clyfford Still, as well as lesser-known but no less vital artists.

The selection aims to re-evaluate Abstract Expressionism, recognising that though the subject is often perceived to be unified, in reality it was a highly complex, fluid and many-sided phenomenon. Likewise, it will revise the notion of Abstract Expressionism as based solely in New York City by addressing such figures on the West Coast as Sam Francis, Mark Tobey and Minor White.

To ensure an exhibition for the 21st century, informed by new thinking, Abstract Expressionism will re-examine the two main strands into which these artists have often been grouped in the past. Namely, the so-called ‘colour-field’ painters, such as Rothko and Newman, versus the ‘gesture’ or ‘action painters’, epitomised by de Kooning and Pollock. The art of the former has been held to focus on the contemplative or sublime use of colour, whereas the latter supposedly demonstrated spontaneity and improvisation in their work through bold gestural mark-making. Yet these categories are simplistic, belying the deeper concerns that linked many of the artists.

For example, various Abstract Expressionists developed the ‘all-over composition’ by rejecting the formal concept of an image with a single or central focus. Instead, they thought in terms of energised fields, whether of vibrant colour or linear dynamism. Concerns such as myth-making, the sublime, monochrome and an urge to stress the human presence even in abstraction also connected the artists. Similarly, their creations challenged conventional notions of scale with dimensions that ranged from minute intimacy to epic grandeur – dramatic innovations that the exhibition will highlight.

For the first time, the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which holds 95% of the artist’s work, will loan nine major paintings to the exhibition, establishing the artist at the very forefront of Abstract Expressionism. The paintings by Clyfford Still will be presented in a dedicated gallery within the exhibition.

Jackson Pollock’s monumental Mural, 1943 (University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa) and Blue Poles, 1952 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) will be displayed in the same gallery for the first time, a juxtaposition unlikely to ever be repeated. Further highlights will include Arshile Gorky’s Water of the Flowery Mill, 1944 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Willem de Kooning’s Woman II, 1952 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York); Franz Kline’s Vawdavitch, 1955 (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago); Mark Rothko’s No. 15, 1957 (Private Collection); Lee Krasner’s The Eye is the First Circle, 1960 (Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York); and David Smith’s Hudson River Landscape, 1951 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). Works by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner and Ad Reinhardt will also feature amongst others. In addition to Aaron Siskind and Minor White, the photographers will include Harry Callahan, Herbert Matter and Barbara Morgan.

Dr David Anfam, co-curator of Abstract Expressionism said: “Abstract Expressionism will explore this vast phenomenon in depth and across different media, revealing both its diversity and continuities as it constantly pushed towards extremes. It will bring together some of the most iconic works from around the world in a display that is unlikely to be repeated in our lifetime.”

Abstract Expressionism has been organised by the Royal Academy of Arts, London with the collaboration of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The exhibition is curated by the independent art historian, David Anfam, alongside Edith Devaney, Contemporary Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts. Dr Anfam is the preeminent authority on Abstract Expressionism, the author of the catalogue raisonné of Mark Rothko’s paintings and Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum, Denver.

Abstract Expressionism: Catalogue

Abstract Expressionism will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Authors include David Anfam, author of the now-standard textbook Abstract Expressionism (1990); Susan Davidson, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Edith Devaney, Curator of Contemporary Projects, Royal Academy of Arts; Jeremy Lewison, former Director of Collections at Tate; Carter Ratcliff author of Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (1996) and Christian Wurst, researcher on The Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings of Jasper Johns (forthcoming).

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, LONDON

www.royalacademy.org.uk

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974-2014 

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC 
March 13 - June 3, 2015

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present the first comprehensive exhibition in the United States of the celebrated Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b. 1924). In recognition of a lengthy career, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 focuses on the faceted mirror sculptures and corresponding geometric drawings Monir has produced over the past forty years. The majority of the selected works in this exhibition are from the artist’s own collection, and many have never been shown to the public.

MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN 

Untitled, 2012. 

Felt-tip pen on paper, 70 x 100 cm. 

Collection of the artist, courtesy The Third Line, Dubai 

© Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. 

