Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classivo / The Forms of Classicism @ Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Robert Mapplethorpe 

Le forme del classivo / The Forms of Classicism

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venezia

The Rooms of Photography, Venice

Through 6 January 2026

Robert Mapplethorpe

Self Portrait, 1975 

Photo © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe

The Sluggard, 1978

Photo © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe

Derrick Cross, 1983

Photo © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe

Dennis Speight, 1983

Photo © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography in Venice hosts a major exhibition dedicated to one of the most influential – and still, in many ways, provocative – figures in international photography: ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE (New York, 1946 – Boston, 1989). Curated by Denis Curti, Artistic Director of Le Stanze della Fotografia, Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classivo is organised and promoted by Marsilio Arte and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

This retrospective marks the first chapter in a broader trilogy dedicated to the study and exploration of Mapplethorpe’s work. Two further exhibitions will follow in 2026. Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del desiderio [The forms of desire], to be held at Palazzo Reale in Milan, will present a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s most iconic, powerful, and daring images, focusing on the most intense aspects of his practice. Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme della bellezza [The forms of beauty] will be shown at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome and will centre on Mapplethorpe’s reflections on beauty as classical ideal, featuring direct comparisons and a special section devoted to a number of significant photographs taken in Italy, now exhibited for the first time.

To accompany the trilogy, a single major catalogue will be published by Marsilio Arte, gathering all three exhibitions into one comprehensive volume. Featuring 257 works, it will offer a sweeping look at Mapplethorpe’s entire output and the evolution of his visual language.

«The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation is delighted to collaborate with Marsilio Arte, Denis Curti, and his colleagues on these upcoming exhibitions devoted to Mapplethorpe, which will be beautifully presented in three outstanding venues and institutions. Denis Curti’s thoughtful curatorial approach will offer visitors a unique experience, tailoring each show to its location and highlighting different facets of Mapplethorpe’s art. While the exhibitions will share certain themes, each will adopt a distinct perspective on his work. Venice has not hosted a major Mapplethorpe retrospective since 1992, when Germano Celant’s iconic international show was presented at Palazzo Fortuny. We eagerly anticipate Mapplethorpe’s return to Venice after 33 years, as well as the exhibitions planned for Rome and Milan», said Michael Ward Stout, President of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith, 1986

Photo © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe

Isabella Rossellini, 1988

Photo © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Robert Mapplethorpe

“Flowers” Purple Callas, 1987

Photo © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Featuring over 200 photographs, some of which are on view in Italy for the first time, Robert Mapplethorpe. The Forms of Classicism at Le Stanze della Fotografia pays tribute to the great American artist and picks up the thread laid out by curator Germano Celant in his 2005 exhibition Between Ancient and Modern. An Anthology (Turin), placing Mapplethorpe’s work back into the wider context of mid-20th century American art and culture. It is this classical dimension of Mapplethorpe’s photography – particularly emphasised in Venice through direct comparisons with images of ancient statuary – that renders his portraits so striking. These bodies, captured in their sculptural beauty and form, appear timeless: age-old yet contemporary expressions of desire, shaped by the geometry of light and transfigured into eternal, almost divine icons that remain deeply, unmistakably human.

The exhibition draws attention to Mapplethorpe’s pursuit of a perfect curvature, a sensual, almost sacred roundness, evident in the depictions of both male and female bodies, as well as in his magnificent photographs of flowers. These are laid bare in all their delicacy, forming poetic, ambiguous compositions. As curator Denis Curti notes, «Mapplethorpe uses photography to reinterpret and renew classical aesthetics, heightening the dialogue between the living body and ideal sculpture. The comparison reveals his ability to transpose the grace and perfection of classical form into contemporary photography, through meticulous attention to detail and light. Statues, governed by an incomplete sexuality, remind us of the importance of flesh in the language of seduction. Mapplethorpe dissolves their marble limbs, allowing a sensual beauty to emerge from beneath layers of rigidity, breathing new life into them».

The exhibition opens with Mapplethorpe’s earliest collages and ready-mades from the late 1960s, many of which have never been shown before. Created using original drawings, cuttings from homoerotic magazines and objets trouvés, these early pieces reflect his search for identity and his fascination with experimentation from the outset of his career, layering disparate elements into bold visual statements.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Exhibition View. Photograph by Matteo de Fina

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Exhibition View. Photograph by Matteo de Fina

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Exhibition View. Photograph by Matteo de Fina

These are followed by portraits of his companion, friend, and muse Patti Smith, captured in intimate, iconic poses that convey both her androgyny and vulnerability; and by images of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, which explore strength, endurance and femininity while transcending conventional notions of gender. Mapplethorpe depicts her sculpted body with classical precision, celebrating power and beauty through an aesthetic grounded in antiquity.

Unsettling self-portraits reveal his ongoing exploration of identity as something fluid and mutable. Through carefully constructed poses and provocative symbolism, Mapplethorpe presents himself both as artist and subject, examining the boundaries between the private self and public persona.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Exhibition View. Photograph by Matteo de Fina

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Exhibition View. Photograph by Matteo de Fina

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Exhibition View. Photograph by Matteo de Fina

Throughout the exhibition, male nudes take centre stage as odes to classical perfection, emphasising strength, sensuality and symmetry through refined lighting and composition. These works navigate desire and eroticism while openly challenging traditional social norms. Similarly, the female nudes on display in Venice reveal Mapplethorpe’s elegant, minimalist approach: a play of curves, folds and lines that evokes what art historian Arthur C. Danto described as «self-aware women with an almost regal power».

Also on view are portraits of figures such as Truman Capote, Glenn Close, Richard Gere, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Annie Leibovitz, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Susan Sarandon, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol and many others. For Robert Mapplethorpe, portraiture was never simply an intimate encounter between two individuals, but rather a kind of visual altar, where the subject’s physical presence becomes transfigured, enmeshed in a subtle game of desire and possession.

