ringl + pit @ Robert Mann Gallery, NYC - Grete Stern + Ellen Auebach Photography Exhibition

ringl + pit

Robert Mann Gallery, New York

October 23 - December 6, 2025

At the height of the Weimar Republic, an artist duo experimented with gender roles and consumer culture, subverting a commercial world dominated by cheerful faces and brightly illustrated pages. They photographed wigs, mannequins, and merchandise in unorthodox still lives, tapping into Berlin’s vibrant, avant-garde spirit. Their work transcended traditional advertising, highlighting touch, texture, and enigma. Their name: ringl + pit.

Robert Mann Gallery presents ringl + pit, an exhibition featuring rare studio photographs alongside an exceptionally limited-edition portfolio of the duo’s life work—much of which has been rarely exhibited to the public.

ringl + pit were the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (pit). Both trained under Walter Peterhans, the pioneering photography instructor at the Bauhaus, who emphasized precision, formal clarity, and graphic design. In 1930, Stern and Auerbach founded their Berlin-based studio, ringl + pit, blending avant-garde experimentation with commercial portraiture and advertising. Their work emerged during a period of increasing independence for women in Germany, both socially and artistically.

Their photographs challenged conventional advertising norms through striking, surreal, and meticulously composed images. Working collaboratively, the women alternated roles behind the camera and on set, constantly refining each shot until it felt just right. The studio quickly gained a reputation as one of Germany’s most innovative, producing crisp, compelling images that merged modernist aesthetics with subversive wit. Their work was widely recognized, earning international awards and appearing in influential publications such as Die Gebrauchsgraphik and Cahiers d’Art.

Among their most iconic works is Komol Haircoloring Advertisement, an advertisement for hair dye that disrupts traditional beauty standards with artificial hair, a paper cutout silhouette, and metallic mesh. In the Güldenring Cigarettes Advertisemen, they defy convention by omitting both the pack and the hand, instead focusing on a single cigarette protruding from a cellophane wrapper. Their textile commission for Maratti captures a seam running down a luxurious swath of fabric—eschewing the expected female model and instead emphasizing craftsmanship and tactile detail.

The exhibition also includes two rare self-portraits. In pit with Veil, Ellen Auerbach is shown in a stylized headpiece, her sideways glance withheld from the viewer, hinting at the portrait as a form of disguise. In contrast, Grete Stern appears in a tight close-up, her bespectacled face framed with intense, inward focus. Together, these portraits reveal the duo’s deep artistic dialogue—an exploration of selfhood, queerness, and mutual expression. Their work captures the intellectual and creative energy of Weimar-era Germany, a time of extraordinary cultural ferment that was tragically cut short by the rise of the Nazi regime. As progressive Jewish women, both Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were forced to flee the country in the early 1930s.

Ellen Auerbach eventually settled in New York; Grete Stern made her home in Buenos Aires. Though continents apart, the two remained lifelong friends. In 1985, they co-published Fotografie ringl + pit, a carefully designed portfolio that echoed the aesthetic and material choices of their early 1930s studio work.

Taken together, their photographs illuminate how Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern not only participated in, but helped define the avant-garde spirit of their time. Through humor, experimentation, and a refusal to conform to prescribed gender roles, they carved out a bold new space for visual expression. Their work endures as a testament to photography’s power to question representation, defy convention, and assert identity.

The exhibition ringl + pit is presented in conjunction with Yale University of Art Gallery’s The Shared New Vision of ringl + pit, on view through December 7, 2025. 

ROBERT MANN GALLERY

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

robertmann.com

Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70 @ Pinacoteca de São Paulo - Brazilian Pop Art Exhibition

Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70

Pinacoteca de São Paulo

Through October 5, 2025

Claudio Tozzi 

Astronautas [Astronauts] (1969)

Courtesy of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo

Pietrina Checcacci 

Dinheiro [Money] (detail), 

from the series O povo brasileiro [The Brazilian People] (1967) 

Credit: Jaime Aciolo 

Courtesy of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo

The Pinacoteca de São Paulo presents the exhibition Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70, in the Grande Galeria of the Pina Contemporânea building. Featuring 250 works by more than 100 artists the show offers a broad perspective on the art of the period. Curated by Pollyana Quintella and Yuri Quevedo, the exhibition is divided into thematic sections that trace major events of the time, such as the rise of the cultural industry, the breakdown of democracy, and various social transformations. Works by Wanda Pimentel, Romanita Disconzi, Antonio Dias, among many others, are on view.

In a context of industrialization and political upheaval—including the Cold War and Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship—national artistic production responded to the mass culture, driven by television, mainstream media, and advertising, with both irreverence and resistance. From the 1960s onward, a series of international figurative trends entered national artistic debates. Among them was pop art, which originated in the United Kingdom but gained prominence in the United States through celebrated artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. While these artists worked on language within a developed, industrialized society marked by mass production, Brazilian artists operated in a context of underdevelopment and inequality, where they had to reckon with the trauma of a society oppressed by military rule.

“The exhibition explores a moment in Brazilian history that still resonates in our daily lives. Looking at this production is key to understand the emergence of contemporary art in Brazil, as well as the foundational issues in many debates we face today. And, through the gathering of these works, we can grasp the collective strength of a generation of artists who worked to denounce, protest, and dream of a new society,” say the curators.

The artists’ interest in the street—driven by a desire to occupy more diverse and less institutionalized spaces—marked a series of events in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among them was the Happening das Bandeiras [Flag Happening], held in 1968 at General Osório Square in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro. It brought together artists such as Nelson Leirner, Flávio Motta, Hélio Oiticica, Carmela Gross, and Anna Maria Maiolino. On that occasion, they displayed silkscreened flags in the square, promoting a collective occupation of public space, in pursuit of broader and more democratic access to the visual arts. The set of original flags opens the exhibition in the Grande Galeria.

Subsequent sections present works that reflect Brazil’s emerging cultural industry, showing stars of Brazilian popular music—whose fame grew thanks to television festivals—amid the fever of the space race, which turned astronauts into “pop icons” and broadcast to the world the historical milestone that was the humankind’s landing to the Moon. Prominent names from the period are showcased, like Nelson Leirner with his altar to the “king” Roberto Carlos, in the work Adoração [Adoration] (1966); Claudia Andujar, with a photograph of Chico Buarque taken in 1968; Flávio Império, who portrayed Caetano Veloso in Lua de São Jorge (1976); the popular artist Waldomiro de Deus, with his characteristic rockets; and Claudio Tozzi, with works such as Bob Dylan (1969) and Guevara (1967), in addition to his astronauts that helped define the iconography of Brazilian pop art. 

