Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York @ David Zwirner, New York - John Currin, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, Lisa Yuskavage

Circa 1995: 

New Figuration in New York 

David Zwirner, New York

May 7 – July 17, 2025 

MARLENE DUMAS

The Conspiracy, 1994 

Private Collection.

© Marlene Dumas. Courtesy David Zwirner 

David Zwirner presents Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York at the gallery’s 537 West 20th Street location in New York. The exhibition features eight generation-defining artists who played a central role in the resurgence and expansion of figurative painting during the 1990s: John Currin, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, and Lisa Yuskavage.

By the early 1990s, as photography, film, video, and installation art were taking center stage, painting (and figurative painting in particular) was prematurely dismissed by some as having exhausted its possibilities and contemporary relevance. The artists in this exhibition challenged this notion. Looking to some of the medium’s classic tropes, genres, and techniques while also introducing new subjects, themes, and ideas, these artists redefined what painting could be: their incisive approaches to figuration not only spoke to the moment but also laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of painters. These influential artists have moreover continued to remain uniquely relevant in their ongoing work.

While working in different locations and contexts in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, each of these artists showed in New York for the first time in the early to mid-1990s, around the time David Zwirner opened in SoHo in 1993. The works on view here are drawn from key solo shows, including several that were presented at the artists’ respective New York galleries (such as Andrea Rosen Gallery, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Jack Tilton Gallery, and Marianne Boesky Gallery), and point to career-expanding presentations, such as Documenta 9 (1992); Projects 60: John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans (1997), at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the traveling exhibition Sensation (1997–2000), among other important shows from the decade that brought these artists and their radically original work to the forefront. 

Known for his academically rendered canvases and provocative subject matter, American artist JOHN CURRIN (b. 1962) draws on art-historical tropes and genres such as portraiture, still life, history painting, and mythology, giving them a distinctly contemporary appearance. As art historian Norman Bryson remarks, Currin’s figurative works, which are inspired by traditional portraits as well as pinups, pornography, B movies, and women’s magazines, “swerve between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and guilt, joy and shame.” [1] Included in this exhibition are works that debuted in Currin’s critically lauded 1994 and 1997 solo exhibitions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, such as The Cripple and The Bra Shop (both 1997) as well as Ann-Charlotte (1996), which was in the Projects 60 show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997. That presentation, curated by Laura Hoptman, included John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, and Luc Tuymans and signified the resurgence of figurative painting in contemporary art that had been occurring throughout the 1990s.

[1] Norman Bryson, “Maudit: John Currin and Morphology,” in Rose Dergan and Kara Vander Weg, eds., John Currin (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2006), p. 30.

PETER DOIG’s (b. 1959) atmospheric compositions focus predominantly on the figure and landscape. Influenced by his childhood in Trinidad and Canada, his paintings, drawings, and watercolors capture what appear to be familiar moments of tranquility, where abstract and uncanny elements found on the periphery of the urban and natural worlds appear with the dreamlike quality of memory. Referencing a range of art-historical precedents, Doig sources imagery from an archive of materials that includes films, newspapers, album artwork, postcards, and personal photographs. Circa 1995 includes Jetty (1994), which debuted in Doig’s first solo show in New York, at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in 1994, the year Brown opened his eponymous gallery west of SoHo, and which was painted the same year the artist was nominated for the Turner Prize, as well as his Briey (Concrete Cabin) (1994–1996), a canvas from the significant series based on Le Corbusier’s iconic modernist Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Briey-en-Forêt, France.

MARLENE DUMAS (b. 1953) has continuously probed the complexities of identity and representation in her work. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, Dumas moved to Amsterdam in 1976, where she has since lived and worked. Her paintings and drawings, frequently devoted to depictions of the human form, typically reference a vast archive of source imagery collected by the artist, including art-historical materials, mass media images, and personal snapshots of friends and family. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Dumas’s works reframe and recontextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. Having exhibited widely in Europe since the late 1970s, Marlene Dumas came to broad international attention by the early 1990s with her participation in significant group show such as Documenta 9 (1992), and solo museum presentations, including ones at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia) (1992–1994). On view in Circa 1995: New Figuration in New York is a painting by the artist that appeared in her 1994 solo show Not From Here at Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, as well as two other significant paintings from the period.

British artist CHIS OFILI’s (b. 1968) atmospheric, enigmatic paintings investigate the intersection of desire, identity, and representation. Portraying characters from a range of aesthetic and cultural sources through a kaleidoscopic visual mode that bridges abstraction and figuration, his works serve as sites for journeys of creative transformation. On view in Circa 1995 are three of Ofili’s iconic dung paintings, which garnered him both critical acclaim and notoriety during the 1990s. These multilayered paintings, playfully bedecked with resin, glitter, and collage, rest on balls of elephant dung. Among those in the show are Afrodizzia (1996), which presents dazzling, psychedelic patterns of collage and color with balls of dung on its layered surface. Interspersed throughout the composition are magazine cutouts of iconic Black cultural figures. The work was included in the touring exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection—a show that made international headlines in 1999 when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, where The Holy Virgin Mary (1996; collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York), another elephant dung painting by Chis Ofili (not in the present exhibition), was displayed.