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice

Exhibition View. Photograph by Matteo de Fina

Among the most iconic works in the exhibition are his photos of flowers – calla lilies, orchids, and tulips – captured at the precise moment they seem to become taut with energy, transformed into pulsing muscle. These works strike a delicate balance between stately reverence, achieved through subtle monochrome tones, and the vibrant dynamism of colour. Throughout, ancient statuary provides a powerful point of comparison: defined by an unresolved sexuality, these classical forms underscore the centrality of flesh in Mapplethorpe’s seductive visual language.

Thanks to the Mapplethorpe Foundation, exceptional vintage ephemera are on display. The archival items include two original Patti Smith audio cassettes, a 45 rpm record, gallery and museum exhibition invitations, posters, a limited edition, signed, and leather-bound copy of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, illustrated with Mapplethorpe gravures, magazines, handwritten letters from Mapplethorpe to his mentor and lover Sam Wagstaff, and the memorial card from Wagstaff's funeral.

Also on view in the exhibition are two short films directed by Robert Mapplethorpe: Still Moving: Patti Smith from 1978 and Lady with Lisa Lyon from 1984.

LE STRANZE DELLA FOTOGRAFIA

Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore

www.lestanzedellafotografia.it

Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico, 10 April 2025 – 6 January 2026 

Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore 

Maurizio Galimberti: Polaroid Mosaics Exhibition @ Venice, Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography, Venice

Maurizio Galimberti 

tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino 

on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons

Le Stanze della Fotografia / 

The Rooms of Photography, Venice 

Through 10 August 2025

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Charlotte Gainsburg 

Polaroid plate, 50 x 50 cm, 2003 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Photomovie

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Isabella Rossellini 

Polaroid plate, 2003, 50 x 60 cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/ Photomovie

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Johnny Depp 

Polaroid plate, 2015, 50 x 60 cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Photomovie

Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography presents the exhibition Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino [Maurizio Galimberti on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons], curated by Denis Curti, organised by Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Internationally known for his portraits of celebrities like Lady Gaga, Robert De Niro, Johnny Depp and Umberto Eco, and for having published books and staged site-specific exhibitions on New York, Paris, Milan, Rome and Venice, Maurizio Galimberti presents some of his most iconic Polaroid mosaics in Venice – including Johnny Depp, Barbara Bouchet and Angelica Huston – alongside more recent works, some of them previously unseen, such as those dedicated to Taylor Swift.

Maurizio Galimberti (Como, 1956) in 1983 began to use the Polaroid camera almost exclusively, appreciating it for the immediacy of its results and the possibility of “manipulation”. With it he creates photographic mosaics, the artistic form for which he is best known. His expressive language mixes a sensitivity to the contemporary image with influences derived from the historical avant-gardes - Futurism and Cubism for shapes and spirit, Surrealism and Dadaism for modes.

As Denis Curti observes, «his works do not set out to reproduce reality faithfully, but are the product of an investigation of the visible, an operation of breaking down the world that finds its ideal instrument in photography. Galimberti takes inspiration from David Hockney’s photographic collages and is guided in his research by such illustrious models as the Futurist works of Umberto Boccioni or Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, inspired in turn by Etienne-Jules Marey breakdown of movement» (D. Curti, Capire la fotografia contemporanea, Marsilio 2020).

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Messico (4)

Polaroid plate, 2002, 40 x 50cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Archivio M.G. - N.308

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

New York Studio n. 10 

Polaroid plate, 2024, 31 x 66 cm 

By Maurizio Galimberti/Angelos Dimitriou

MAURIZIO GALIMBERTI

Taylor Swift (1) 

Polaroid plate, 2024, 50 x 54 cm

By Maurizio Galimberti/Luchi Collection

The exhibition is divided into six sections: Cenacolo, History, Sport, Portraits, Taylor Swift and Places, each of which presents a different facet of his work and his approach to photography. His creations, characterised by a multifaceted and fragmented vision of reality, are taken apart and put back together as in a mosaic, offering a profound reflection on perception and on the multiplicity of viewpoints.

The images are almost always manipulated at the development stage, exerting pressure with simple tools – like pens and wooden sticks – directly onto the surface of the support, or assembled into mosaic-like compositions, in which each photograph contributes to the formation of an end result able to create a spectacular overall vision.

«His technical inventions, manipulations, ready-mades and mosaics – Denis Curti still observes – are none other than the metaphor for a transversal language that does not pass through the filter of rationality, and, precisely for this reason, becomes emotion. In every one of his photos there is a precise gesturality, a visual act that finds its synthesis inside the definition of «Instant Artist», invented by Maurizio himself to describe his production, because, when he decided to transform his youthful passion into a profession, he chose the Instamatic camera as his ideal instrument. In his hands, this medium goes beyond the purely descriptive detail, through a procedure that is calculated and always oriented towards the transfiguration of the visible».

Le Stanze della Fotografia 

The Rooms of Photography

Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore

www.lestanzedellafotografia.it

Maurizio Galimberti tra Polaroid/Ready Made e le Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino

Maurizio Galimberti on Polaroid/Ready Made and Italo Calvino's American Lessons

Le Stanze della Fotografia / The Rooms of Photography, Venice, 10 April – 10 August 2025

L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, California: 50th Anniversary Exhibition

L.A. Louver celebrates 50th years

L.A. Louver, Venice, California

15 February - 14 June 2025

L.A. Louver’s historic façade

at 55 North Venice Boulevard, 1975-1976

Photo Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California

Gallery directors Peter Goulds & Kimberly Davis,

pictured at at 55 North Venice Boulevard, 1991

Photo Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California

L.A. Louver façade at 45 North Venice Boulevard

Photo Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California

L.A. Louver celebrates its 50th anniversary with an exhibition surveying the gallery’s history, from its formation in 1975 to now. One of the longest-established contemporary art galleries on the West Coast, L.A. Louver has presented more than 660 exhibitions over the course of what has been the most significant period of creative growth in Southern Californian history. L.A. Louver commemorates this achievement with a presentation in all spaces of the gallery, which remains on the same block as its original 1970s location.