The restrictions imposed by the civil-military dictatorship were reflected in artistic production through diverse formal, poetic, and political strategies. The exhibition includes caricatures of generals, featured in the works by Humberto Espíndola, Antonio Dias, and Cybele Varela; political prisoners’ drawings from the Alípio Freire Collection, belonging to the Memorial da Resistência; photographic records that Evandro Teixeira made in the emblematic March of the One Hundred Thousand, as well as works that sought to intervene directly in the political context, such as the CocaCola bottles by Cildo Meireles, which make up the work Inserções em circuitos ideológicos [Insertions into Ideological Circuits] (1970), and the Trouxas ensanguentadas [Bloody Bundles] (1969) by Artur Barrio. The theme of crime also permeated the art of the period. Faced with the oppressive state, figures of marginality were evoked as a subversive strategy, challenging morality and laws. Among them, we highlight a crime scene painted by Paulo Pedro Leal in the early 1960s, the film Natureza [Nature] (1973), by Luiz Alphonsus, and the classic work A bela Lindonéia [The Beautiful Lindonéia] (1967), by Rubens Gerchman.

Pop gestures also appropriated the urban imagery through visual codes and signage. This is the case of works such as Marlboro (1976), in which Geraldo de Barros transforms billboard scraps into paintings, and the structured surfaces with acrylic and brass remains by Judith Lauand (Untitled, 1972). In the central area of the gallery, works express the dispute for public space. Arrows, traffic lights, festivities, and collective projects gain centrality in the works. Buum (1966), by Marcello Nitsche, Totém de interpretação [Interpretation Totem] (1969), by Romanita Disconzi, Lateral de ônibus [Side of Bus] (1969), by Raymundo Colares, and the iconic parangolés by Hélio Oiticica, first shown 60 years ago in the Opinião 65 exhibition, held at MAM Rio, can be seen by the public. In the case of Hélio Oiticica, the visitor can literally try on the parangolés, wearing them in the exhibition space. 

The 1960s also served as a stage for a sexual revolution, sparked by historical events such as May 68 in France and the hippie movement in the United States. At the core of the section dedicated to desire and sexuality are works by artists who reflected on the shifting status of sexuality in Brazil, also influenced by mass culture. This is the case of Wanda Pimentel, with her Envolvimento [Involvement] series (1968), Teresinha Soares with A caixa de fazer amor [Lovemaking Box] (1967), and Antonio Dias in Teu corpo [Your Body] (1967), as well as pieces by Maria Auxiliadora, Lygia Pape, and Vilma Pasqualini.

Curators: Pollyana Quintella and Yuri Quevedo

PINACOTECA DE SÃO PAULO

Pina Contemporânea Building | Grande Galeria

Av. Tiradentes, 273, São Paulo 

pinacoteca.org.br

Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70

Pinacoteca de São Paulo, May 31 – October 5, 2025

Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923 - Exhibition @ New York Public Library

Becoming Bohemia 

Greenwich Village, 1912–1923

New York Public Library

October 12, 2024 – February 1, 2025

Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923 chronicles the extraordinary rise and fall of the first large-scale countercultural enclave in the United States.

During the 1910s an extraordinary gathering of artists, writers, radicals, and free spirits settled in New York’s Greenwich Village, lured there by inexpensive housing and the promise of a relaxed, permissive atmosphere in which to live and work.

Though they harbored diverse creative and personal agendas, these iconoclastic transplants shared an impulse to upend not only the established principles of their respective arts, but also the era’s social conventions and political status quo. To that end, they often advocated for a host of causes such as women’s suffrage, birth control, gender equality, labor reform, socialism, anarchism, free speech, and antimilitarism.

“The Village's bohemian scene of the 1910s and 1920s was a hotbed of aesthetic innovation and radical political activism, attracting and nurturing a who's who of cutting-edge artistic, literary, and intellectual talent,” Michael Inman, Susan Jaffe Tane Curator of Rare Books at The New York Public Library, said. “Influential in its own time, it also served as a template for future American countercultures and avant-gardes.”

Highlights from the exhibition include:

- Rare editions of influential Village-based little magazines such as Others, The Dial, The Glebe, The Little Review, The Seven Arts, The Pagan, and Rogue, among others;

- Photographs of noted Villagers by Jessie Tarbox Beals, including portraits of Merton Clivette, Romany Marie, Tiny Tim, and Bobby Edwards, as well as photographs of noted Village hangouts, including the Washington Square Bookshop, the Samovar, Polly’s restaurant, and Hotel Brevoort;

- A broadside advertising an Emma Goldman lecture on birth control held at Carnegie Hall;

- First editions of John Reed’s and Louise Bryant’s firsthand accounts of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, published respectively as Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) and Six Red Months in Russia (1918);

- First edition printings of The Provincetown Plays (1916), series I–III;

- The April 1920 issue of The Little Review that occasioned the Ulysses obscenity trial; and

- Original costume design drawings for a performance of the Greenwich Village Follies (1920).

While the Village soon developed a reputation as a bohemian utopia and epicenter of the avant-garde—a place in which one might freely discover and express oneself—its stint as a cradle of nonconformism was short-lived: the United States’s entry into the First World War, among other stressors, signaled the imminent demise of its initial age of artistic and societal rebellion.

Becoming Bohemia offers a window into a period of downtown history that had an outsized influence during its time, and whose countercultural legacy continues to be the subject of study and to shape thinkers today.

Additional highlights include:

- Works by William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Alfred Kreymborg, Marguerite Zorach, and John Sloan, among others;

- A first edition of Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), published by Albert and Charles Boni;

- A photograph of the May 1913 suffrage parade in New York City, which was, in part, organized and led by several prominent Villagers;

- The program from the June 1913 Paterson Silk Strike Pageant, which was held at Madison Square Garden;

- An issue of Guido Bruno’s Bruno’s Weekly (1916s); and

- A poster advertising a 1917 bohemian costume held at Webster Hall.

Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923 features approximately 140 works, drawn from across The New York Public Library. 

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

www.nypl.org

Make Way for Berthe Weill @ Grey Art Museum, NYU, New York - Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde

Make Way for Berthe Weill 

Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde

Grey Art Museum, NYU, New York

October 1, 2024 – March 1, 2025 

Emilie Charmy 

Portrait de Berthe Weill (Portrait of Berthe Weill), 1910–14 

Oil on canvas, 35 3/8 x 24 in. (90 x 61 cm) 

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 

Purchase, Annie White Townsend Bequest, 113.2024 

© Alberto Ricci. Photo: MMFA, Julie Ciot

New York University’s Grey Art Museum presents Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde, featuring works by modern artists championed by a dealer who remains relatively unknown. Berthe Weill (pronounced “vay”) was the first dealer to purchase works by Pablo Picasso in 1901, and she promoted Henri Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani, among many others. Yet her role in early 20th century modernism has been omitted from most historical accounts. This landmark exhibition sets the record straight. The groundbreaking show is the second at the museum’s new and expanded galleries at 18 Cooper Square.

Some 110 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture by modern giants such as Picasso, Matisse, Aristide Maillol, Fernand Léger, and Raoul Dufy are featured alongside works by less well-known artists. Together they create a compelling portrait of Berthe Weill (1865–1951), who operated her gallery for four decades in four different Parisian locations and was the first to promote work created exclusively by emerging artists. The exhibition highlights Berthe Weill’s influence and examines the sexism, antisemitism, and economic struggles she faced as she advocated for cutting-edge contemporary art in a competitive Parisian art market.