Los Angeles–based artist LAURA OWENS’s (b. 1970) experimental approach to painting challenges its material and conceptual limits. Her multilayered works combine diverse interests in folk art, comics, and wallpaper patterns with a broad range of text sources, such as the alphabet and printed media like the Los Angeles Times. Laura Owens incorporates these references into a variety of techniques and media—from traditional oil painting to silkscreening and needlework. Her inventive compositions achieve a formal unity while resisting straightforward analysis, renewing the medium of painting by questioning and exploring its master narratives. Owens’s work often takes the exhibition space into account, indicating the artist’s awareness of the relationship between the object and the viewer. Exhibited in this exhibition are works from Owens’s breakout solo shows from the late 1990s. As critic Roberta Smith noted, reviewing Laura Owens’s 1998 solo exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, “What is beautiful is also funny. The message here is that the medium of painting, which remains above all a surface to be engagingly animated, contains quite a bit of uncharted territory and that the old dog of formalism, unfettered by pure abstraction, can learn all sorts of new tricks.” [2]

[2] Roberta Smith, “Art in Review: Laura Owens,” New York Times, November 6, 1998.

ELIZABETH PEYTON (b. 1965) creates paintings and works on paper that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of her chosen subjects. Throughout her career, whether depicting individuals from historical or contemporary eras, Elizabeth Peyton has been driven by an openness and curiosity that seeks to approach and understand her subjects, and, often, their creative practices. As curator Donatien Grau observes: “Her desire is one for perfection: she makes her paintings into perfect images of life, which are so beautiful and draw you in. But within that desire you can feel the longing: the longing for a life that is gone, or that is going to be gone. You can feel the desire to know—truly know—those individuals.” [3] The exhibition includes paintings that depict the musicians Kurt Cobain and Liam Gallagher, both important recurring subjects in Peyton’s work during the 1990s, as well as the gallerist Martin McGeown, who staged an exhibition of her work in London in 1995 at his experimental gallery Cabinet.

[3] Donatien Grau, “Fragments on Elizabeth Peyton,” in CLOSE-UP: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Lotte Laserstein, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton. Exh. cat. (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2021), p. 224.

Belgian artist LUC TUYSMANS’s (b. 1958) deeply resonant compositions insist on the power of images to simultaneously reveal and withhold meaning. Often rendered in a muted palette, the artist’s canvases are based on preexisting imagery from a range of historical, cultural, and popular-media sources. Their quiet and restrained appearance, however, belies an underlying moral complexity that engages equally with questions of history and its representation as with quotidian subject matter. In Circa 1995 are key paintings by Luc Tuymans, including works which debuted in the artist’s 1996 show The Heritage at David Zwirner. Stemming from the artist’s interest in picturing the prevailing mood of uncertainty and loss that he perceived in the United States following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the exhibition presented works that incorporated a range of recognizable symbols of American life and received critical acclaim, including from Peter Schjeldahl, who noted in his Village Voice review: “When I’m looking at Tuymans’s work, it seems to me absurd that our culture doesn’t embrace painting normally and avidly, as an enthusiastic matter of course.” [4] 

[4] Peter Schjeldahl, “Bad Thoughts: Luc Tuymans,” Village Voice, October 8, 1996, p. 86.

In her work, American artist LISA YUSKAVAGE (b. 1962) affirms the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. Her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements in which color and light are the primary vehicles of meaning. Several of Yuskavage’s standout paintings from the 1990s are presented in the exhibition, including works from her Bad Babies series (1991–1992), which the artist has described as “portraits of beings in color” and feature individual female figures seen from the knees up set against jewel-tone monochromatic fields of color. The Bad Babies, a breakthrough series of four works, was first shown together in Yuskavage’s second solo exhibition in New York, at Elizabeth Koury in 1993. Likewise, Big Little Laura (1998), another seminal painting from this decade, was first shown in New York in 1998 at Marianne Boesky Gallery. As Peter Schjeldahl wrote, again in The Village Voice, in praise of the works in that exhibition, “Remember when contemporary art was an adventure? With the likes of Yuskavage around, it is adventurous again.” [5]

[5] Peter Schjeldahl, “Purple Nipple,” Village Voice, September 29, 1998, p. 138.

DAVID ZWIRNER 

537 West 20th Street, New York City 

www.davidzwirner.com

Louise Bourgeois @ Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong - ‘Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape’ - Exhibition Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith

Louise Bourgeois: Soft Landscape

Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

25 March – 21 June 2025

Widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the past century, French-American artist LOUISE BOURGEOIS’s work expresses a variety of emotions through a visual vocabulary of formal and symbolic equivalents, ranging from intimate drawings to large-scale installations. ‘Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape’ explores the dynamic relationship between landscape and the human body in Bourgeois’s work. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, this is her second show at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, and coincides with the ongoing tour of a major survey exhibition organized by the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, which is on view at the Fubon Art Museum, Taipei, since 15 March through 30 June 2025.