L.A. Louver was founded with a singular mission: to contextualize Los Angeles and global artists in a distinguished exhibition program. L.A. Louver Celebrates 50 Years honors this initial ambition and the pivotal role the gallery has played in establishing L.A. as a global art center. Comprised of work by over 50 artists, the exhibition includes those from the early days of the gallery (Max Cole, George Herms, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Don Suggs), international figures (David Hockney, Sui Jianguo, Per Kirkeby, Leon Kossoff), stalwarts of the city’s creative landscape (Tony Berlant, John McCracken, Ed Moses, Ken Price), and those living and working in Los Angeles today (Rebecca Campbell, Gajin Fujita, Heather Gwen Martin, Alison Saar).

The exhibition is a portrait of L.A. Louver, enriched and informed by history as much as the landscape of today. Though harkening back to key moments from the past, the presentation offers points of nonlinear connection that elucidate the complex truth of an identity shaped by time, place, and people. Furthermore, it is a tribute to the forces and memories that have shaped the gallery – the Bohemian art haven that was 1970s Venice Beach; the artists, staff, and community that have kept the program vibrant and dynamic; the bespoke building designed by Frederick Fisher & Partners that has held hundreds of exhibitions and events; and the artworks that have traveled the world.

54 ARTISTS: Terry Allen, Georg Baselitz, Tony Berlant, Wallace Berman, Tony Bevan, Domenico Bianchi, William Brice, Deborah Butterfield, John Cage, Rebecca Campbell, Nick Cave, Dale Chihuly, Max Cole, Richard Deacon, Edgard de Souza, Mark di Suvero, Richard Diebenkorn, Marcel Duchamp, Jimmie Durham, Toshikatsu Endo, Gajin Fujita, Charles Garabedian, Joe Goode, Frederick Hammersley, George Herms, David Hockney, Edward Kienholz, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Per Kirkeby, Leon Kossoff, Ben Jackel, Lili Lakich, Richard Long, Nathan Mabry, Heather Gwen Martin, Jason Martin, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Thom Mayne, John McCracken, Michael C. McMillen, Ed Moses, Ken Price, Sandra Mendelsohn Rubin, Alison Saar, Eduardo Sarabia, Peter Shelton, Kate Steinitz, Don Suggs, teamLab, Sui Jianguo, Juan Uslé, Matt Wedel, William Wiley, Tom Wudl

L.A. LOUVER

45 North Venice Boulevard, Venice CA 90291

lalouver.com

Jean Cocteau @ Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice – "Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge" – Exhibition Curated by Kenneth E. Silver

Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge 

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 

Organized by Kenneth E. Silver  

April 13 – September 16, 2024

Philippe Halsman: Jean Cocteau, New York, USA. 1949

© Philippe Halsman / Magnum Photos

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge, the largest retrospective ever organized in Italy dedicated to Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), the enfant terrible of the French twentieth-century art scene.

Organized by eminent Cocteau specialist and New York University art historian Kenneth E. Silver, the exhibition highlights the artist’s versatility, the multiple juggling acts that distinguished his production, which often drew criticism from his contemporaries. Loans from prestigious institutions, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, and the Musée Jean Cocteau, Collection Séverin Wunderman in Menton, as well as major private collections, including the Cartier Collection, gather over one hundred and fifty works in an impressive variety of media. These include drawings, graphics, jewelry, tapestries, historical documents, books, magazines, photographs, documentaries, and films directed by Cocteau, which trace the development of this multifaced artist’s unique and highly personal aesthetics, alongside the highlights of his tumultuous career.

Among the most influential figures of the twentieth century, Jean Cocteau was impressively prolific. He referred to himself as a poet, but he was also a novelist, playwright, and critic whose subjects ranged from art and music to other expository forms such as travel writing and memoirs. At the same time, he was also a gifted, highly original, and innovative visual artist. This side of the artist’s creative life is focus of the exhibition organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: Cocteau the draftsman, graphic artist, muralist, fashion-jewelry-and-textile designer, and filmmaker. For his eclectic nature, he could easily be described as a modern-age “Renaissance man,” whose extraordinary versatility left an indelible mark on twentieth-century art. A key figure of the French art scene of his time, his circle included such artists as Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Sergei Diaghilev, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso, and Tristan Tzara. However, the frank assertion of his homosexuality and the opium addiction he never attempted to conceal, meant he occupied a precarious position within the avant-garde. A man of the French establishment yet subversive of it, Cocteau embodied the cultural, social, and political contradictions of his age. 