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller 

The Wretched, 1901 

Bronze, 17 x 21 x 15 in. (43.2 x 53.3 x 38.1 cm) 

Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington 

Gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, 1951.07.264

Emilie Charmy 

Piana Corsica, 1906 

Oil on canvas mounted on board 

21 1/8 x 25 3/8 in. (53.5 x 64.5 cm). 

Galerie Bernard Bouche, Paris 

© Alberto Ricci

Robert Delaunay 

Paysage aux vaches (Landscape with cows), 1906 

Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 24 in. (50 x 61 cm) 

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 

Donation of Henry-Thomas, 1984, 2576 

CC0 Paris Musées / Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Organized by NYU’s Grey Art Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, Make Way for Berthe Weill also features paintings by Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy, and Alice Halicka, to name a few among the many female artists Weill promoted. Also included are works by Marc Chagall, André Derain, and Diego Rivera, whose first solo show took place at the Galerie B. Weill.

“This exhibition spotlights the remarkable story of an indomitable woman who maintained a gallery in Paris, the art capital of the world, from 1901 to 1941,” says Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Museum and one of the curators of the exhibition. “Weill sought out unproven artists, some of whom became household names and some of whom didn’t. But all benefited from her creativity, ingenuity, and passion.”

Berthe Weill was born in 1865 in Paris to an Alsatian Jewish family of very modest means. In her teens, she began an apprenticeship with Salvator Mayer, a colorful print and antiques dealer whose shop was located in the heart of the Parisian gallery district and which attracted Impressionist artists such as Edgar Degas and collectors such as Isaac de Camondo. At age 36, after learning the trade for two decades, she opened the Galerie B. Weill just a few streets away. Her business card read “Place aux Jeunes,” which roughly translates to “make way for the young.” In addition to presenting exhibitions, Weill sold books, prints, and antiques to earn enough to stay open. Fearless and determined, she organized Modigliani’s only solo exhibition during his lifetime. The show was shut down by police on the opening night, as they judged the nudes to be “indecent.” Consequently, no works were sold; the impoverished artist died three years later.

Berthe Weill stood apart from her male counterparts, such as Ambroise Vollard, Paul Durand-Ruel, the Bernheim-Jeune brothers, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, not only in her class and gender, but in her willingness to gamble on unknown talent and in her disdain for contracts. Art lovers of her time recognized Weill’s achievements. In October 1931 a journal reported that she was writing her autobiography: “Mlle B. Weill, that extraordinary picture dealer . . . has a long memory and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. So gossip about the memoir by ‘the great and small’ Mlle Weill is buzzing from Saint-Tropez to Sanary by way of the terrasse of the Dôme, and some people are feeling nervous.” Weill’s memoir, Pan! dans l’oeil!, was published in 1933. Translated in 2022 as Pow! Right in the Eye!, it appears to be the first autobiography by an art dealer, followed by Vollard’s Recollections of a Picture Dealer in 1936.

Jules Pascin 

Portrait of Madame Pascin (Hermine David), 1915–16 

Oil on canvas, 21 x 24 in. (53.3 x 61 cm) 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967-30-66 

Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Amedeo Modigliani 

Fille rousse (Girl with red hair), c. 1915 

Oil on canvas, 16 x 14 3/8 in. (40.5 x 36.5 cm) 

Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris 

Jean Walter and Paul Guillame Collection, 1960.46 

© Photo: Musée de l’Orangerie / Sophie Crépy

Louis Cattiaux 

La Vierge attentive (The Attentive Virgin), 

also known as La Vierge à l’étoile (Virgin with a star), 1939 

Oil on canvas, 22 x 19 5/8 in. (56 x 50 cm)

Collection Guieu, Jouques, France 

© Jean-Christophe Lohest

The exhibition includes archival documents—such as letters, exhibition catalogues, photographs, and journals—that reveal her deep relationships with a range of artists. A keen observer of contemporary art trends, she supported Matisse and showed the Fauves before they gained their moniker at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. She began promoting Cubism, noting in Pow! how difficult it was to convince the public of its importance. In the late 1910s and ’20s, she featured figurative paintings by School of Paris artists, before focusing on abstraction in the 1930s with shows by Otto Freundlich and Alfred Reth. In 1941, she was forced to close her Left Bank gallery on rue Saint-Dominique due to the “Aryanization” measures enacted under the Nazi occupation. Somehow avoiding deportation, Berthe Weill emerged impoverished and in poor health after the war. In December, 1946, artists and rival galleries donated artworks for a public auction, the proceeds of which went to Berthe Weill in recognition of her crucial early support.

The exhibition’s international curatorial team includes Lynn Gumpert, Marianne Le Morvan, founder of the Berthe Weill Archives in Paris, Anne Grace, curator of modern art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Sophie Eloy, collections administrator and coordinator of the Contrepoints Contemporains installations at the Musée de l’Orangerie.

An illustrated publication, Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde, accompanies the exhibition. Published by Flammarion, it illuminates the rich artistic period by spotlighting recently rediscovered artists and offering new insights into the era’s central figures. It includes an introductory essay by Le Morvan, a discussion of portraits of Weill by Grace, an essay on antisemitism in late 19th-century France by historian Charles Dellheim, an overview of collectors who frequented the Galerie B. Weill by researcher Robert McD. Parker, and entries on works by Eloy. It also features a chronology and selected bibliography.

BERTHE WEIL

Pow! Right in the Eye! 

Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting

The University of Chicago Press, 2022

Also available is Berte Weill’s recently translated 1933 memoir, Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting, edited by Lynn Gumpert and translated by William Rodarmor, with foreword by: Julie Saul and Lynn Gumpert; introduction by Marianne Le Morvan; University of Chicago Press, 280 pages, ISBN: 9780226814360.

Make Way for Berthe Weill: Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-Garde is organized by the Grey Art Museum, New York University, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. 

The exhibition will tour to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts May 10 – September 7, 2025, and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris October 8, 2025 – January 25, 2026.

GREY ART GALLERY, New York University 

18 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003

greyartmuseum.nyu.edu

Jiro Takamatsu @ Pace Gallery, NYC - "The World Expands" Exhibition - Shadow and Perspective Artworks

Jiro Takamatsu: The World Expands

Pace Gallery, New York

September 20 - November 2, 2024

JIRO TAKAMATSU

Shadow, 1989/1997 

© The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, 

courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, 

Pace Gallery, New York and 

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Photograph by Richard Gary

Pace presents its first exhibition of JIRO TAKAMATSU (1936-1998)—a profoundly influential artist, theorist, and teacher who emerged in postwar Japan in the early 1960s—since its representation of the artist’s estate this year. The presentation at the gallery’s 540 West 25th Street flagship in New York focuses on Jiro Takamatsu’s Shadow and Perspective concepts—throughout his entire oeuvre, Jiro Takamatsu used the term “concept” to denote certain ideas or phenomena. Bringing together a selection of his paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects dating from 1966 to 1997, this exhibition showcases his inventive, deeply philosophical practice and his important role in the development of Conceptual Art.