Consisting of a selection of works from the 1960s up until her death in 2010, ‘Louise Bourgeois. Soft Landscape’ sets up a series of four interlocking dialogues that revolve around an iconography of nests, holes, cavities, mounds, breasts, spirals, snakes and water. This imagery corresponds to the themes and preoccupations that Louise Bourgeois explored over the course of her career: the good mother, fecundity and growth, retreat and protection, vulnerability and dependency, and the passage of time. Her forms are expressed using such diverse materials as bronze, rubber, lead, aluminium, wood and marble. The exhibition foregrounds certain formal devices developed by Louise Bourgeois, such as the hanging form, the spiral and the relief. As always in her work, there is an oscillation between abstraction and figuration. 

On view throughout the exhibition space are works from Bourgeois’s Lair series, first created by the artist in the early 1960s as she emerged from a deep depression and a long immersion in psychoanalysis, which all but replaced her artmaking for the better part of a decade. The Lair sculptures are protective places of retreat, like a home, and convey a mood of interiority, introspection and withdrawal. 

Making its debut in Asia, the sculpture ‘Spider’ (2000) was loosely inspired by an ostrich egg given to the artist. The large scale of the egg, relative to the spider that it contains, expresses the burdensome responsibilities of motherhood. Bourgeois’s iconic spiders were conceived as an ode to her mother, yet the spider is also a self-portrait; Bourgeois felt that her art came directly from her body, just as a spider spins its own web. 

A number of works that have never been exhibited before are on view in this exhibition. In one gallery, four wall reliefs of painted wood merge landscape and biomorphic form. Louise Bourgeois fashioned these reliefs out of the interiors of old crates once used to transport her Personage sculptures. The way she put these wooden pieces together created a central opening that she would sometimes populate with internal elements. The metal frames that house these reliefs serve to make them feel more sculptural and object-like. This series of painted landscape reliefs is complemented by a long horizontal scratchboard landscape. Here the mark making is achieved through patiently scratching the dark-painted surface to make a delicate white line. The resulting image is a portrait of isolation, of a world without other people. 

Also exhibited for the first time is the bronze fountain ‘Mamelles’ (1991 [cast 2005]), which consists of a long frieze of multiple breast-like forms, with water spilling from five of the nipples into a basin below. Bourgeois – who liked seeing how different materials could alter the meaning of her forms – also realized this sculpture in marble and pink rubber. The endless flow and splashing of the water symbolize the passage of time, but it also represents the good mother who provides nourishment for her children.

A pair of late works on paper similarly express the passage of time through flowing calligraphic gestures on music paper that hover between an abstracted landscape and wave-like forms. 

‘Time’ (2004) belongs to a series of suites of double-sided drawings which Louise Bourgeois made in 2003-04. The repetitive mark-making has a meditative quality, and perhaps exerted a calming effect on the artist. The richness emerges in the slight inflections and differences in line and texture among the sheets (there is an affinity to weaving), and the occasional appearance of words, names and phrases that seem to surface from the unconscious. ‘Time’ (2004) has a diaristic quality, as if the artist’s pen were an instrument for registering the most minute shifts in the artist’s thought and mood. 

LOUISE BOURGEOIS (b. Paris, 1911, d. New York, 2010) is one of the most influential artists of the past century. Though she worked in several mediums throughout her 70-year career—including performance, painting, and printmaking—she is best known as a sculptor. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, and ranging from intimate drawings to large-scale installations, Bourgeois expressed a variety of emotions through a visual vocabulary of formal and symbolic equivalents. Raised in Paris and its suburbs, she was involved in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop and gallery from a young age. Complex relationships with her disloyal father and chronically ill mother led to pervasive feelings of guilt, jealousy, betrayal, and abandonment. These themes, countered with love and reparation, form the core of her work. She often stated that the creative process was a form of exorcism: a way of reconstructing memories and emotions in order to free herself from their grasp.

HAUSER & WIRTH HONG KONG

G/F, 8 Queen's Road Central, Central, Hong Kong

www.hauserwirth.com

Mondrian Evolution @ Fondation Beyeler, Riehen & Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf

Mondrian Evolution

Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Bâle

5 juin – 9 octobre 2022

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf

29 octobre 2022 – 12 février 2023

À l’occasion du 150ème anniversaire de la naissance de l’artiste, la Fondation Beyeler consacre une grande exposition au peintre néerlandais PIET MONDRIAN (1872–1944), réunissant des œuvres de sa propre collection et d’importants prêts internationaux. Figurant parmi les artistes les plus marquants et les plus polyvalents de l’avant-garde, Mondrian a joué un rôle décisif dans l’évolution de la peinture de la figuration à l’abstraction. Avec 89 œuvres provenant de collections privées et publiques en Europe et aux États-Unis, «Mondrian Evolution» retrace le parcours saisissant de l’artiste, de peintre paysagiste du 19ème siècle à l’un des protagonistes majeurs de l’art moderne. L’exposition offre une rare occasion de découvrir sous un jour nouveau le travail de Mondrian, qui a profondément influencé le 20ème siècle non seulement dans le domaine de l’art mais aussi dans ceux du design, de l’architecture, de la mode et de la culture pop. Il s’agit de la première exposition individuelle consacrée à l’artiste en Suisse depuis 50 ans. L'exposition sera ensuite présentée à Düsseldorf au Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

