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

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

Nicole Eisenman Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - What Happened

Nicole Eisenman. What Happened

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

24 March - 10 September 2023

“Nicole Eisenman. What Happened” at Museum Brandhorst surveys for the first time the entire spectrum of the artist’s three decades of work in painting and sculpture, bringing together approximately 100 works dating from 1992 to the present. Relevant from an art historical and social, political and deeply human perspective, it is an oeuvre that manages in an anarchic way to be both an homage to and a critique of its own subject.

Nicole Eisenman (*1965) has been one of the protagonists of the New York art scene since the 1990s and is today one of the most influential contemporary artists. From the beginning, her work has been characterized by a juxtaposition of different materials, formats and techniques, from paintings and works on paper to large-scale murals and installations. Characteristically, Eisenman draws from a variety of sources, including works from the Renaissance, underground comics, and socialist murals of the 1930s to name but a few. Many of her works invoke the experiences of lesbian communities in New York. However, rather than being documentary, they are highly imaginative and comical.

In her large-scale figurative paintings since the 2000s, Nicole Eisenman references her living environment, depicting the everyday in ways that are both humorous and compassionate. They are often group portraits, yet they tell not only of unity and connectedness, but also of loneliness and alienation within society. Since the mid-2010s, the artist has produced a series of monumental paintings in which she references the tense political atmosphere in the United States following the 2016 presidential election. Some works criticize those voters who fell for Donald Trump’s populist promises. Others feature politically engaged communities working together to confront a social culture that is on a dark path (“The Darkward Trail,” 2018). In recent years, sculptural works have also become more prominent in Nicole Eisenman’s practice. After initially working with plaster at the beginning of the 2010s, these days there is no material that the artist does not use in her sculptures. Their materiality references queer themes that continually preoccupy Eisenman, along with her unwavering humanist and universalist stance.

Visitors to the exhibition “Nicole Eisenman. What Happened” are immersed in three interwoven narrative threads as they explore the show. The first is about a lesbian artist with feminist convictions who begins painting for a small alternative community in New York’s downtown scene of the 1990s and whose works are now celebrated internationally. Another narrative is devoted to Eisenman’s view of and commentary on U.S. society and the cracks that run through it: the impact of George W. Bush’s presidency, the 2008 economic crisis, or the shift to the right in politics following Trump’s election. Likewise, Eisenman negotiates the omnipresence of screens in our everyday lives, imagines the U.S. landscape at the onset of climate catastrophe, and infuses the genre of history painting with new life by capturing recent protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police in her images. Finally, in a third narrative strand, the exhibition displays the impressive formal aesthetic experiments, ambition, and ingenuity in the selection of material that distinguish the artist’s oeuvre.

Accompanying the exhibition is a comprehensive catalog documenting the full range of Eisenman’s work. In his essay entitled “What Happened,” Mark Godfrey provides a comprehensive genesis of the work. In her text, Monika Bayer-Wermuth explores the question of fluidity of material and bodies alike. In addition to the essays by the two curators, Chloe Wyma devotes herself to Eisenman’s most recent works and her role within political discourses in the art world in recent years. Reminiscences and short contributions by numerous contemporaries complete the book, which provides an insight into the artist’s work that is as profound as it is personal.

German edition: ISBN 978-0-85488-318-9

English edition: ISBN 978-0-85488-312-7

An exhibition by Museum Brandhorst in cooperation with the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen

Theresienstrasse 35 a, 80333 Munich

www.museum-brandhorst.de

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Lucy McKenzie @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich - Prime Suspect

Lucy McKenzie – Prime Suspect

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Through 21 February 2021

LUCY McKENZIE 

in front of the work "Mooncup" (2012) 

in the exhibition "Lucy McKenzie -Prime Suspect"

© Lucy McKenzie. Photo:Robert Haas

“Lucy McKenzie – Prime Suspect” is the first international survey exhibition of the Brussels-based Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie (b. 1977). Bringing together approximately 80 works dating from 1997 to the present, the exhibition brings together examples from all of the artist’s significant bodies of work. From her early works exploring the pageantry and iconography of international sport and the politics of postwar muralism, through her engagement with fin-de-siècle architecture and interior design and mid-century Belgian illustration, to her ongoing research into the intertwined histories of fashion and retail display, Lucy McKenzie has established herself among the most singular artistic voices of her generation.