A prolific artist who produced thousands of works over the course of his 40-year career, Jiro Takamatsu worked across painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and performance, exploring questions about perception, space, existence, and absence. Early in his practice, during the 1960s, he staged performative interventions in public spaces around Tokyo as part of the artist collective Hi Red Center, liberating art from its traditional context and shaking the foundations of the Japanese art world at the time. Presenting politically minded actions in public spaces throughout postwar Tokyo, Hi Red Center sought to dissolve boundaries between art and life—producing what the group called a “descent into the everyday”—through experimental and unorthodox approaches to making. It was also during this decade, in 1968, that Jiro Takamatsu represented Japan at the 34th Venice Biennale, cementing his status as a key figure within the international avant-garde.

Viewing the act of creating as an intensely intellectual endeavor, Jiro Takamatsu adopted a somewhat reclusive, solitary lifestyle as part of his practice. Grounded by his thoughts about and observations of the world around him, the artist’s highly conceptual works often examine ideas about reality and the self, matter and space, and presence and absence. Producing diverse bodies of work simultaneously, he examined these concepts through various mediums and forms. In one of Takamatsu’s best-known bodies of work—his iconic Shadow paintings, which he created from 1964 up until his death in 1998—he explored questions of perception and dimension as they relate to our experience of matter. In these illusionistic paintings depicting shadows of figures and objects, he presents a visual summation of the complex relationships between that which is at once existent and nonexistent, tangible and intangible, in both physical and metaphysical terms.

A selection of the artist’s Shadow paintings and drawings figures in Pace’s presentation, alongside works from his lesser-known Perspective series. Jiro Takamatsu began creating his Perspective paintings, drawings, and sculptures in the mid-1960s in tandem with his Shadow works, and the relationship between these two concepts hinges on the illusionistic potential of space, when perspective is bent by human intervention. While many of his two-dimensional, mathematically minded Perspective works depict silhouetted figures occupying geometric structures within different planes, some of these compositions are devoid of figures, focusing instead on the ways that combinations of shapes can imply interiority, exteriority, and depth. Several material objects from the Perspective series on view in the gallery’s show shed light on the ways in which Jiro Takamatsu extended these inquiries into three dimensions, imbuing his painted abstractions with a physicality that makes them all the more surreal.

JIRO TAKAMATSU: Biography

Engaging with histories of Dadaism and Surrealism through a minimalist visual language, Jiro Takamatsu’s (b. 1936, Tokyo; d. 1998, Tokyo) art centers on metaphysical ideas and concepts related to time, space, and emptiness. Over the span of his four-decade career, the artist engaged with a range of mediums, including sculpture, photography, painting, drawing, and performance art, through which he explored concepts related to perception, space, and objecthood. Jiro Takamatsu studied at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he cultivated an interdisciplinary artistic practice after graduating in 1958. In the following years, he helped establish the collective known as Hi Red Center (1963–64), which sought to dissolve boundaries between art and life through politically minded actions in public spaces. Jiro Takamatsu was also a leading figure in the Mono-Ha (School of Things) movement, centering on materiality and material conditions through non-representational art. Through his practice, Jiro Takamatsu investigated how painting could serve as a tool for critical inquiry, questioning the role of perceptual and visual phenomena in constructing notions of reality.

An influential figure of the Japanese avant-garde, presenting numerous solo exhibitions during his lifetime, Jiro Takamatsu is once again the subject of international attention, his practice lauded by scholars and curators across institutions globally. In 2014, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo opened Jiro Takamatsu: Mysteries, which traced three distinct phases of his career; in 2015, the National Museum of Art in Osaka mounted the major retrospective Jiro Takamatsu: Trajectory of Work. Takamatsu has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, United Kingdom (2017) and the Royal Society of Sculptors, London (2019). The artist’s work is held in important public collections worldwide, including Aomori Museum of Art, Japan; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London; among others.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

October 21, 2022 - February 12, 2023

Paul Klee

Glühende Landschaft [Glowing Lanscape], 1919

Oil on cardboard, 40,5 x 30,5 cm

Private collection, Switzerland

For the artist, dialogue with nature remains a conditio sine qua non.

The artist is a man, himself nature and a part of nature in natural space.

Paul Klee

Ways to Study Nature, 1923

Throughout his life, the Swiss-born German artist PAUL KLEE (1879-1940) felt an undying fascination for the observation of nature. For him, the contemplation of natural phenomena was an art in its own right, which allowed him to go beyond the world of the apparent in order to understand their intrinsic dynamics and to create works based on them.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, the exhibition Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature examines the link the artist had with the natural environment, in which he found not only a field of study and a pedagogical model, but also a source of inspiration and a vital refuge. In collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern and with advice from its chief curator, Fabienne Eggelhöfer, the show also aims to demonstrate just how important the exploration of natural phenomena was for the formation and development of an artist like Paul Klee, one of the most outstanding artists of the European avant-garde and perhaps one of the most surprising ones to rediscover through the lens of nature itself.

The exhibition unfolds into four areas that propose a chronological journey through Paul Klee’s holistic view of nature, from his formative stage right up to his final artistic one. The Zentrum Paul Klee’s collection is the most important archive of the artist’s drawings and pictorial works. The Zentrum Paul Klee also conserves his library and the natural objects that interested him and accompanied his research. The bulk of the more than 200 pieces on display in the exhibition are from these holdings, while the rest are contributions from other outstanding international private collections and institutions. Within the context of the current revision of the canon and as part of the effort to recover the names and careers of artists silenced by the official account of the history of art, each section includes a work by a woman artist, of whom some were contemporaneous with Paul Klee, such as Gabriele Münter (1877-1962), Emma Kunz (1892-1963) and Maruja Mallo (1902-1995), while others were or are aligned with some of his artistic approaches, such as Sandra Knecht (Switzerland, 1968).

This project falls within the framework of a line of exhibitions organised in collaboration with other monographic museums of major artists of the avant-gardes. Based on the Fundació Joan Miró’s holdings, the links between the two institutions will also result in a Miró exhibition focusing mainly on the large format works that were made possible by the artist’s new studio in Palma de Mallorca from 1956, which the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern will host from January to May 2023.

In his formative years, Paul Klee’s curiosity for the origin of form and of artistic expression led him to meticulously study his most immediate environments: the outskirts of Bern and the family garden. The plants, animals, landscapes, geological formations and atmospheric and physical phenomena that he examined in his various places of residence and also while on excursions and trips strengthened his relationship with nature and had an impact on his unique poetics. The first area of the show presents the importance of the study of nature to the discovery of this artistic personality based on early drawings done between 1883 and 1911, among which is his first documented drawing, done when he was just four years old. In this selection, Klee dialogues with two major artistic legacies: naturalist drawing, which he was taught during his school years and which shaped his ability to pay attention to the visible; and classical culture and its internal order, which he discovered during his trip to Italy in 1901, filtered by the reading of J. W. von Goethe, and which encouraged him to disentangle the even more complex order inherent to the natural world.