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is an especially appropriate place to host the most comprehensive exhibition ever dedicated to Jean Cocteau in Italy, not least because of his long-lasting friendship with the U.S. patron. In fact, it was with an exhibition of Cocteau’s drawings, at the suggestion of Marcel Duchamp, that Peggy Guggenheim began her career in the art world at her London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in 1938. The show displayed numerous costume designs for characters the artist had created for his play, The Knights of the Round Table (1937), as well as two large-scale drawings on lined bed sheets created specifically for the exhibition. As Guggenheim recounted in her autobiography, Out of This Century (1979): “One was an allegorical subject called La peur donnant ailes au Courage, which included a portrait of the actor Jean Marais. He and two decadent looking figures appeared with pubic hairs.” The work’s daring subject matter caused a scandal with British customs, and it was only after strenuous negotiations that Guggenheim accepted the compromise of exhibiting the work privately in her office rather than in the exhibition gallery. Cocteau never offered an interpretation of this remarkable drawing, which may have been created in support of the antifascist republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. The work remained in Guggenheim’s collection and travelled with her to Venice, before being sold to a distant American relative who in turn donated it to the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. Outside of Italy for the last seventy years, the drawing returns to Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice as a key work reflecting the triadic relationship between Guggenheim, Duchamp, and Cocteau. What is more, Jean Cocteau had a special relationship with Venice, which he first fell in love with and felt transformed by at the age of fifteen. In the years following World War II, he regularly visited the city, attending the Venice Film Festival, creating fanciful renditions of gondoliers, objects at Egidio Costantini’s glassworks in Murano—which he helped revive and personally renamed La Fucina degli Angeli (“The Foundry of the Angels”)—and paying visits to Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. The exhibition also includes a drawing from one of Peggy Guggenheim’s guestbooks, including a letter and a caricature dedicated to her.

The exhibition explores the main themes of Jean Cocteau’s oeuvre: Orpheus and poetry, eros, classicism in art, Venice and his relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, cinema, and his interest in design, expressed in fashion and especially in jewelry and the applied arts. A surprising selection of drawings also highlights the central role of desire in Cocteau’s practice, as well as his ambivalent relationship with Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. A further section also explores his relationship with the world of popular culture, advertising, and film, pointing toward his influence on later artists, including Andy Warhol, Félix Gonzáles-Torres and Pedro Almodóvar. Finally, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to admire the Academician Sword for Jean Cocteau (1955) designed by the artist and rendered by Cartier in gold, silver, emerald, ruby, diamond, ivory (originally), onyx, and enamel. This exquisitely refined object features a profile of Orpheus, a central figure to Cocteau’s artistic identity for decades, a lyre, and a star, which are recurring symbols in his work. The sword was first unveiled on October 20, 1955, when the artist was elected as a member of the Académie Française.

“Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge provides an ideal opportunity to revisit the art of Cocteau, and to see him with a fresh 21st-century point of view. His astonishing artistic range--for which, in his lifetime, he was often criticized for spreading himself too thin—now looks prescient, a model for the kind of wideranging cultural fluidity we now expect of contemporary artists. All this, in addition to his more-or-less forthright homosexuality, as well as his very public struggles with drug addiction, make him look especially modern. Perhaps the world has finally caught up with Jean Cocteau.”, says the curator Kenneth E. Silver.

Jean Cocteau. The Juggler’s Revenge

Edited by Marsilio Arte, 2024

176 pages, ENG - ISBN 9791254631683

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive illustrated catalogue, edited by Marsilio Arte, with essays by curator Kenneth E. Silver and Blake Oetting.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION, VENICE

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni - Dorsoduro 701 - 30123 Venezia

www.guggenheim-venice.it

Ange Leccia @ Galleria Six, Milan & Venice - Cars, Marble and Cinder Block

Ange Leccia 

Cars, Marble and Cinder Block 

Galleria Six, Milan & Venice 

March 26 - June 25, 2022 

Galleria Six presents ANGE LECCIA's solo exhibition, Cars, Marble and Cinder Block. This is his second show at the gallery after Ange Leccia: Girls, Ghosts and war (2018-2019).

The exhibition focuses on both sculptural and installation works. The pieces are concerned with the constant relationship between light and image: an image that disorients our gaze, our thinking and leads us to question the subtle relationship between man, technology and identity.

In this exhibition the photographic works, Arrangement, are related both formally and conceptually to the sculptures on display. 

In fact the construction of an enigmatic space placed between the proximity of two or more objects, seems to constitute 'the original gesture' upon which the artist leads us to reflect.

For the occasion a work by Ange Leccia is exhibited in the new space in Venice at Calle de la Vida San Marco 2530.

For the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, Ange Leccia has created a video installation, (D') Aprés Monet, which proposes to feel and read the polysemy of Monets Water Lillies from the story of the genesis of this masterpiece. 

Ange Leccia, born in 1952 in Minerviu, Corsica, lives and works in Paris and Corsica. After studying visual arts, he became dually involved as a visual artist and filmmaker, and initiated his research as a resident at the French Academy in Rome. His work has been shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Documenta in Kassel, Skulptur Projekte in Münster, the Venice Biennale, the Seibu Museum, Hiroshima Art Document, among others. Ange Leccia has taught at Geidai Tokyo University of the Arts. He was a resident at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. In 2013, he had a solo exhibition at the MAC/VAL, as well as the Palais de Tokyo in 2014, and the HAB in Nantes during the summer of 2016. In 2017, he had a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in Reykjavik. In 2018, he participated in Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse. In 2019, he had a solo exhibition at the Abbaye de Jumièges and the Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland. In 2022, he will exhibit his work at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, the Musée des Impressionnismes in Giverny, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Ange Leccia has directed numerous films and fashion shows for big names in the fashion world such as Vuitton and Hermès. He recently co-directed the feature film Christophe Définitivement with the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. It will be released in 2022.

GALLERIA SIX

Piazza Piola 5 - 20131 Milan

Calle de la Vida San Marco, 2530 - Venice

www.galleriasix.it

Georg Baselitz @ Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice: Baselitz – Academy

Baselitz – Academy

Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

8 May – 8 September 2019

With a major retrospective, Georg Baselitz is the first living artist to exhibit at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Curated by Kosme de Barañano, Baselitz – Academy examines the artist’s work in relation to the Italian art historical tradition and the legacy of the academy.

As a young artist, Georg Baselitz left Germany for Italy after winning a six-month residency at the Villa Romana in Florence. During this pivotal time, he turned his gaze intensely to the art of the Italian Renaissance, including that of Giovanni di Paolo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Jacopo da Pontormo.