Photo: Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

Monir’s rich body of work references Persian architectural and decorative tradition, the mathematical basis of geometric forms in Islamic pattern, and Sufi cosmology. When considered along with the Guggenheim’s historical commitment to abstraction and internationalism, the exhibition offers a timely opportunity to examine Monir’s rich body of work in its own right and as part of an increasingly transnational perspective on artistic production and its reception.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal, where it was on view in fall 2014 before traveling to New York. The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, and former Curator, Abu Dhabi Project, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, with assistance from Karole Vail, Associate Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, for its New York presentation.

The Leadership Committee for Infinite Possibility is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to Simin N. Allison, Maryam Eisler, The Soudavar Memorial Foundation, Mohammed Afkhami, Patricia and Alexander Farman-Farmaian, Haines Gallery, Yasmine Nainzadeh and Sara Nainzadeh, Nazgol and Kambiz Shahbazi, and The Third Line.

MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN

Mirror Ball, 1973

Mirror on plaster ball, 19 x 19 x 19 cm

Collection of Nima Isham, Montana

© Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Photo: Filipe Braga 

© Fundação de Serralves–Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014 includes early wood, plaster, and mirror reliefs, a series of large-scale geometric mirror sculptures, and an impressive body of works on paper, focusing on a sculptural and graphic oeuvre developed over a period of more than forty years. The presentation reveals how the compositional principles used by the artist during this period were translated into large-scale commissions, including a series of etched glass doors created for a New York townhouse in the early 1980s. A selection of previously unseen abstract works on paper produced between 1974 and 2014 reveals the central role of drawing as a conceptual foundation for Monir’s sculptural practice. The artist’s ambitious mirror sculptures, known as “geometric families,” which she produced in the last decade since reinstating her studio in Tehran, will also be on view. Monir’s prolific body of work is characterized by the merging of visual and spatial experience and a distinctive approach to abstraction, coupled with the aesthetic tradition of Islamic architecture and decoration, allowing for, in the artist’s own words, “infinite possibility.”

MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN 

Untitled, 1980

Felt-tip pen and colored pencil on paper, 63 x 44.5 cm

Collection of the artist

© Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Photo: Courtesy of the artist

Born in Qazvin, Iran, in 1924, MONIR SHAROUDY FARMANFARMAIAN attended the Fine Arts College of Tehran before moving to New York in 1945, where she studied at Cornell University and at Parsons School of Design and worked as a freelance illustrator for Vogue and as a graphic designer. These formative years in New York served as a sort of apprenticeship for Monir, who spent time alongside fellow artists Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and later Andy Warhol, among others. Notably, during her time in New York, Monir visited the Guggenheim in its founding locations and was present at the 1956 groundbreaking for the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed museum building on Fifth Avenue. She returned to Iran in 1957 and journeyed across the country, further developing her artistic sensibility through encounters with traditional craftsmanship. Indigenous art forms such as Turkoman jewelry and clothing, coffee house paintings (a popular form of Iranian narrative paintings), and the technique of reverse-glass painting influenced her work, resulting in a productive period of artistic discovery and breakthrough that culminated in a series of commissions in Iran and exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including presentations at Galerie Denise René in Paris and New York. The Islamic Revolution in 1979 marked the beginning of Monir’s twenty-six-year exile in New York, during which she focused on drawing, collage, and a few commissions, and also returned to carpet and textile design. In 2004, when she finally returned to Iran, she reestablished her studio there and resumed working with some of the same craftsmen she had collaborated with in the 1970s.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian in her studio working on Heptagon Star, Tehran, 1975

Photo: Courtesy of the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Italian Institute, Tehran (1968); Jack Kaplan Gallery, New York (1975); the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. (1976); the Iran American Society, Tehran (1976); Galerie Denise René, New York and Paris (1977); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2007); and Leighton House Museum, London (2008). Her work has also been featured in a number of group exhibitions, including the first Tehran Biennial (1958); the Venice Biennale (1958, 1964, 1966, and 2009); Gold, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1978–79); Living Traditions: Contemporary Art from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, Queen’s Palace, Bagh-e Babur, Kabul (2008); The Power of Ornament, Lower Belvedere, Orangery, Vienna (2009); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2009–10); There is always a cup of sea to sail in, São Paulo Biennial (2010); and Jef Guys/Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: The world as seen through a Pelican in Plexi, Wiels, Brussels (2013).