Paul Klee’s interest in discovering the dynamics of nature, and the grammar of art that he began to elaborate from his observations, gradually developed in the years between the First World War and his arrival at the Bauhaus as a teacher. ‘Trip to Tunisia, and the First World War. Nature as an Enigma and an Escape (1912-1920)’ is the title of the second area of the show, which brings together oil paintings, watercolours and drawings, in which the contemplation of nature became a visionary instrument for coping with the tough moments that he had the misfortune to endure. Standing out in this room are works like Glühende Landschaft (Glowing Landscape, 1919), an example of Klee’s total landscape, where the artist aimed to represent not only the motif, but also the connectivity of organic, atmospheric and geological elements. Belonging to the same historical context as these is another oil painting included in this area: Abstrakt (Abstract, 1914) by the German artist Gabriele Münter, a member of the avant-garde group Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) of which Paul Klee also formed part during his time in Munich, until the outbreak of the First World War.

This baggage and his careful reading of books like The Metamorphosis of Plants by J. W. von Goethe together served as the basis for his courses at the Bauhaus, during the years of theoretical consolidation of the first avant-gardes. Entitled ‘Teaching at the Bauhaus. The Analysis of Natural Phenomena (1921-1931)’, the third area of the show presents around 70 pieces, among which are works, pedagogical materials and collections of natural objects such as preserved plant specimens and seashells, which provided him with a field of study. His works from this period and his theoretical compendium both manifest his reflections stemming from his contemplation of the internal laws of nature – movement, growth, recurrence, conformation, which he turned into the basis of his creative process and teaching programme. When Klee taught these notions at home, he would often invite students to spend time observing fish in his aquarium, just as he would do. To evoke the philosophy of these teachings, the design of this exhibition space reconstructs Klee’s aquarium by displaying works containing fish. The works brought together in this area have already transcended the apparent aspects of nature in order to compose themselves according to their internal principles, and that is what he encouraged his students to look for. Obeying these laws are titles like Vor dem Blitz (Before the Blitz, 1923), Klang der südlichen Flora (Harmony of Southern Flora, 1927) and Gemischtes Wetter (Unsettled Weather, 1929), where nature is represented by its constituent forces. These works dialogue with one of the characteristic geometric drawings by the Swiss artist and healer Emma Kunz, whose practices precisely flowed from using the energy underlying matter.

Finally, in his last stage, Paul Klee carried on working on these topics in a mature synthesis. They also became an artistic refuge when faced with the challenge of living the latter years of his life with a degenerative disease. So, the area ‘Synthesis and Identification. The Last Period (1932-1940)’ shows how, in the final stretch of Klee’s life, which was highly productive despite his fragile state of health, his understanding of the principles of nature and his communion with it reached the peak of their expression. All of this is clear to see in works like Der Winter kommt (Winter is Coming, 1939), where he uses his fingers to paint, arriving at his so sought-after transcendence of the dualism between subject and object: is body becoming one with nature through the pictorial medium.

The artist of today is more than an improved camera; he is more complex, richer and wider. He is a creature on the Earth and a creature within the whole, that is to say, a creature on a star among stars.

Paul Klee

Ways to Study Nature, 1923

Also presented in the last room is Protozoarios (Protozoans, 1981), a later work by the Spanish surrealist painter Maruja Mallo, who was interested in portraying the potentiality of natural shapes – flowers, shells, fruit or fantastical hybridisations of living organisms – and, like Paul Klee, continued painting them right to the very end. 

Sandra Knecht

My Land is Your Land Dark Night (Home Is a Foreign Place), 2022

Pigment print on cotton paper, 152 x 110 x 6 cm

Artist's collection

© Sandra Knecht

The exhibition concludes with an installation by the contemporary Swiss artist Sandra Knecht. She was born in the same canton as Klee and advocates rural life as part of her practice. To establish a dialogue with Paul Klee, Knecht makes a reflection on the disease that the artist suffered from, understood as a natural process. The resulting installation is entitled Dark Night (Home is a Foreign Place) and includes photographs, sculptures and an audiovisual piece referring to the natural world and rural tradition, as well as drawings by Klee, and photographs by Francesc Català-Roca of the natural objects that abounded in Joan Miró’s studio. Pro Helvetia has participated in Sandra Knecht’s project as a collaborating institution.

By examining the artist’s special experience of natural phenomena, the exhibition Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature also offers visitors an insight into how contemporary society has constructed its view of the natural world. 

In the words of its curator, Martina Millà: ‘at a time when, facing imminent planetary collapse, there is speculation about survival strategies […] we would like to see this project as an exercise that can help us reposition ourselves by revisiting that period which marked the start of the problematisation of our gaze and of our current understanding of the phenomena of nature. Visitors can find a great opportunity to rethink their relationship with artistic practices connected with the agenda of modernity and with a planet subjected to an unstoppable process of ecosystem and biodiversity destruction; a planet that has nevertheless been the sounding board and a canvas on which human creativity has been unleashed.’

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature

Exhibition Catalogue

Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature is accompanied by a catalogue that reproduces a broad selection of the show’s works and includes a curatorial text by Martina Millà and an essay signed by Fabienne Eggelhöfer. The catalogue is completed by a conversation between Myriam Dössenger, a researcher at the Zentrum Paul Klee, and the artist Sandra Knecht, as well as a pedagogical manifesto written by Paul Klee in 1923 entitled Ways to Study Nature. This catalogue is available in english and in spanish.

An exhibition organised and produced by the Fundació Joan Miró in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró, in collaboration with Fabienne Eggelhöfer, chief curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Fundación BBVA.

Fundació Joan Miró

Parc de Montjuïc, 08038 Barcelona

fmirobcn.org

Lygia Clark @ Luhring Augustine, New York - Modulated space

Lygia Clark: Modulated space

Luhring Augustine, New York

April 29 – June 17, 2017

Luhring Augustine presents its first solo exhibition of the pioneering Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. Organized in partnership with Alison Jacques Gallery, London, which co-represents the artist, this exhibition features Lygia Clark’s early drawings, collages, and paintings, as well as her iconic Bichos.

LYGIA CLARK (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1920 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1988) is one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, whose groundbreaking body of work reimagined the relationship between audience and the art object. A founding member of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, Lygia Clark proposed a radical approach to thinking about painting by treating its pictorial surface as if it were a three-dimensional architectural space. Her studies under the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and the French modernist painter Fernand Léger were deeply influential in this regard. Throughout her lifetime, Lygia Clark would remain a seminal figure of the international avant-garde, impacting future generations of artists with her transformative ideas surrounding the body, its presence and agency within a given environment.

Experimenting with modulations of form, color, and plane, Lygia Clark’s early abstract works challenged the canvas’ edge and extended the visual field of painting into the physical realm of the viewer. Her monochromatic compositions are adorned with interlocking shapes that explore various relationships, moving between figure-ground positions as they undergo perspectival shifts. Line and its properties are at the core of Lygia Clark’s investigations into positive and negative space. Through the interplay of adjacent and overlapping planes, she demonstrated that contours could delimit spatial fields as well as occupy the narrow voids in between.