Acutely aware of the arc of art history, Georg Baselitz has returned over and again to the artists of the past. This exhibition highlights this interest while turning attention to his remarkable influence on contemporary painting, including his iconic inversions, which deconstruct the traditions of portraiture.

Seven rooms are dedicated to Georg Baselitz’s paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. The show is divided into sections focusing on themes such as drawings inspired by Pontormo, the “upside-down” portraits, and the impressive large nudes. In a radical and revelatory presentation, the room of nudes exhibits exceptional works that have never before been seen together.

Georg Baselitz comments: “I am delighted to have been invited to present my work at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. I have known the city and museum well for many years and it is a pleasure to work with Kosme de Barañano to present a show that we hope will offer something different.”

Kosme de Barañano, curator of the exhibition, comments: “Georg Baselitz is one of the most significant artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He confronts the great theme of painting not by reducing it to its essence but rather by attacking the convention itself. We are thrilled to work together again. Baselitz has often visited Italy and has kept a studio in the country for quite some time, and the exhibition will reflect how Italy has impacted his work over the years.”

Paola Marini, former Director of the Gallerie dell’Accademia, comments: “After the success of the Philip Guston exhibition in 2017, we are pleased to continue the journey by presenting the work of a contemporary master, Georg Baselitz, whose work has been profoundly influenced by the encounter with the history of Italian art present at the Gallerie dell’Accademia.”

Giovanni Panebianco, General Secretary of MiBAC and Director of Gallerie dell’Accademia, comments: “This exhibition significantly testifies to the Gallerie dell’Accademia’s commitment to carry on a project of dialogue with the contemporary art milieu, a path started some years ago. The exhibition indeed is a tribute to Georg Baselitz, one of the most innovative and influential artists of the last fifty years. Baselitz is intimately connected with the city of Venice, where he more than once presented his artworks during the Biennale Arte, starting from the 1980 edition when he participated with his first challenging, deeply original sculpture.”

Baselitz – Academy

Published by Gagosian, 2019

Texts by Georg Baselitz, Kosme de Barañano, Paola Marini, Michele Tavola

Hardcover - 10 1/2 × 13 inches - 26.7 × 33 cm -288 pages - English

ISBN: 978-0-8478-6741-7

Baselitz – Academy, promoted by Gallerie dell’Accademia and supported by Gagosian, is a Collateral Event of the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Georg Baselitz

Baselitz was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany, and lives between Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. He has exhibited extensively internationally, including highly acclaimed exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Tate, London. Recent institutional exhibitions include Pinturas Recentes, Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2010–11); Baselitz sculpteur, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2011–12); Back then, in between, and today, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014–15); 56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2015); How it began..., State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg (2015); The Heroes, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2016, traveled to Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; and Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, through 2017); Preview with Review, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (2017); Baselitz Maniera: Nonconformism as a Source of Imagination, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany (2018); Works on Paper, Kunstmuseum Basel (2018); and Georg Baselitz / Six Decades, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2018, traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC); Corpus Baselitz, Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France (2018).

Kosme de Barañano

Internationally respected art historian and curator, Kosme de Barañano is a full tenured Professor of Art History at Miguel Hernández University of Elche, Spain. Previously he was a professor at University of the Basque Country, Spain; IUAV University of Venice; and Humboldt University, Berlin. A former Executive Director of Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM), Spain, and former Deputy Director of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, de Barañano holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain. He has authored numerous books and essays on a wide range of subjects, from Pontormo and Max Beckmann to Alberto Giacometti and Eduardo Chillida.

Gallerie dell’Accademia 

Campo della Carità, Dorsoduro 1050, 30123 Venezia

www.gallerieaccademia.it

Francesca Woodman @ Victoria Miro, Venice - Italian Works

Francesca Woodman: Italian Works

Victoria Miro, Venice

15 September - 15 December 2018

Victoria Miro presents an exhibition of works made in Italy by the celebrated photographer FRANCESCA WOODMANN (1958–1981), including examples from the Eel Series, created in Venice in 1978.

Born and raised in the United States, Francesca Woodman considered Italy her second home. She lived in Florence for a year as a child, attending second grade at a public school there, and spent her adolescent summers in Antella, Tuscany, where her parents purchased a farmhouse when the artist was 11 years-old. Shortly after this, at the age of 13, Francesca Woodman created her first self-portrait, and the genesis of her work until her death in 1981, aged just 22, is intrinsically linked to Italian art and culture.

This exhibition is comprised of Italian images, including those Francesca Woodman made in 1977 and 1978, during the year she spent in Rome at the Rhode Island School of Design’s European Honors programme. This year proved pivotal to her artistic development, and the works from this period emphasise the integral influence of Italian art and culture on her aesthetic vision. One of the key influences of Italian art on Woodman’s work was in her precise use of composition, which became more sophisticated during her time in Rome. She explored perspective and consciously used formal strategies learnt from her study of Florentine masters, particularly Giotto and Piero della Francesca, and classical sculpture.

In addition to immersing herself in the study of historic painting and sculpture in Rome, Woodman made strong connections with Italian artists her own age. She became friends with Giuseppe Gallo and Enrico Luzzi, and through them discovered the Pastificio Cerere, an abandoned pasta factory transformed into an art space that housed the studios of artists who became known as the ‘San Lorenzo Group’. It was in the cavernous spaces of the Cerere that she made some of her most iconic images. She also befriended the young painter Sabina Mirri, who became one of her favourite models.

Also crucial to her development in Rome was Francesca Woodman’s association with the Maldoror bookstore in Via di Parione, which specialised in avant-garde literature of the twentieth century as well as more obscure books on subjects including the fantastical and the grotesque. Woodman spent hours in the shop, learning more about early twentieth-century artistic and literary movements. Her first Italian solo exhibition took place in the bookshop’s basement gallery space.