La collection de la Fondation Beyeler comprend surtout des œuvres des périodes plus tardives de Mondrian, mais l’exposition se concentre principalement sur les œuvres des débuts de l’artiste, dont le développement est influencé non seulement par la peinture de paysage hollandaise de la fin du 19ème siècle mais aussi par le symbolisme et le cubisme. Ce n’est qu’au début des années 1920 que Mondrian passe à un langage pictural pleinement non figuratif, restreint à des agencements orthogonaux de lignes noires et d’aires de blanc et des trois couleurs primaires bleu, rouge et jaune. Les tableaux abstraits de Mondrian sont l’aboutissement d’un long processus de réflexion artistique en tension entre les pôles de l’intuition et de la précision, ainsi que d’une remise en question personnelle intense et incessante. Il concevait l’abstraction comme un processus de rapprochement d’une vérité et d’une beauté absolues, vers lesquelles il tendait en tant qu’artiste. Sa versatilité stylistique est la conséquence de sa quête constante de l’unité et de l’essence même de l’image. Il utilisait lui-même le terme «évolution» – mais pas au sens de Charles Darwin. Pour Mondrian, le terme «évolution» signifiait l’accumulation d’expériences sur lesquelles bâtir une nouvelle étape de développement artistique menant à son tour à de nouvelles réalisations et connaissances.

L’exposition est conçue de manière chronologique mais elle tire son expressivité de la confrontation d’œuvres précoces et tardives, qui met en lumière les forces de transformation à l’œuvre dans le travail de Mondrian. Au fil de neuf salles d’exposition, on retrouve des motifs récurrents tels les moulins à vent, les dunes, la mer, les bâtiments de ferme se reflétant dans l’eau et les plantes, représentés à des degrés divers d’abstraction. Dans ses paysages, Piet Mondrian explore l’éclat et le rayonnement de la couleur – ce qui donne à ces tableaux leur apparence extraordinairement lumineuse et vive – ainsi que l’influence de la lumière et l’expérience de l’espace, de la surface, de la structure et des reflets.

Le tableau Moulin au soleil, 1908, dont la radicalité apparaît encore aujourd’hui, avait provoqué un tollé parmi les critiques de l’époque avec son explosion de couleurs et sa technique picturale d’apparence sommaire. L’exposition présente également l’œuvre Le nuage rouge, 1907, qui saisit le moment magique et fugace auquel le soleil couchant teinte un nuage rouge vif alors même que le paysage et le ciel demeurent encore d’un bleu éclatant. Ce tableau appartient à un groupe d’œuvres que Mondrian a peintes au crépuscule, lorsque les couleurs et les combinaisons chromatiques sont soumises à des transformations intenses. Dans ses autoportraits dessinés de 1908, il se représente également au crépuscule, les pupilles grand ouvertes et réceptives aux plus infimes nuances chromatiques produites par la lumière. Le tableau de grand format Forêt près d’Oele, 1908, du Kunstmuseum Den Haag offre une perspective dirigée vers le soleil, situé au-dessus de l’horizon. La succession des troncs d’arbres qui se teintent de rouge ou de violet dans le contre-jour crée l’illusion de spatialité.

Après les explosions chromatiques des années 1907 à 1911, Mondrian, inspiré par sa rencontre avec le cubisme à Paris, revient à des couleurs moins éclatantes. Des tons gris et ocres dominent désormais ses tableaux et la ligne en tant que telle devient toujours plus importante. Mondrian poursuit son exploration de thèmes comme l’abstraction. La métamorphose de ses représentations d’arbres est particulièrement impressionnante, donnant à voir le raisonnement qui sous-tend sa quête picturale. L’expérience de ces tableaux permet à Mondrian de se détacher entièrement de la figuration. Composition No. IX, 1913, un prêt du Museum of Modern Art à New York, est une imbrication de formes pour la plupart caractérisées par des angles droits.

New York City 1 est l’œuvre la plus récente de l’exposition et appartient à un petit groupe de tableaux créés autour de 1941. Sa composition est semblable à celle de Forêt près d’Oele de 1908, mis à part le fait qu’elle n’entretient plus aucun rapport avec un paysage réel mais tient d’une «abstraction pure». L’œuvre est inachevée et apporte un témoignage important du processus de travail de Mondrian dans les dernières années de sa vie. À New York, il avait commencé à reconfigurer ses images et à les rendre plus dynamiques et plus rythmiques à l’aide de bandes de papier. Les surfaces colorées cèdent alors le pas aux lignes de couleur.

Né en 1872 à Amersfoort aux Pays-Bas, Mondrian entre tôt en contact avec l’art : son père enseigne le dessin, son oncle est un peintre amateur à succès, influencé par la peinture de paysage de l’École de La Haye, incarnation spécifiquement néerlandaise de l’impressionnisme. Après une éducation calviniste et une formation en tant que professeur de dessin, entre 1892 et 1895 Mondrian étudie à la Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten à Amsterdam. Il continue à travailler en tant que professeur de dessin, peint des portraits sur commande et réalise des dessins scientifiques pour l’Université de Leyde. Mais il poursuit également ses ambitions artistiques et développe rapidement son propre style. La plupart des œuvres de cette période, qui représentent majoritairement des moulins à vent, des rivières et des bâtiments de ferme, témoignent encore de l’influence de l’École de La Haye. À partir de cette base, Mondrian élargit avec détermination le champ de ses possibilités artistiques.