In “Top of the Will” (1998-99), one of the earliest works in the exhibition, Lucy McKenzie combined staged photos of herself and her friends, dressed in gymnastics uniforms based on those worn by the Soviet teams of the 1970s, taped directly to the wall and interspersed with pages torn from vintage books and magazines. In its combination of fact and fiction, documentation and imitation – and a mode of presentation that simultaneously evokes a teenager’s bedroom décor and the “evidence wall” familiar to viewers of countless police procedurals – “Top of the Will” already introduces a combination of fanlike enthusiasm and forensic analysis that is among the most enduring features of Lucy McKenzie’s oeuvre.

Over the past two decades, Lucy McKenzie has excavated and transformed images, objects, and motifs from a wide range of historical moments and contexts, producing a body of work that defies easy categorization but that is, for that very reason, all the more compelling. She has revived the old tradition of trompe l’oeil painting—whose images are so convincingly real that they literally “deceive the eye”—using it as a means to inhabit, critique, and reimagine earlier styles and periods of art and design, illuminating an alternative history of modern art in which the so-called “applied arts” emerge as key players in a narrative that diverges from the established chronologies of modernism and the avant-garde.

Despite her own formidable skills as a painter, Lucy McKenzie has consistently refused to privilege one form of visual or material production over another, often highlighting vernacular and collaborative practices that have historically been marginalized or denigrated in the context of the fine arts. The large-scale installation “Interior” (2007) and the monumental painting “Ludwig Haus” (2009) each synthesize a variety of fin-de-siècle interior designs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Victor Horta, and others, enlarging small watercolor sketches and presentation drawings to one-to-one architectural scale. Despite this massive shift, through which they become both paintings and environments, each work nevertheless retains the provisional qualities of its sources. More recently, Lucy McKenzie has mined such seemingly disparate veins as the visual rhetoric of cartography and advertising, while expanding her ongoing series of trompe l’oeil “quodlibet” paintings from pinboards and tabletop arrangements into three dimensions, further destabilizing the relationship between the thing depicted and the thing itself.

The politics of gender and the place of women and the representation of the female body in twentieth century art, architecture, and fashion is also a major theme that runs throughout the exhibition. Where the early painting “Curious” (1998) highlights the eroticization of female athletes in popular media, “Copy of Untitled, 2005” (2014) speaks to the banality of sexual and pornographic content in contemporary culture. “Co? Në!” (2004) imagines a 1960s-era mural advertising a fictional ladies’ deodorant, while “Mooncup” (2012) presents an enormous (unauthorized) advertisement for a real British maker of silicone menstrual cups. Such recent works as “Vionnet Salon Murals after Georges de Feure” (2016) and “Rebecca” (2019) take up the legacy of the early French designer Madeleine Vionnet, known for the mathematical precision of her garments, with construction details often executed to create decorative effects, thereby obviating the need for additional ornament.

Fashion and its dissemination and display are the central concerns of Atelier E.B, Lucy McKenzie’s ongoing collaboration with the Scottish designer Beca Lipscombe. Originally founded in 2007 as an interior design firm, by 2011 Atelier E.B had morphed into a successful line of ready-to-wear fashion employing the highest quality Scottish materials and artisanship. It has also come to function as a kind of artistic research bureau investigating the history of fashion as well as the history of display, from Worlds’ Fairs and heritage exhibitions to department stores and retail showrooms, presenting their findings in the form of exhibitions and publications. Atelier E.B’s fundamentally hybrid nature is exemplified by the architectural work “Faux Shop” (2018), acquired by the Museum Brandhorst in 2019, which functions simultaneously as a showcase for their Jasperwear collection and as an enormous trompe l’oeil sculptural installation in its own right.