The exhibition explores Francesca Woodman’s fusion of Italian classicism with aspects of narrative and performance. In Italy Francesca Woodman extended her development of classical subject matter, predominantly the female nude and tropes of still life and classical composition. At the same time she was enhancing and extending her use of narrative and performative strategies. This is evident in her use of series of images, crucially in Self-deceit, 1978, which features scenarios where Francesca Woodman refers to classical and surrealist sculptural poses using her own naked body and a single prop, a rough-edged piece of mirrored glass. Further important series Francesca Woodman worked on during this time include the Angel series, which she commenced in Providence but extended in works made in the Cerere, and Eel Series, 1978, likely created in Venice on one of her frequent visits to the city.

Bringing these diverse works to Venice for the first time reveals the ways in which Italy and its culture underscored the development of an artist whose work has garnered exceptional public and critical interest in the 37 years since her untimely death.

Born in 1958 in Denver, Colorado, FRANCESCA WOODMANN lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island, New York and Italy until her death in 1981. Significant posthumous solo presentations include On Being an Angel, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2015–2016), touring subsequently to Foam, Amsterdam (2016), Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris (2016), Moderna Museet, Malmo (2016–2017) and Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki (2017); Francesca Woodman, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2011–2012), touring to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012); Francesca Woodman: Retrospective, Sala Espacio AV, Murcia, touring to SMS Contemporanea, Siena (both 2009); Francesca Woodman: Providence, Roma, New York, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2000); Francesca Woodman, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, touring to Kunsthal, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (both 1998); Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal (1999); The Photographers’ Gallery, London (1999); Centro Cultural TeclaSala, L’Hospitalet, Barcelona (1999–2000); Carla Sozzani Gallery, Milan, (2001); The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2001) and PhotoEspana, Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid (2002). Woodman's work is represented in the collections of major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Tate/National Galleries of Scotland. Current exhibitions include Life in Motion: Egon Schiele / Francesca Woodman, Tate Liverpool, UK until 23 Sep 2018.

VICTORIA MIRO, VENICE

Il Capricorno, San Marco 1994, 30124 Venice

www.victoria-miro.com

Elemental @ L.A. Louver, Venice, California

ELEMENTAL: Peter Alexander, Carl Andre, Josh Callaghan, Richard Deacon, Toshikatsu Endo, Richard Long, Nathan Mabry, John McCracken, Richard Nonas, Yoko Ono, Adrian Paules, Fabrice Samyn, Peter Shelton, John Zane Zappas
L.A. Louver, Venice, California
Through 3 March, 2018

Richard Long

Trastevere Spring Line, 2012

Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice

L.A. Louver presents ELEMENTAL, an exhibition that brings together sculptures by both established and emerging artists, whose works focus on essential materiality and form. The exhibition includes work by Peter Alexander, Carl Andre, Josh Callaghan, Richard Deacon, Toshikatsu Endo, Richard Long, Nathan Mabry, John McCracken, Richard Nonas, Yoko Ono, Adrian Paules, Fabrice Samyn, Peter Shelton, and John Zane Zappas.

While representing a diversity in approaches and techniques, there is a continuity and unification of structural language that unfolds throughout the installation. Freestanding sculptures include a minimalist grid configuration by Carl Andre, a towering column of staggered concrete blocks by Adrian Paules, a sleek black triangular pillar made of resin by John McCracken, and a carved refrigerator by Josh Callaghan; wall mounted pieces include plaster bone forms arranged into letters by Nathan Mabry, Light and Space artist Peter Alexander’s colorful grouping of shimmering resin bars, and an annulus finished with silver leaf by Peter Shelton – each work displays a skilled proficiency in construction and intent.

John Zane Zappas 

A S H T R Æ 4, 2017 

Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice

Peter Shelton 

sundog, 2003-2017

Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice

Several considerations of material usage are represented. Raw materials – stone, burned wood, bronze, steel – maintain their original integrity in the works of Richard Long, Toshikatsu Endo, Richard Nonas and John Zane Zappas. While sculptures by Peter Shelton, Richard Deacon and John McCracken take on highly refined fabrication techniques and contemporary materials – fiberglass, stainless steel, resin.

Yoko Ono 

Disappearing Piece (Bronze, cast of 1965 version), 1988

Courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice

The sculptures challenge viewers’ perception of space in relation to their own physicality – compelling visitors to move around and confront the works individually, and as a whole. However, works by two artists engage in a more participatory relationship. The contents of a discreet bronze box in Yoko Ono’s Disappearing Piece (1988) are said to vanish upon exposure to light, and a wall mirror by Fabrice Samyn titled Dust of Breath (2010) captures the spectre of a breath – comprised of dust – on its surface, alluding to the human essence. They also challenge the idea of materiality as not merely a physical manifestation, but that which can be imagined.

L.A. LOUVER
45 North Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90291
www.lalouver.com

Deborah Butterfield @ L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

Deborah Butterfield: Three Sorrows
L.A. Louver, Venice, California
Through 6 January, 2018

DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD

Three Sorrows (quake, tsumani, meltdown from, Gretel Ehrlich in Facing the Wave), 2016

Cast bronze, wood, plastic and wire

Primary element: 81.25 x 100.75 x 40 in. (206.4 x 255.9 x 101.6 cm)

Installations dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

L.A. Louver presents new and recent works by DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD. For the artist, found materials are a continued source of inspiration for her horse sculptures. In a new direction, Deborah Butterfield has incorporated marine debris from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami to create some of her most powerful and poignant works to date. The sculptures are featured in the front courtyard, the second floor gallery and our open-air Skyroom.