L’art de Mondrian est étroitement lié à son intérêt pour la philosophie et l’ésotérisme. À partir de 1908, il se passionne pour la théosophie ; influencé par les écrits de Rudolf Steiner – alors encore théosophe – en 1909 il adhère à la section néerlandaise de la Société théosophique. Sa rencontre avec le cubisme mène fin 1911 à un premier séjour à Paris qui dure jusqu’en 1914, lorsque Mondrian ne peut y retourner en raison du début de la Première Guerre mondiale. En 1919, il s’installe durablement à Paris.

Après la Première Guerre mondiale, les artistes sont nombreux à chercher un renouveau culturel radical. Aux Pays-Bas, un groupe d’artistes d’avant-garde se constitue et publie à partir de 1917 la revue De Stijl. Mondrian formule l’intention du groupe de démanteler les traditions afin de refonder tous les aspects de la vie sur la base des éléments essentiels de l’art tels qu’il les défend.

Dans des écrits théoriques, Mondrian tente d’exposer son programme artistique. Il désigne sa nouvelle forme d’expression picturale sous le terme de «néoplasticisme», qu’il conçoit en première ligne comme une concentration sur les moyens d’expression essentiels de la peinture : d’une part le noir et le blanc, situés aux extrêmes opposés de l’échelle des couleurs, d’autre part les couleurs primaires jaune, rouge et bleu. Le noir est généralement celui des lignes qui s’étirent à la verticale et à l’horizontale, se croisant à angle droit. La combinaison de ces éléments ouvre des possibilités de composition infinies. Mondrian s’intéresse à l’image essentielle, à la création d’un équilibre parfait et tendu à la fois, dans lequel tous les éléments semblent à leur place.

Mondrian passe les 25 dernières années de sa vie dans les trois métropoles de l’art moderne: Paris, Londres et New York. De fin 1911 à 1938, avec une interruption due à la Première Guerre mondiale, il vit à Paris. Après quelques années à Londres, en 1940 il s’installe à New York, où il décède d'une pneumonie en 1944 âgé de 71 ans. En tant que membre de la Société théosophique, Mondrian accordait une grande importance à l’internationalité. Il accède au statut de célébrité dès les années 1920 en tant qu’artiste d’avant-garde et co-initiateur de la peinture abstraite. Ses ateliers deviennent des lieux légendaires, sources d’inspiration surtout pour des artistes plus jeunes dont Willem de Kooning et Lee Krasner.

Dans le cadre de l’exposition, la Fondation Beyeler présente le film «Piet & Mondrian», un court-métrage de Lars Kraume, l’un des cinéastes les plus renommés de langue allemande. Le film prend pour point de départ l’essai Réalité naturelle et réalité abstraite, formulé par Mondrian en 1919/20 sur le mode du dialogue pour y exposer ses considérations et ses réflexions sur l’abstraction dans l’art. Le grand acteur allemand de théâtre et de cinéma Lars Eidinger donne vie au texte théorique de Mondrian. «Piet & Mondrian» a été produit par Felix von Boehm / Lupa Film avec le soutien financier du Medienboard BerlinBrandenburg. Le scénario a été écrit par Constantin Lieb.

«Mondrian Evolution» est une exposition de la Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Bâle et de la Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, en coopération avec le Kunstmuseum Den Haag. L’exposition est placée sous le commissariat d’Ulf Küster, Senior Curator, Fondation Beyeler, Kathrin Beßen et Susanne MeyerBüser, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Mondrian Evolution

Catalogue de l'exposition

Hatje Cantz, 2022

Le catalogue de l’exposition a été conçu par Irma Boom, graphiste de renom international qui au fil des dernières années a renouvelé les possibilités infinies du livre. Le catalogue paraît en allemand et en anglais au Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. Sur 264 pages, il réunit des articles rédigés par Benno Tempel, Caro Verbeek, Ulf Küster, Kathrin Beßen, Susanne Meyer-Büser, Charlotte Sarrazin et l’artiste Bridget Riley, avec une préface de Sam Keller et Ulf Küster. 

Ulf Küster, Mondrian A–Z

Hatje Cantz, 2022

À l’occasion de l’exposition, le Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin publie également Mondrian A–Z : dans ce texte amusant, Ulf Küster explore en ordre alphabétique les thèmes qui intéressaient le peintre et nous offre ainsi des aperçus de son univers mental et sensoriel. 120 pages, 32 illustration. En allemand et en anglais.

