The Sonnabend Collection, Wexner Center, Colombus - From Pop to Now - Off-site exhibition

From Pop to Now

Wexner Center off-site, Colombus

November 3, 2002 – February 2, 2003

From Pop to Now showcases works from the private collection of gallery owners Ileana and Michael Sonnabend, including such artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gilbert & George, Rona Pondick, Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Elger Esser, and Christian Boltanski. Nearly 70 works—painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed-media installation—by about 50 artists are on view. Together, this selection sheds light on the intersections of pop, conceptualism, minimalism, postmodernism, and other major experimental art movements of the last century, in a show that is “brimming with important pieces” (The New York Times, June 30, 2002).

From Pop to Now was organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. The presentation in Columbus coincides with the Wexner Center’s gallery renovations. All exhibitions in the upcoming season will be presented off-site, with three presented in downtown Columbus.

THE SONNABEND COLLECTION

Ileana Sonnabend—who became known in the ’60s as “The Mom of Pop Art”—has been a seminal force in the contemporary art world for 40 years, identifying young, emerging artists and introducing their work to wide audiences in both Europe and the United States. Her enthusiasm for collecting began in the 1950s during her brief marriage to art dealer Leo Castelli, and continued with her marriage to Michael Sonnabend, with whom she ran galleries in Paris and New York. The Sonnabends introduced new American artists—such as Robert Rauschenberg and Dan Flavin—to Europe, and brought European artists to the attention of New York audiences (e.g., Ileana was the first to bring the new German art to New York in the early 1980s). The vast Sonnabend Collection includes contemporary paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and works in new and nontraditional media, collected over the decades.

From Pop to Now is the most comprehensive survey to date of the Sonnabends’ legacy. The exhibition includes key works originally shown at their galleries, along with rarely seen pieces from their private collection. “I’m particularly interested in works that are by now ‘classical’ and still keep their provocation,” Ileana Sonnabend told The New York Times earlier this year. Recently widowed, Sonnabend continues to actively collect.

From Pop to Now premiered at the Tang in June; the Wexner Center marks its first stop on a national tour, and additional venues will be announced.

THE ART

The exhibition features a range of works reflecting the Sonnabends’ taste over the years, including early pop art by then-emerging artists, contemporary photography, and multimedia sculptural works. Major art movements include pop, minimalism, conceptualism, arte povera, and abstract expressionism. The earliest work in the show is from 1956 (a Cy Twombly); the most recent is from 2002 (a chromogenic print by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher).

Among the highlights from the exhibition: Roy Lichtenstein’s Aloha (oil on canvas, 1962), plus three other Lichtensteins; Andy Warhol’s White Brillo Boxes (1964), plus five other Warhols; Jasper Johns’s Figure 8 (1959); Jeff Koons’s stainless steel Rabbit (1986); Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs Water Towers (1972); Rona Pondick’s Dog (yellow stainless steel, 2000); Dan Flavin’s “Untitled (To the ‘Innovator’ of Wheeling Peach Blow),” featuring fluorescent lights, from the late 1960s; Sol LeWitt’s Arcs from Four Corners (1971); Gilbert & George’s They (1986); and Bruce Nauman’s neon 

My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon: Bbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuucccccccccceeeeeeeeee (1967).

EXHIBITION'S LOCATION: The Belmont Building, 330 West Spring Street, Colombus, OH

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

1871 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210

www.wexarts.org

Johan van der Keuken - Wexner Center, Colombus - From The Body and the City

 Johan van der Keuken

From The Body and the City

Wexner Center, Colombus

September 18 – December 30, 2001

“Film is not life, but it has to touch your life. It’s a second life.”—Johan van der Keuken

An exhibition of multimedia works documenting street life in New York, Amsterdam, and Sarajevo by Dutch artist Johan van der Keuken opens at the Wexner Center this fall. Known for his exquisitely shot images of urban settings around the globe, van der Keuken had an astonishing career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world. His gallery works, which combine film, photography, and sound, have never been shown in the United States. “The idea,” wrote the artist about these works, “is to use image, projection, sound, and visual instruments to create individual and distinct worlds and atmospheres.”

The three installations at the Wexner Center are part of the series The Body and the City, created in collaboration with designer Jeroen de Vries, who comes to the Wexner Center to help install the exhibition.

Reflecting Johan van der Keuken’s international perspective, the three installations on view here are New York/Colours on 42nd Street, Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, and Amsterdam/Two Streets. These works, all produced in 1998, consist of multiple photographs and moving images on film and video, focusing on the individual set against documentary backdrops of urban scenes. Wrote Artforum, these environments “draw visitors into and out of the exhibition space, to transform spectators into active participants, and, ultimately, to recall the violence and chaos of ‘what’s happening on the street.’”

In Johan van der Keuken’s own words, following are descriptions of the three installations:

• New York/Colours on 42nd Street, featuring a wall of 32 large-scale color photographs, plus film: “On 42nd Street between Times Square and Eight Avenue, I came across a long row of shops, their roll-down shutters all closed and painted in bright colors. I spent hours on the sidewalk across from the roll-down shutters, photographing passers-by walking past the fields of color. With their own bright colors, they seemed to represent an entire society. In the exhibition, the photographs are arranged adjacent to each other to form a huge mosaic of colour fields with people in them, one big human chessboard. A flat surface with the feeling: The Old New World: America!”

• Sarajevo/November 1993–November 1996, incorporating black-and-white photographs and film: “In November, 1993, my friend and colleague Frank Vellenga and I went to Sarajevo to show several films at the festival held there amidst Serbian gunfire and sniper ambushes. We also shot a 14-minute film showing moments in the day-to-day life of a city under siege with the underlying question: What purpose does it serve to make a film in wartime? Our main character was Marijela Margeta, an architecture student who risked her life to attend all the films at the festival.”

• Amsterdam/Two Streets, featuring two series of black-and-white photographs: “Two ‘lanes’ of photographs that are technically and aesthetically very different are confronted with each other. They run parallel or cross each other, much as streets do. On one lane, pictures of Dam Street can be seen through ‘holes’ in the black surface of the photographs like keyholes, so the view is largely restricted. Dam Street in the old center of Amsterdam is populated by an odd mixture of old timers, tourists, dropouts, junkies, and dealers. The opposite lane consists of pictures of Haarlemmerdijk. An old-fashioned shopping street now characterized by enormous mobility: stores, snack bars and coffee shops come and go, premises are constructed and demolished. I have photographed images of this street in layers one over the other, as multiple exposures with control and coincidence each playing an equal role.”

The Body and the City, a series of eight installations, has been exhibited in various combinations in Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has hosted a retrospective of van der Keuken’s films this year, but his gallery installations have never before been exhibited in the United States.

Johan van der Keuken: From The Body and the City was curated by Bill Horrigan, the Wexner Center’s curator of media arts.

Johan van der Keuken (1938–2001) emerged as an artist in 1955 with the publication of his first photography collection, We Are 17. After studying film in Paris, he embarked on a career as a documentary filmmaker and photographer, working in virtually every part of the world with retrospectives in Montreal, Paris (at the Centre Georges Pompidou), and Holland. The artist became known for his evocative images and films that revealed an interest in the global circulation of capital, the erosion of traditional ways of life, the divide between rich and poor, racial and religious conflicts, and the place of chance and control in photography and film.

Jeroen de Vries has been compiling and designing innovative photo and media exhibitions for more than two decades, most recently in the cities of Belgrade and Porto. He designed the recent catalogue of Johan van der Keuken’s photographs, The Lucid Eye. He divides his time between Amsterdam and Belgrade.

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS

THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

1871 North High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210

www.wexarts.org