To create each sculpture, Deborah Butterfield uses gathered wood to build the skeletal armature of the horse. Once these wooden pieces are cast in bronze and welded together, this becomes the foundation over which the artist can begin forming the sculpture. With a keen eye, Deborah Butterfield selects wood from accumulated stockpiles to build her compositions, fastening them one by one to this underlying structure. The rectangular body of the horse is the area of focus, which according to the artist is a “container for objects which often have lyrical line quality, emotional resonance, and narrative history, whether from wind, water, fire, pressure, or man.” As a finishing touch, Butterfield composes the neck and the head to personify the sculpture, realizing the form as a horse. At this stage, the artist meticulously documents the sculpture before disassembling it and casting the remaining wooden pieces in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry in Washington state. She then works with the foundry to weld the pieces to their original configuration, and applies a specialized patina to its surface. Some are smaller in scale, while others are larger-than-life.

For Deborah Butterfield, the sculptures are less about the horse, but the wider context and emotional response invoked by their materials. In select works, Deborah Butterfield has introduced another kind of found material, marine debris that drifted to the coastal regions of Alaska and British Columbia following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. She first took notice of these washed-up materials during a visit to Iceland, which she collected and brought back to her studio. This led her to research volunteer initiatives aimed at gathering excess debris amassing in the Pacific Ocean, and was given access to these materials for use in her sculptures. “I have been collecting driftwood and assorted debris all my life, finding beauty and order in the disorder and disintegration of our treasured or discarded everyday objects.” says Deborah Butterfield. “When given the opportunity to use marine debris from the tsunami in Japan, I jumped at the chance to work with such emotionally, spiritually and tragically infused material.”

DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD

Elkhorn, 2016

Cast bronze

97 x 86 x 29.75 in. (246.4 x 218.4 x 75.6 cm)

Courtesy the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

Pairing natural wood with man-made refuse, the artist touches on the delicate balance of our environment, and the increasingly common phenomenon of natural disasters in our current age. In two smaller sculptures Maulele and Kōkai (both produced in 2017), the artist has cast both the wood and debris in bronze, but in a larger work, the artist chose to utilize the actual rubbish alongside the bronze wooden forms. Three Sorrows is a monumental installation that takes its title from Gretel Ehrilch’s novel Facing the Wave, which accounts the aftermath through those who endured the tragedy. Butterfield combined wood (cast in bronze) and detritus (plastic and foam objects) to realize the horse’s physicality. Driftwood, plastic container and scraps, foam buoys and materials are scattered around its base. With its head tilting downwards in a melancholic gesture, the horse appears to reflect upon the materials of its making, lamenting their very existence.

Born and raised in San Diego, Deborah Butterfield studied at the University of California, Davis and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, Butterfield taught sculpture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Montana State University, Bozeman. Since 1976, the artist has exhibited extensively. Solo shows include the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1981; ARCO Center for Visual Art, Los Angeles, CA (traveled to Oklahoma State University, OK; University of Colorado, CO; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Boise Gallery, ID; and Utah Museum of Fine Art, UT) 1981-1983; the Seattle Art Museum, WA and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, TX, 1982; Oakland Museum of California Art, CA, 1983; San Diego Museum of Art, CA, 1996; Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT (traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, HI and Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL) 2003 – 2004; Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, CO, 2015; and The Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL, 2016. Commissions include the Walker Art Center and the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA, CA. Works are also represented in numerous public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; Cincinnati Museum, OH; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Deborah Butterfield divides her time between her home and studio on the Big Island, Hawaii, and her studio and ranch in Bozeman, Montana.

L.A. LOUVER
45 North Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA, USA
www.lalouver.com

Heather Gwen Martin @ L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

Heather Gwen Martin: Currents 
L.A. Louver, Venice, California
Through 6 January, 2018

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN

Higher, 2017

Oil in linen, 82 1/2 x 77 in. (209.6 x 195.6 cm)

Courtesy the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

L.A. Louver presents new works by Los Angeles-based artist HEATHER GWEN MARTIN. All produced over the past year, the exhibition features over a dozen paintings in bold and subdued palettes, and in a wide range of sizes, from small-scale intimate pieces to her largest work to date, approximately 8 x 10 ft. (2.4 x 3 m).

Heather Gwen Martin continues to evolve the color and spatial relationships in her lyrical, vivid abstract paintings. Painting on linen, she first primes each support with an oil ground, embracing the fabric’s natural surface irregularities that result from this process. The underlying texture roots the materiality of the painting to come, and inserts the artist’s hand as the maker. Once the background is awash with color, Heather Gwen Martin develops the composition with varied biomorphic forms and lithe meandering lines, in an array of sumptuous colors. The two-dimensional paintings are not visually flat. Elements push forward, recede back, and traverse everywhere in between.

In Higher (2017), one of the larger paintings in the show, shapes are suspended amidst a crimson red background. A pair of tenuous lines elongate from two soft blue configurations, and reach towards a dark blue almost black form, seemingly lifting it from the void. Meanwhile, green, pink, yellow and blue shapes and lines punctuate the scene. All are interconnected, reactive and conductive, making contact with only the slightest touch.

HEATHER GWEN MARTIN

Breather, 2017

Oil on linen, 20 x 21 in. (50.8 x 54.6 cm)

Courtesy the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

Throughout the exhibition, Heather Gwen Martin’s color dexterity and technical prowess are on full display. Subtler in tonality and smaller in scale, Breather (2017) is a quieter composition. In an atmosphere of muted pink, a luminous yellow radiates upwards to graze a dark green form. A single tendril extends from the dark green, interrupted by a cloud of white that floats atop the picture plane.

When approaching her work, Heather Gwen Martin begins with an initial intent that serves more as a point of departure, rather than a destination. Dissolving any sense of objectivity, the artist releases preconceptions to allow the compositions to materialize with immediacy, experimentation and improvisation. In this state of mindfulness, with an awareness of both interior and exterior motives, Heather Gwen Martin connects currents of consciousness to bring the imagery forth, their impulsivities made visible through her actions made on canvas.