FONDATION BEYELER

Baselstrasse 77, 4125 Riehen

www.fondationbeyeler.ch

KUNSTSAMMLUNG NORDRHEIN-WESTFALEN

Grabbeplatz 5, 40213 Düsseldorf

www.kunstsammlung.de

HATJE CANTZ VERLAG

www.hatjecantz.de

Mondrian figuratif @ Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Mondrian figuratif
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
12 septembre 2019 - 26 janvier 2020

PIET MONDRIAN

Dévotion, 1908

© Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands

La peinture figurative de Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) est longtemps restée méconnue. Pourtant, celui qui se distingue aujourd’hui comme le plus important collectionneur de l’artiste, Salomon Slijper (1884-1971) s’est passionné pour cet aspect longtemps oublié de son oeuvre. Ayant rencontré le maître aux Pays-Bas où il se réfugie pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, ce fils de diamantaire d’origine amstellodamoise réunit un ensemble unique de peintures et de dessins de l’artiste avec lequel il se lie d’amitié. Piet Mondrian procède lui-même à la sélection d’une suite représentative de sa production exécutée entre 1891 et 1918, enrichissant l’ensemble de quelques pièces abstraites ultérieures ; les majorités des acquisitions ayant lieu entre 1916 et 1920. Le soutien que Slijper apporte au peintre est de taille. Plus encore, il change sa vie. A une époque où Piet Mondrian ne parvient pas à vivre de son travail et fait des copies au Rijksmuseum pour joindre les deux bouts, les achats en nombre de son récent mécène lui ouvrent de nouvelles perspectives et lui permettent de financer son retour à Paris en juin 1919.

PIET MONDRIAN

Moulin dans la clarté du soleil, 1908

© Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands

Le devenir de la collection de Salomon Slijper n’est pas sans rappeler l’héritage de Michel Monet qui est l’un des fleurons du musée Marmottan Monet. Comme le fils de l’impressionniste, Salomon Slijper est resté sans enfant. Comme ce dernier, Slijper a institué un musée – le Kunstmuseum de La Haye (anciennement Gemeentemuseum) – son légataire. Comme le fonds Monet présenté dans l’hôtel particulier de la rue Louis Boilly, la collection Slijper constitue le premier fonds mondial de l’oeuvre de l’artiste.

Musée de collectionneurs ayant vocation à apporter un éclairage sur le rôle des amateurs dans la vie des arts, le musée Marmottan Monet a noué un partenariat exceptionnel avec le Kunstmuseum de La Haye pour organiser une exposition totalement inédite rendant hommage à Salomon Slijper et au Mondrian figuratif à travers la présentation de peintures et de dessins majeurs provenant exclusivement de la collection de l’amateur. Dans cette exposition, ce sont près de soixante-dix Mondrian qui ornent les cimaises de l’institution parisienne. L’exposition se distingue par le nombre et la qualité des toiles estampillées chefs-d’oeuvre par le musée de La Haye. Des 67 Mondrian présentés, la moitié voyage pour la première fois à Paris. Les autres sont tout aussi rares : 12 % n’y ont pas séjourné depuis un demi-siècle, 20 % depuis près de 20 ans. Jamais vu à Paris depuis près d’une génération, l’accrochage crée en soi l’événement. Un événement unique à plus d’un titre puisque certaines pièces phares sont déplacées pour la dernière fois en raison de leur fragilité. C’est le cas de l’iconique Moulin dans la clarté du soleil (1908). L’exposition de Marmottan offre ainsi une ultime opportunité de le découvrir à Paris avant son interdiction définitive de prêt.

Composition N° IV (1914) est présenté en ouverture. Première oeuvre acquise par Salomon Slijper, elle est aussi l’une des exceptions jalonnant le parcours puisque purement abstraite. L’acquisition d’une peinture récente fut sans doute un pré requis pour mettre l’artiste en confiance. Piet Mondrian sera dès lors heureux de céder ses toiles « naturalistes » à Salomon Slijper qui s’impose sans délai comme son mécène le plus fidèle. Faisant pendant, un lièvre mort de 1891 souligne les liens qui unissent Piet Mondrian à la tradition hollandaise à travers le genre de la nature morte. Pièce la plus ancienne de l’exposition – le peintre n’a que 19 ans quand il la signe – elle ouvre le parcours qui suit : chronologique et à dominante figurative.

La première section regroupe des paysages peints entre 1898 et 1905. Ce sont des vues de la région du Gooi à l’est d’Amsterdam, où l’artiste et le mécène résident un temps et se fréquentent. Ces oeuvres qui décrivent des lieux connus des deux hommes illustrent les talents précoces de Piet Mondrian : dessinateur hors pair et maître du clair obscur. Les thèmes choisis tout autant que l’attention portée au rendu de l’atmosphère le rattache à l’école de La Haye. Il est encore un héritier des « classiques ». Pourtant, la rapidité de son évolution, son renouvellement ininterrompu frappent. Bien que le peintre se limite à quelques thèmes – le moulin, l’arbre, la ferme, la fleur et le portrait – aucune oeuvre ne se ressemble. Il se réinvente sans cesse. Ainsi, le parcours est-il placé sous le signe de la diversité, du contraste et de la surprise.

Considérant que « les couleurs de la nature ne peuvent être imitées sur la toile », Piet Mondrian aborde dès 1907 un tournant moderne privilégiant les aplats et les contrastes colorés poussés à l’extrême. Moulin dans le crépuscule (1907-1908) explore – à travers des registres aux tonalités franches : jaune, bleu, vert – une poétique de la peinture. Avec Bois près d’Oele (1908) l’artiste passe un nouveau cap. Lignes courbes, arabesques et couleurs irréelles confinent au mystique. Membre de l’association théosophique, Piet Mondrian se dépeint alors tel un illuminé. Trois autoportraits inédits le montrent à l’âge trente-six ans, cheveux longs, barbe noire et le regard pénétrant des êtres habités.