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s works are found in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Tate, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Several of the artist’s extant works from the 1970s are in the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Major commissions include installations at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Dag Hammarskjöld Tower in New York, and the Niavaran Cultural Center in Tehran

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY

www.guggenheim.org

On Kawara, Silence at the Guggenheim Museum, New-York

On Kawara, Silence

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New-York

February 6 - May 3, 2015

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present the first comprehensive exhibition of the work of ON KAWARA (1933-2014), the broadest representation to date of his practice since 1963. On Kawara—Silence invites the viewer to consider a body of work that engages the nature and experience of time and place.

Installed along the spiral ramps of the museum according to a framework of 12 sections, or “chapters,” devised by the artist, the exhibition features work from 1963 through 2013 and includes every category of On Kawara’s output, much of it produced during his travels across the globe: monochrome Date Paintings (from the Today series); telegrams (the I Am Still Alive series); stamped tourist postcards (the I Got Up series); city maps marked with the route taken by the artist on a given day (the I Went series); lists of names of people encountered that day (the I Met series); newspaper cuttings (the I Read series); a complete inventory of paintings (the Journals); and vast calendars (One Hundred Years and One Million Years). Numerous drawings produced in Paris and New York in 1964, which are fascinating proposals for unrealized works, and Kawara’s only two extant paintings of 1965, Location and Title, which herald the Today series, offer a historical perspective and indicate the emergence of the pictorial idiom he continued to pursue throughout his career. The exhibition also presents three months of consecutive Today paintings, identified by the artist collectively as Everyday Meditation, part of which was displayed in the 1971 Guggenheim International Exhibition. As part of the One Million Years project, a continuous live recitation of dates from an immense ledger will occur three days a week during the run of the exhibition on the ground floor of the Guggenheim rotunda.

Born in Kariya, Japan, ON KAWARA achieved early recognition during the 1950s as a young member of the Tokyo avant-garde. The artist left Japan in 1959, moving first to Mexico City and then to Paris before settling in New York City. During that period of relocation, he abandoned his early surrealistic representations of the body. In 1966 his practice acquired the form it would take thereafter—the intermittent yet persistent production of paintings and other works, most of which serve to identify the time and place of the artist’s whereabouts on the day they were made.

On Kawara’s work is often associated with the rise of Postminimal and Conceptual art. Yet in its complex wit and existential reach, it also stands well apart. At the heart of On Kawara—Silence are paintings from the Today series, created over the course of seven decades according to intensive protocols. With each painting, the date is inscribed in white acrylic against a monochromatic ground in variants of blue, red, or very dark gray, in the language of the place where the painting was made. The strict range of dimensions for the Date Paintings is preordained, and the process of making them is seemingly mechanical, although the paintings were, in fact, meticulously produced by hand. A painting was either finished in the course of a given day or destroyed. On some days, two, and, very occasionally, three, were made. The exhibition presents over 150 Date Paintings, many accompanied by the handmade storage boxes that Kawara often lined with cuttings from the daily press. Such cuttings, representing topics both historical and banal—politics, natural disaster, celebrity, space exploration, sports—place Kawara’s work in a context of current events, although any logic of selection is difficult to discern.

“I Got Up.” “I Went.” “I Read.” “I Met.” Much of Kawara’s work deploys such first-person declarations, which seem to designate little more—yet nothing less—than his very being in the world. More than 1,500 tourist postcards, addressed, stamped, and mailed to friends and acquaintances including artists, gallerists, collectors, critics, and curators such as John Baldessari, Germano Celant, Herman Daled, Kasper König, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Toshiaki Minemura, and Adrian Piper bearing the message “I GOT UP AT,” followed by the precise time Kawara began his day, are featured in On Kawara—Silence. The exhibition also includes city maps upon which the artist traced his route in a single day, and more than 100 telegrams delivered between 1969–2000, each bearing the simple message “I AM STILL ALIVE.” These series, produced according to their own set of rules, record the basic activities of the artist’s life. Like the Date Paintings, they appear to be purely systematic. While close examination reveals the work’s unexpectedly personal qualities—not least the discipline and endurance implied by the artist’s relentless record keeping—indications of personal experience are elusive. Throughout his lifetime, the artist’s official biography consisted only of the number of days he had been alive. The schematic nature of his oeuvre means that, despite its subjective nature and focus on self-examination, it remained surprisingly abstract.