Lines delineating the two-dimensional surfaces of her paintings find affinities with the creases and folds of her iconic Bichos, or critters. Constructed out of hinged metal planes, these versatile objects allowed for the audience to exercise authorship through participation. Lygia Clark’s reliance on the viewer to steer her sculptures through many possible configurations both jeopardized the autonomy of the art object and reconfigured her art as a performative, time-based event. Their open-endedness and iterative qualities affirmed her desire to overcome spatial and temporal boundaries, continuing to fulfill moments of continuity between artist, object, and viewer.

Retrospective exhibitions dedicated to Lygia Clark’s work include the critically acclaimed exhibition Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art 1948-1988, curated by Connie Butler and Luis Pérez-Oramas, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2014; Lygia Clark: A Retrospective, at the Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil in 2012; and Lygia Clark, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona in 1997, which travelled to the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Marseille, France; Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium; and the Imperial Palace, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Important solo and group exhibitions during Clark’s lifetime include the early São Paulo Biennials (1953-1967); the Second Pilot Show of Kinetic Work, curated by Guy Brett at Signals Gallery, London in 1962; and a presentation, alongside Mira Schendel, at the XXXIV Bienale di Venezia in 1968. Recent exhibitions include Making and Unmaking, at the Camden Arts Centre, London in 2016; Life Itself, at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm in 2016; Lygia Clark: Work from the 1950s at Alison Jacques Gallery, London in 2016; Adventures of the Black Square, Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015, curated by Iwona Blazwick and Magnus Petersens at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 2015. A major presentation of Lygia Clark’s work as part of The Shadow of Color, curated by Rita Kersting, is on view at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem through April 2017. Lygia Clark’s work will be featured in the upcoming exhibitions Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles as part of the greater initiative Pacific Standard Time. Lygia Clark’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid; the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro, among others.

LUHRING AUGUSTINE

531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.luhringaugustine.com

Asger Jorn (1914-1973), un artiste libre, Fondation de l'Hermitage, Lausanne

Asger JORN (1914-1973), un artiste libre 

Fondation de l'Hermitage, Lausanne 

22 juin - 21 octobre 2012 

Partageant sa vie entre le Danemark, la France (il y séjourne dès 1936), la Suisse et l’Italie, ASGER JORN a joué un rôle majeur dans le développement des avant-gardes européennes de l’après-guerre. En 1948, il fonde avec d’autres artistes du Nord le mouvement CoBrA (1948-1951), dont le nom fait référence aux trois villes Copenhague, Bruxelles et Amsterdam. Dans le sillage du surréalisme, ils prônent la spontanéité, le retour à l’art populaire et au dessin d’enfant. La tuberculose qui frappe Jorn en 1951 précipite la fin de CoBrA. Après dix-huit mois passés au Sanatorium de Silkeborg au Danemark, Jorn choisit, pour sa convalescence, l’air pur des montagnes et s’installe pour six mois dans un chalet de Chesières (canton de Vaud). En Suisse, le Danois développe un langage nouveau, qui renoue avec les sensualités enveloppantes d’Edvard Munch, pionnier de l’expressionnisme moderne. Les années suivantes conduiront Jorn à libérer progressivement et de la façon la plus radicale son art des modes et des influences, et à inventer une peinture saisissante, tantôt apaisée, tantôt explosive, toujours colorée. Son oeuvre puissante, élaborée au rythme de voyages incessants à travers l’Europe, s’ancre profondément dans la culture et la sensibilité scandinaves, tout en s’imprégnant des échanges qu’il entretient avec la scène artistique internationale. La tension entre une tradition nordique enracinée dans le Moyen-Age, et une aspiration à la perméabilité des frontières et à la vitalité d’une création collective, est au coeur de la fascination que Jorn exerce aujourd’hui.

La rétrospective lausannoise couvre toutes les périodes, depuis les compositions colorées de l’immédiat après-guerre, peuplées d’un bestiaire fantastique, jusqu’aux peintures lumineuses de la fin de sa vie, traversées de formes fluides et dynamiques. Réunissant quelque 80 peintures, l’exposition déploiera en outre un bel ensemble de dessins, des estampes – entre autres l’emblématique Suite suisse, 1953-1954 –, ainsi que des sculptures, rendant compte de l’extraordinaire force expressive de Jorn dans la diversité des médiums. Une section documentaire et un film viennent clore le parcours. L’exposition bénéficie de la participation exceptionnelle de nombreuses institutions, en premier lieu le Museum Jorn de Silkeborg, mais aussi le Louisiana Museum of Modern Art à Humlebaek, le Kunsten Museum of Modern Art à Aalborg, le ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, le Statens Museum for Kunst de Copenhague, le Skive Ny Kunstmuseum, le Henie Onstad Kunstsenter à Høvikodden, la Kunsthalle Emden, le Centre Pompidou à Paris, la Tate Modern à Londres, les Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, ainsi que de bon nombre de prestigieuses collections privées. Enfin, l’artiste belge de renommée internationale Pierre Alechinsky, qui a entretenu depuis CoBrA – il fut à 24 ans le plus jeune membre de ce mouvement – une relation privilégiée avec Jorn, encourage activement ce projet en lui ouvrant sa collection et ses archives.

Commissariat général : Sylvie Wuhrmann, directrice de la Fondation de l’Hermitage

Catalogue : Reproduisant en couleur toutes les œuvres exposées, le catalogue réunit de nombreuses contributions (Pierre Alechinsky, Troels Andersen, Helle Brøns, Rainer Michael Mason, Frédéric Pajak, Dominique Radrizzani, Didier Semin, Dieter Schwarz et Sylvie Wuhrmann), ainsi qu’une anthologie de textes

d’Asger Jorn, Christian Dotremont et Jacques Prévert.

FONDATION DE L’HERMITAGE

Route du Signal 2, CH - 1018 Lausanne 

www.fondation-hermitage.ch

Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania at Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Tristan Tzara, Victor Brauner, Marcel Janco, M. H. Maxy, Arthur Segal, Jules Perahim, Paul Paun 

Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania 

Israel Museum, Jerusalem 

Through February 18, 2012

This exhibition at Israel Museum traces the artistic development of seven Jewish artists from Romania – Tristan Tzara, Victor Brauner, Marcel Janco, M. H. Maxy, Arthur Segal, Jules Perahim, and Paul Paun – who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, took the art world by storm through their fearless experimentation. After a successful presentation at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania brings to Israel for the first time ninety works, created between 1910 and 1938, that explore the question of center and periphery, and illuminate the role of Jewish artists in the avant-garde movement.