The title of the exhibition, “Prime Suspect”, alludes to the way that Lucy McKenzie’s exhibitions often function like detective stories, in which a fictional premise provides the structure for her own investigations, using historical material to ask important and resonant questions about contemporary society. It also points to her own elusiveness in the process – in which the artist herself has a way of disappearing into the dense web of references she weaves in her work – and the challenges this poses to the traditional model of the solo exhibition. Beyond the sheer variety of her output, the formal variation from one body of work to the next can be disconcerting. Her technical dexterity has allowed Lucy McKenzie to develop a methodology that involves taking up and temporarily inhabiting the styles of other artists and periods. In so doing, however, she operates more like a pathologist or method actor than a counterfeiter or forger: for McKenzie, imitation operates not as a form of deception but as a means of understanding her subjects (whether individuals, movements, ideologies, or some combination thereof): of getting inside their heads and figuring out what makes them tick. Similarly, her frequent use of existing historical material differs importantly from the model of appropriation familiar from the art of the 1980s, where artists often sought to undermine the authority of their sources and their claims to authenticity. Rather, Lucy McKenzie herself performs the role of the detective, uncovering and rearticulating overlooked details from the past in order to reveal something of the social relations involved in their production, as well as what made them compelling in the first place, and thereby to better understand those relations in the present.

LUCY McKENZIE - PRIME SUSPECT

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive and profusely illustrated catalogue, documenting the full range of McKenzie’s oeuvre. It includes new essays by Mason Leaver-Yap, Leah Pires, Anne Pontégnie, and Jacob Proctor, as well as a short story by Lucy McKenzie. 350 pages, 282 color illustrations. Published by Museum Brandhorst in collaboration with Walther König. Language: German & English. ISBN 978-3-96098-852-6

Curator: Jacob Proctor

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstraße 35a, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

Alex Katz Retrospective Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Alex Katz

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

6 December 2018 – 22 April 2019

The Museum Brandhorst presents a major exhibition of works by celebrated American painter Alex Katz. A towering figure in contemporary painting best known for his iconic portraits of beautiful, stylish women, masterfully rendered in bold, vibrant colors, Alex Katz has influenced and inspired generations of artists around the world. Featuring about ninety works—including some of the artist’s most important paintings—the exhibition offers visitors a retrospective overview of this seminal artist’s oeuvre from the 1950s to today.

ALEX KATZ (born 1927, New York) emerged on the New York scene during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and just prior to the explosion of Pop Art. Although he is often hailed as one of the precursors to Pop, his aesthetic is perhaps more closely aligned with such poets as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery than with other painters of his generation. His unique oeuvre, which now spans some 70 years, is utterly devoted to the representation of the here and now and the immediacy of human perception—a commitment to what the artist has often described as “painting in the present tense.” Working variously en plein air, from photographic sources, and from his own sketches and preparatory drawings, he has focused his attention on subject matter from his immediate milieu: portraits of family (in particular his wife Ada) and friends, artistic collaborators and scenes of social interaction, landscapes and architectural scenes, and flowers. Throughout, Alex Katz’s sensitivity for painterly surfaces unfolds in productive tension with the formal languages of film, fashion, and advertising.

The exhibition begins with works from the late 1950s and early 1960s, including portraits of the renowned choreographer and dancer Paul Taylor and his company, for which Alex Katz designed many sets. A series of seminal single and group portraits from the 1960s establish Alex Katz’s signature style as well as the social and artistic milieu of Downtown New York, both of which remain leitmotifs throughout his work and the exhibition. Two large galleries of landscapes show Alex Katz playing at the edge of abstraction while at the same time recommitting himself to a decidedly modern form of realism.

The quality of light itself, whether direct, reflected, or diffused, becomes a central concern in these paintings. So, too, does the ability of an individual brushstroke to delimit multiple different types of form while also retaining its status as an autonomous mark.

Also on display is a sizable collection of small oil paintings, sketches, and preparatory drawings. Often directly related to the large-scale paintings on view, these works will provide visitors with an expanded understanding of the artist’s multi-layered working process.

The exhibition draws on the Museum Brandhorst’s own extensive collection of works by the artist—including masterpieces from across his long career—supplemented by key works from other public and private collections, and provides an extended glimpse into the prolific production of this 91-year-old painter.

 An abundantly illustrated catalogue was published by Hirmer Verlag, featuring newly commissioned texts on the artist by critic Kirsty Bell and art historian Prudence Peiffer, as well as reflections by contemporary artists Arturo Herrera, Jordan Kantor, and Matt Saunders (ISBN 978-3-7774-3237-3).

On the occasion of the exhibition, the museum premieres a new documentary film on Alex Katz, directed by Kristina Kilian of the University of Television and Film (HFF) Munich. This project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Museum Brandhorst and the HFF.

Curator: Jacob Proctor

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de