Dévotion (1908) témoigne par le biais du portrait d’enfant de la portée spirituelle de son oeuvre. Certaines des toiles les plus illustres du maître lui font face. Marquées par l’exemple des fauves et des divisionnistes Moulin dans le crépuscule, Dunes ou Arum (1908-1909) se font de plus en plus rayonnantes et vibrantes. Deux critères propres à définir la beauté d’une toile selon Piet Mondrian.

La spectaculaire église rose de Domburg (Clocher en Zélande, 1911) et le monumental Moulin rouge (1911) éclatant sur un fond bleu profond exaltent les couleurs pures vers 1911. La géométrisation des formes des deux monuments annonce l’abstraction. Au même moment, Piet Mondrian réinterprète d’ailleurs le cubisme de Braque et Picasso dont il adopte la palette ocre – gris comme le montrent Arbre gris (1911) et Paysage (1912).

Figuration et abstraction se font également face dans la section suivante. Trois exceptionnels grands formats représentant à l’huile et au fusain le moulin de Blaricum (1917) où réside Salomon Slijper et Ferme près de Duivendrecht (1916) reprenant un motif de jeunesse visible dans la première section tranchent avec trois toiles purement abstraites de 1914.

Terminant le parcours et en guise de conclusion, un autoportrait de Piet Mondrian posant devant une toile abstraite en damier (1918) fait face à une oeuvre du même genre : Composition avec grille 8 : composition en damier aux couleurs foncées (1919) que Salomon Slijper acquiert l’année de sa création. Les oeuvres se font écho autant qu’elles font contraste : les couleurs vives – rouges et bleus – étant réservées exclusivement à la peinture en damier tandis qu’un camaïeu de bruns suffit à la représentation « naturaliste » du peintre dans son atelier.

En épilogue, Composition, toile néoplasticiste de 1921 voisine avec six tableaux de fleurs exécutés entre 1918 et 1921 : chrysanthèmes, roses et arums. La juxtaposition de ces oeuvres achève de démontrer que l’évolution de Mondrian est plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît. Elle ne peut se définir comme un strict passage de la figuration à l’abstraction ou du noir à la couleur. Au contraire, le naturalisme reste et demeure une constante de l’oeuvre de Piet Mondrian, l’érigeant au rang – méconnu et pourtant essentiel – de grand maître de la peinture figurative du XXe siècle.

Commissariat de l'exposition : Marianne Mathieu, Directeur scientifique du musée Marmottan Monet.

MUSEE MARMOTTAN MONET
2 rue Louis-Boilly, 75016 Paris
www.marmottan.fr

Alice Neel Exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Alice Neel

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

26 February - 11 April 2015

Xavier Hufkens presents the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Alice Neel (1900-1984). Drawn from the artist’s estate, the presentation includes paintings from all periods of Neel’s career, together with a selection of drawings. This is the first showing of her work in Belgium.

Born in Philadelphia in 1900, Alice Neel trained at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and carved out a career as an artist in New York, often in difficult circumstances. Neel’s dedication to the ‘unfashionable’ art of portrait painting and social realism – and this during the decades of abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism – ensured that her work remained permanently out of kilter with avant-garde artistic developments. To quote Jeremy Lewison, advisor to the Alice Neel Estate, ‘she was isolated in a sea of changing styles’. While this was reflected in a lack of commercial and critical success during her most productive years, a retrospective organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 confirmed a groundswell of belated recognition. After her death in 1984, critical interest in Neel’s work further intensified and led to a series of landmark exhibitions in Europe. Alice Neel is today recognised as one of the greatest American figurative painters of the twentieth century.

Alice Neel’s posthumous success is intimately connected to her profound social conscience and idiosyncratic choice of sitters. Working across six decades of radical social and political upheaval, Neel’s approach to her art was uncompromising and unwavering. Passionately interested in the trials and tribulations of everyday life, and the desperate struggle to survive in what she called the ‘rat race of New York’, Alice Neel interacted with people from all walks of life. A self-described ‘collector of souls’, Alice Neel’s work provides an illuminating insight into the cultural, countercultural and multicultural circles in which she moved. Furthermore, she often tackled subjects that were perceived as ‘risky’ during her lifetime: Alice Neel is known for painting gay people long before homosexuality was legalised, transvestites, members of the poor, immigrant communities in Spanish Harlem (where she lived), candid portraits of nursing and pregnant women as well as unflinching male and female nudes.

Among Alice Neel’s greatest gifts were her remarkable mastery of her chosen medium and her unique ability to plumb the inner psychological depths of her sitters, whom she always painted from life. She began painting in the 1920s but it was not till the early 1930s that she really got into her stride, a period represented in the exhibition by her sober portrait Martin Jay (1932). When she moved from Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in 1938, she turned her attention to the local immigrant community, many of whom lived on the margins of society and were afflicted by the poverty of the Depression years. Alvin Simon (1959) and Mother and Child (1962) are classic works of this type. Neel’s gradual acceptance into the art world saw her not only begin to paint her fellow artists, but also a whole host of other figures involved in the vibrant New York art scene of the 1960s and 70s. Her portraits of the writer, poet and editor Michael Benedikt (1967) and the graphic designer and scenographer Ron Kajiwara (1970) are typical in this respect. Alice Neel also painted infants and members of her own family. Three portraits of children, painted at different periods of her life, and one of her daughter-in-law Ginny, a frequent sitter, are also on display.