Victor Brauner

To my beloved Saşa Pană, 1930

Courtesy of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem

During World War I, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco were central to the development of Dada in neutral Zurich, in venues such as Cabaret Voltaire. Back in Romania in the 1920s, Tzara and Janco, together with Victor Brauner, M. H. Maxy, and Arthur Segal, were involved in the publication of avant-garde magazines Contimporanul, 75 HP, Punct, and Integral, and organized the First International Art Exhibition of Contimporanul. The 1930s brought a younger generation of artists into the conversation, such as Jules Perahim and Paul Paun. New avant-garde magazines Unu and Alge were introduced, and Bucharest became a central point of activity in the Surrealist movement. Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania explores Segal’s Neo-Impressionist art, Tzara’s Dada experiments, Brauner’s Surrealist works, Janco’s masks, landscapes, and genre scenes, Maxy’s growing interest in social themes, and the involvement of Jules Perahim and Paul Paun at the forefront of Surrealism, shedding light on the central role these artists played in the history of European avant-garde art.

The Romanian art scene in the early twentieth century, and particularly the contributions of artists of Jewish origin, have previously received little serious study by art historians, due to the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism of the Eastern Bloc at the time and in the decades that followed. This exhibition underscores the long-neglected importance of Bucharest tin the development of the European avant-garde, and explores the relationship between Jewish identity and radical modernity.

Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania was organized by the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, and curated by Radu Stern and Edward van Voolen. At the Israel Museum, the exhibition is organized by Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, David Rockefeller Curator of the Stella Fischbach Department of Modern Art.

Also on view at Israel Museum a selection of recent acquisitions in contemporary art (through April 30, 2012)

Israel Museum Web Site

Photographie d’avant garde - Prague Paris Barcelone. La modernité photographique de 1918 à 1948, Exposition au MNAC à Barcelone

Prague, Paris, Barcelone

La modernité photographique de 1918 à 1948

MNAC - Musée National d'Art de Catalogne, Barcelone

Jusqu'au 12 septembre 2010

L'influence des artistes avant-gardistes en Europe au cours de la période de l'entre deux guerres (années 1920-1930) est connue. De même que l'est le rôle particulier joué par des artistes à Paris et Prague. Cette exposition souligne le rôle joué par les deux villes mais son originalité réside dans sa volonté de mettre en avant également le rôle joué par les artistes catalans à Barcelone.

Concernant Paris, parmi les artistes marquant de cette période figurent des photographes étrangers attirés par la liberté artistique qui caractérise alors en partie la capitale française : Man Ray, Brassaï, François Kollar, Germaine Krull en sont des exemples marquants. De même que des artistes tels que Gisèle Freund, Gerda Taro et Robert Capa fuyant le fascisme. Paris est alors marqué, au niveau artistique, par une effervescence culturelle propre à stimuler la créativité.

Après Paris, Prague devient la seconde capitale du cubisme et connait aussi une période de forte créativité et d'innovation artistiques. La Tchécoslovaquie connait alors, depuis 1918, une avancée démocratique propice à l'expression d'idées nouvelles, de recherches artistiques originales. Celles-ci prennent forme dans les différents types d'expression artistique : photographie, arts graphiques, cinéma. Certaines oeuvres crées à cette époque à Prague vont avoir une influence artistique internationale durable. Leur influence est forte au cours des années 1920-1930 mais continuera après la seconde guerre mondiale. Ceci est vrai pour les artistes de Prague ainsi que de Paris.

La Catalogne participe aussi à ce mouvement de renouveau artistique qui caractérise alors notamment la photographie. C'est là un aspect que souligne de façon convaincante l'exposition du MNAC à Barcelone. La ville a été le berceau de photographes et artistes graphiques avant-gardistes de talents dont on aurait bien tort d'oublier l'apport.

L'exposition du Musée national d'art de Catalogne présente ainsi des photographies de sa collection qui sont les oeuvres d'artistes marquant une rupture évidente et fort intéressante en photographie. Comme à Paris et Prague, des publications jouent un rôle important en permettant aux photographes présentant une nouvelle perspective, une nouvelle approche de la photographie, de pouvoir diffuser leur travail. C'est la cas notamment de la revue D'Aci i d'Allà, publiée entre 1918 et 1936, qui sert de support de diffusion de photographies d'avant garde à de nouveaux photographes catalans en rupture avec l'esthétique artistique dominante de l'époque en Espagne. En publiant également dans des revues d'autres pays européens ces artistes catalans trouvent des supports à une diffusion élargie de leur travail, capable de leur permettre de marquer de leur oeuvre l'expression d'une modernité photographique innovante, caractéristique de la photographie d'avant-garde dans son ensemble, par delà les frontières nationales, et d'influencer le mouvement générale d'expression de cette modernité.

L'expression d'une nouvelle forme d'expression esthétique est caractéristique du travail des photographes catalans tels que Pere Català Pic, Emili Godes, Josep Sala, Josep Masana. Leur influence est d'autant plus forte que leurs travaux trouvent dans la publicité un support de diffusion bien plus massif que les seules revues spécialisées. Le MNAC souligne à juste titre ce rôle joué par la publicité comme vecteur de diffusion auprès du grand public d'innovations esthétiques pensées et crées par une nouvelle génération de photographes catalans. L'exposition du MNAC présente également leur travail d'artistes catalans qui commencent à explorer avec succès, au cours des années 1918-1948, de nouvelles possibilités dans l'art de la photographie. Citons ainsi Ramón Arissa, Ramon Batlles, Gabriel Casas, Josep Lladó, Carlos Nyssen, Josep Sala et Compal.

Les nouvelles expériences en photographie marquent une rupture à la mesure de celle que l'on trouve dans d'autres champs de l'art et qui n'ont pas été sans influencer la scène artistique dans son ensemble. Une influence qui ne doit pas être conçue comme unilatérale, à sens unique, mais comme réciproque, caractérisée par l'interaction, la stimulation artistique et culturelle. Et c'est à ce moment que commence à prendre corps (sans sous estimées les expériences antérieures) ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui l'art contemporain, marqué par la reconnaissance, de la richesse de la pluralité des formes d'expression artistique, la nécessité de l'expérimentation et de l'innovation artistiques. A l'avant-garde, certains artistes ont été particulièrement reconnus pour leur rôle majeur, à Prague, à Paris, à Barcelone... et dans d'autres villes et pays.

Artistes (pour de nombreux d'entre eux plusieurs oeuvres sont présentées)

Laure Albin Guillot, Antoni Arissa, Josef Bartuska, Ramon Batlles, Aurel Bauh, Hans Bellmer, Ladislav Emil Berka, Théo Blanc, Jacques-André Boiffard, Pierre Boucher, Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), Luis Bunuel, Gabriel Casas, Augusti Cendelles, Compal (Compte-Palatchi), Salvador Dali, Antoine Demilly, Frantisek Drtikol, Marcel Duchamp, Vera Gabrielova Fragnerova, Jaromir Funke, Domenec Gimenez, Emili Godes, Joaquim Gomis, Alexander Hammid, Florence Henri, Pierre Jahan, Karel Kasparik, François Kollar, Germaine Krull, Jan Lauschmann, Fernand Léger, Josep Maria Llado, Eli Lotar, Josep Masana, Lucien Mazenod, Jean Moral, Carlos Nyssen, Ada (Adolf) Novak, Karel Novak Studio, Jean Painlevé, André Papillon, Roger Parry, Pere Català Pic, Frantisek Pilat, Man Ray, Jaroslav Rossler, Josep Sala, Roger Schall, Vladislav Scholz, Josef Sudek, Emmanuel Sougez, Marie Stachova, Hugo Taborsky, Karel Teige, Raoul Ubac, René-Jacques, Karel Valter, Otakar Vavra, André Vigneau, Eugen Wiskovsky, René Zuber

Exposition organisée par le Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)

Commissaires d'exposition : David Balsells, directeur des archives photographiques du MNAC, avec la collaboration de Joan Naranjo, historien de la photographie et collaborateur du MNAC.