On Kawara said very little about his art and preferred to leave much about it unexplained. He did, however, identify one central theme: human consciousness, an individual’s heightened awareness of his or her existence in the world. Kawara also said that a Date Painting represents a paradox—that each painting forever signifies the present by bearing the name and date of the day it was made, yet once the day is over, that present belongs only to the past.

Exhibition curator Jeffrey Weiss observes that Kawara’s work represents an expansive practice, a field of operations and activities that occur over time according to remarkably consistent terms: “The artist believed the best way for us to engage his work was by direct encounter, through which we can discover its relevance to our own lives.”

On Kawara—Silence is organized by Jeffrey Weiss, Senior Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with Anne Wheeler, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in close cooperation with the artist.

The Leadership Committee for On Kawara—Silence is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to David Zwirner, New York/London; Glenstone; Leonard and Louise Riggio; and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf and Berlin.

This exhibition is also supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

On Kawara—Silence: Exhibition Catalogue

On Kawara—Silence will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with essays contributed by Jeffrey Weiss and Anne Wheeler as well as artist Daniel Buren; Whitney Davis, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art, University of California at Berkeley, and Visiting Professor of History of Art, University of York; Maria Gough, Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Professor of Modern Art, Harvard University; Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex; novelist and critic Tom McCarthy; and Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University. Featuring more than four hundred images and available in four different colors of cover that correspond with the monochromes of artist’s Date Paintings, the book will offer authoritative descriptions of each category of the artist’s work and will be available for $65 in a hardcover edition beginning in February at guggenheimstore.org.

The Worlds of Nam June Paik, Guggenheim Museum, NYC

The Worlds of Nam June Paik 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
February 11 - April 26, 2000

The Worlds of Nam June Paik is the first American retrospective of the Korean-born multimedia artist since 1982. This exhibition brings together the major artworks that define Nam June Paik's singular achievement. Through his sculptures, installations, videotapes, and projects for television, Nam June Paik recognized and realized the potential of video to become an artist's medium. The exhibition allows audiences to experience the numerous ways in which Nam June Paik has treated the electronic moving image and expanded the definition of sculpture and installation art over the past four decades. The exhibition explores the crucial role Nam June Paik has played in changing visual and media culture.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a spectacular site-specific installation, Modulations in Synch (2000). It features laser projections cast onto the Rotunda ceiling, as well as laser projections that pass through an actual seven-story waterfall cascading from the top of the museum to the Rotunda floor. On the floor of the Rotunda will be an installation that employs more than 100 television sets facing upwards, displaying a pulsing mix of Nam June Paik's video imagery. This dramatic merging of lasers and video can be viewed all along the ramps that circle the Rotunda, offering the viewer multiple perspectives on the work.

On the ramps is a selection of Nam June Paik's seminal video installations from the 1960s and 70s, including The Moon Is the Oldest TV (1965-76), TV Garden (1974-78), and Video Fish (1975), as well as groupings of important smaller-scale sculptures. Several of Nam June Paik's early prepared televisions such as Magnet TV (1965) and performance pieces such as TV Cello (1971) are also on view in the Tower Gallery. A selection of the artist's laser sculptures are installed in the High Gallery.

The exhibition has been organized by John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with Jon Ippolito, Assistant Curator of Media Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and distributed through Harry N. Abrams, Inc., it includes an essay by John G. Hanhardt, along with a selection of Nam June Paik's own writings

SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
1071 Fifth Avenue, New York City
www.guggenheim.org

Updated 04.07.2019

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

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