Born in 1977 in Saskatchewan, Canada, Heather Gwen Martin studied at the University of California, San Diego and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been included in museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Torrance Art Museum, CA; El Segundo Museum of Art, CA; and Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH. Forthcoming, her work will be included in the group exhibition Chaos and Awe Painting for the 21st Century at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, 22 June – 16 September 2018.

In 2016, Heather Gwen Martin was invited by the Murals of La Jolla to create a towering mural on the exterior of a three-story building. Titled, Landing (2016), the mural is located in the downtown La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, CA on 7224 Girard Avenue.

L.A. LOUVER
45 North Venice Boulevard, Venice, CA, USA
www.lalouver.com

Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice - Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero

Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

September 4, 2010 - January 9, 2011

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective, the first retrospective exhibition of this great American Abstract Expressionist painter to be shown in Italy. Like those previously dedicated to William Baziotes and Richard Pousette-Dart at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, this exhibition brings to Italy a better understanding of a generation of New York artists that in the 1950s came to form American Abstract Expressionism. The origins of this movement in the 1940s is closely linked to the career of Peggy Guggenheim herself, and to her New York museum-gallery Art of This Century.

The career of Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), charismatic artist and thinker, is closely tied to that of other exponents of American Abstract Expressionism: for example, from the early 1930s he had firm friendships with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Rothko shared with Gottlieb the quest for a new pictorial language based on personal artistic expression, and was a founding member with him of “The Ten” in 1935. In 1941 Gottlieb and Rothko together resolved to explore mythical and Jungian subject matter, thus initiating an important early phase of the nascent New York school of painters, and signalling for the first time an avant-garde that was independent of European prototypes. Again with Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb was the author of a now-historic letter to The New York Times of 13 June 1943, considered the first public statement of theories underlying what was later to be known as American Abstract Expressionism. In spring 1950 he organized a group of artists to protest the position of the Metropolitan Museum of Art towards contemporary American art, a group labeled „The Irascibles‟ by an article in The New York Herald Tribune, and presented to a much larger public through an iconic photograph by Nina Leen published in Life magazine. The photograph included Baziotes Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Newman, Pollock, Pousette-Dart, and Clyfford Still, as well as Adolph Gottlieb himself. In 1958-59, a touring exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, that included Adolph Gottlieb and several of these same artists, was titled The New American Painting. However, as Sanford Hirsch, Executive Director of the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, notes in the catalogue: “Gottlieb is labeled an Abstract Expressionist painter, and it is true that he was one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism and one of its major artists through the 1940s and 1950s. However, the term itself is too narrow to comprehend the breadth of Gottlieb's art and its impact on his colleagues, audiences, and the art that would follow.” This exhibition sets out to reveal the diversity of Gottlieb's production, and its ceaseless evolution, according to his own aphorism: “Different times require different images.”

The exhibition opens with paintings, drawings and etchings from the 1930s, including portraits of Rothko and another close friend Milton Avery, as well as allusions to an important sojourn in Arizona in 1937-38. Next comes a numerous selection, for the first time in Italy, of the first cohesive series of Adolph Gottlieb's paintings, the Pictographs, begun in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor and America's entry to World War II. These place Gottlieb, alongside Rothko and a few others such as Arshile Gorky and Pollock, among the pioneers of the new American avant-garde. Typically a grid segments the picture surface; inside its compartments Adolph Gottlieb placed symbols, whether a hand, an eye, or hieroglyphs of his own invention that blend American Indian or other primitive ritual imagery with allusions to Greek mythology. They influenced a specific formal component of Abstract Expressionism, the „allover‟ composition, which disperses pictorial incident evenly across the picture surface. Having exhausted the visual possibilities of the Pictograph, Adolph Gottlieb developed novel compositional types such as the Labyrinths (beginning with Labyrinth #1, 1950, in the exhibition) and Imaginary Landscapes from 1951, such as Sea and Tide (1952, in the exhibition). In the first group the grid of the Pictographs either takes over and dominates the painting, or becomes transparent, revealing concealed brushwork in the depths of the painting. In the second the composition splits into two zones, with celestial bodies in the upper part and an imaginary, vigorously brushed „landscape‟ below. These works coincide with Gottlieb's growing commercial and critical success in the mid 1950s. In 1956, the lower part of the Imaginary Landscapes detached itself from the picture edges to become an independent floating form in vertical compositions known as the Bursts, Gottlieb's best known works. A jury headed by Italian critic and historian Giulio Carlo Argan awarded Adolph Gottlieb first prize at the 1963 São Paulo Biennial. In the 1960s, notwithstanding the emergence of Pop Art, antithesis of Abstract Expressionism, Gottlieb's painting was perceived as a prophetic and vital source of Minimal art. The exhibition also includes a selection of Adolph Gottlieb's sculptures, made from colored cardboard and presented in the company of the cosmic images that inspired them. The exhibition closes with a series of late works in which the explosive Burst contracts into more geometric and cooler discs, painted in the years prior to his death aged almost 71 in 1974.

Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective

Exhibition catalogue

Giunti Editore, 2010

The fully illustrated exhibition catalogue by Giunti Editore, in English and Italian, includes essays by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and by Pepe Karmel, Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Fine Arts, New York University. 

The exhibition has been organized in partnership with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York, which has lent numerous paintings and sculptures from its holdings. The exhibition also benefits from loans from the Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Musée national d'art moderne (Centre Pompidou), Paris, the American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, and from several private collectors.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION

Palazzo Venier del Leoni

701 Dorsoduro, 30123 Venezia

www.guggenheim-venice.it