Catalogue édité en Catalan/Français et Espagnol-Castillan/Anglais

MNAC - Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Parc de Montjuic, Barcelona

www.mnac.cat 

18 mai - 12 septembre 2010

Hélio Oiticica, Tate Modern, London - The Body of Colour

Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour

Tate Modern, London

6 June – 23 September 2007

HELIO OITICICA (1937– 1980) was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of his generation. Colour was central to his practice and this is the first exhibition to focus on this key element in his work. Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour is the first large-scale exhibition of Hélio Oiticica’s work for over 35 years in the UK. The exhibition includes more than 150 works – paintings and works on paper, reliefs and sculptural objects as well as installations and environments.

Hélio Oiticica produced a remarkable body of work throughout his career in which he continually sought to challenge the way in which art could be experienced. From abstract compositions to early environmental installations, the exhibition traces the way in which the artist deconstructed the traditional elements of painting – colour and the two-dimensional plane that supports it – reconfiguring them in new, innovative forms, and eventually liberating colour into space. This exhibition features works from Hélio Oiticica’s early career, such as the paintings and gouaches made with the Rio de Janeiro-based Grupo Frente 1955–56, which show an obvious affinity with masters of modernism such as Paul Klee, Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. This is followed by the extraordinary series of Metaesquemas, monochromatic grids of uneven abstract forms painted on board(1957–58), and a group of white on white paintings, never previously shown together.

The exhibition features Spatial Reliefs 1960, Bilaterals 1959 and Nuclei 1960–66, works which the viewer is invited to move in and around and to discover colour as a physical body or environment. A highlight of the exhibition is the fully restored, complete version of Hélio Oiticica’s incredible Grand Nucleus 1960–68. Comprising over thirty paintings suspended from the ceiling, the work will occupy the large central gallery of the exhibition at Tate Modern.

Hélio Oiticica’s most radical use of colour is found in the Bolides 1963–69, boxes or bottles containing pigment, foam, mirrors, shells, earth, fabric and poetry, and in the Parangolés 1964–79,cloth-objects that he described as habitable paintings. In the Bolides, Hélio Oiticica began the gradual dematerialisation of colour into pure sensory stimuli which would reach a climax with the Parangolés. Hélio Oiticica combined colour with rhythm, music, and performance to stimulate visual and tactile sensations, drawing in and involving his audience. The coloured capes, tents and banners of the Parangolés, were worn by members of the audience who moved to the rhythm of samba, activating and enacting the illusion of colour-in-motion.

Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour was organised by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in collaboration with Tate Modern. The concept of the exhibition has been conceived by Mari Carmen Ramirez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art and Director, International Center for the Arts of the Americas, MFAH. Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour was presented at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (10 December 2006 – 1 April 2007) and travel to Tate Modern, London (6 June – 23 September 2007).

TATE MODERN, LONDON

www.tate.org.uk

Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU

Dreams and Disillusion

Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde

Grey Art Gallery, NYU, New York

May 1 - July 7, 2001

Dreams and Disillusion provides a long-overdue exploration of the career of the most important Czech proponent of modernism, KAREL TEIGE.  Previously overlooked in Western accounts of the European avant-garde, Karel Teige (1900–1951) was a graphic designer and architectural theorist whose innovations in book design, poetry, stage sets, and collage revolutionized Czech artistic production in the 1920s and '30s. The exhibition both reveals the major contributions of Karel Teige and his circle to the development of modernism and illuminates the social and political forces that affected Czechoslovakia from the end of the First World War to the Soviet occupation. It features some 100 objects, including 21 of Teige's surrealist collages— never before been seen in the United States—as well as a full-scale model of Teige's ideal apartment for workers. This exhibition is organized by The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida.

"We are very pleased that the Grey Art Gallery will be able to participate in the tour of Dreams and Disillusion: Karel Teige and the Czech Avant-Garde," observes Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery. "Teige's multi-faceted accomplishments certainly deserve a wider audience. The broad range of media explored by the artist, along with the important social issues he raises, are still extremely relevant today."

Drawn primarily from the superb collection of Central European graphic arts of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Dreams and Disillusion focuses on Teige's key artistic production between the wars. Faced with the challenges of defining a newly independent Czech culture after the end of the First World War, Teige brought international attention to the Czech avant-garde through his connections to well-known Constructivists, Purists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and Bauhaus designers in Russia, France, and Germany. Karel Teige, who was eighteen years old when the Republic of Czechoslovakia gained its independence from Austria-Hungary, served as a conduit of ideas between East and West in the early days of the Soviet government.

One of the founders of Devetsil, a leading association of young artists and intellectuals in Prague, Karel Teige edited a number of significant avant-garde journals on art and architecture, and wrote books and essays on art, architecture, typography, photography, film, and theater. He also acted in his own plays, designed stage sets, and taught at the Bauhaus. Putting theory into practice, he produced poems, paintings, prints, book illustrations, film scripts, and photomontages. His embrace of technology and the cutting edge of modernist design techniques is evident throughout this remarkable body of work.

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Karel Teige remained confident in the potential of socialism to improve conditions for the masses. He sought solutions to the economic and political crisis through architecture, offering theoretical housing projects that rejected the bourgeois way of life and addressed the needs of a newly empowered working class. However, the rise of Stalin, the Nazi invasion, the Second World War, and finally the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia shattered Teige's dreams of utopia. From the late 1930s until his untimely death in 1951, he turned inward, creating a series of edgy, erotic, and disturbing Surrealist collages.

The installation consists of five sections. The introductory section examines the rise of oppositional culture in Prague through photos, objects, and text, and introduces visitors to Teige's role in the Czech avant-garde. The second explores his early work and Devetsil; the third relates to poetism, the movement he founded with poet Vítezslav Nezval; the fourth illuminates his significant influence on modernist architecture. The exhibition concludes with the final phase of Teige's life, from Hitler's closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 to the artist's death in 1951. This section includes his surrealist collages, shown for the first time in the United States, from the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague.

The exhibition was organized by Dr. Eric Dluhosch, Professor Emeritus of Architecture at MIT; Wendy Kaplan, former Associate Director for Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University; and James Wechsler, former Assistant Curator at the Wolfsonian. The exhibition will be touring next fall to the Smart Gallery of Art at the University of Chicago, where it will be shown from October 4 to December 9, 2001.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Karel Teige, 1900–1951: L'Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 1999), edited by Dr. Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Svachá of the Czech Academy of Science.

GREY ART GALLERY, NYU

New York University

100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003

www.nyu.edu/greyart