While Alice Neel perfectly captured the zeitgeist of her age, the visceral honesty and analytical clarity of her work renders it both timeless and universal. Reflecting upon painting, she explained: ‘It was more than a profession. It was even a therapy, for there I just told it as it was. It takes a lot of courage in life to tell it how it is.’

In recent years, Alice Neel’s work has been the subject of a major survey of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (touring to the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Moderna Museet, Malmö, 2010) and a retrospective exhibition of drawings at the Nordiska Akvarellmeuseet, Skärhamn (2013). Smaller solo exhibitions have been held at Victoria Miro, London (2014), the Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea (2013), David Zwirner, New York (2012) and Aurel Scheibler, Berlin (2011). Her work has been included in many important group shows, most recently Face Value. Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction, National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (2014), Paint Made Flesh at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville (touring to the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., and the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, 2008) and Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (touring to PS1, New York and Vancouver Art Gallery, 2007). Her work has also been written about extensively.

XAVIER HUFKENS 

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels 

www.xavierhufkens.com

Philip Guston - Late Paintings, Peder Lund, Oslo

Philip Guston - Late Paintings 

Peder Lund, Oslo 

September 20 - November 8, 2014

Peder Lund is proud to announce an exhibition of late paintings by the American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980). Bringing works by Guston to Norway for the first time, Peder Lund exhibits six paintings and two drawings made in the last decade of the painter’s life, two of which are on loan from Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Four of the paintings have been part of the travelling exhibition Philip Guston: Late Works, celebrating the centennial of the artist’s birth, which opened in November, 2013, at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and travelled to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, through August, 2014. 

Philip Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 as the youngest son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, who had fled the pogroms in Odessa, Ukraine. The family relocated to Los Angeles in 1919, and Philip Guston began to draw at the age of 14. He earned a scholarship from the Otis Art Institute in 1930, but left the art school after three months and set out as an autodidactic painter, before travelling to Mexico in 1934, where he got involved with the Mexican Mural Movement. Returning to America, Guston left Los Angeles for New York in 1936 and joined the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/ FAP) (1935-43), the visual arts initiative of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme, for which Guston made a number of murals on public buildings. A fascination with Italian Medieval and Renaissance artists came to influence Philip Guston’s murals, and the painter further explored this interest when he travelled across Italy, Spain and France between 1948 and 1949. This fascination endured throughout Philip Guston’s oeuvre and came to play a significant part in his late, figurative works.

After leaving the WPA project, Philip Guston began to frequent the vibrant circle of Abstract Expressionists, also known as the New York School that was forming in New York, and he developed close friendships with painters including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, as well as the minimalist composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. Guston almost exclusively produced non-figurative art between 1951 and -54, but the grand narratives about art that the New York School propagated did not interest Guston, and he refused the Formalist theories of Clement Greenberg that coloured the work of the New York School. The return to figuration in Philip Guston’s paintings in the decade that followed famously provoked the New York art scene, and Guston insisted that each of his paintings justified itself and that none of his paintings were part of an overall theoretical scheme. He also dismissed the Modernists’ neglect of the tumultuous external affairs that coloured the political landscape at the time, and stated, “what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going home into my studio to adjust a red to a blue […].”

Philip Guston relocated to the remote Woodstock in upstate New York in 1967, where he frequented other artists and poets and further developed his interest in Renaissance art, as well as the work of painters such as Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Beckmann. These influences now stood alongside an attraction to cartoons and comic strips – the work of the cartoonist George Herriman in particular. Cartoon-like figures and recurring themes such as soles or piles of shoes, people’s heads, boxy cars, self-portraits of the artist smoking, and anthropomorphic figures that Philip Guston called “Hoods” (a reference to Ku Klux Klans men) began to appear in his work, and the blocky shapes and open brushwork seen in his non-figurative period had now become caricatured humans and objects. The paintings on display at Peder Lund show several of the recurring themes in Guston’s late paintings – the “Hoods,” shoes, books, amputated legs and heads with protruding eyes. Guston's late paintings have had an unprecedented impact on artists working from the 1980s and up until the present and have earned Philip Guston the standing as one of the most important painters that reintroduced figuration into painting in the second half of the 20th Century.

Philip Guston’s work has been the subject of a vast number of exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious public institutions. Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Guston, which ran through 2003-04, and travelled from the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Guston’s work is featured in numerous public collections worldwide, including those of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27 - 0252 Oslo 

pederlund.no

Robert Colescott, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis - Recent Paintings - Touring Exhibition following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

January 24 - April 5, 1998

"There's a comic-maniac edge to these paintings produced by gross exaggerations and crazy juxtapositions. It's expressive of the insane collage of relationships I'm dealing with." -Robert Colescott

Following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins a two-year United States tour at the Walker Art Center. Organized by independent curator Miriam Roberts for SITE Santa Fe, the exhibition honors Arizona-based artist ROBERT COLESCOTT, the first painter to represent the United States at the Biennale since Jasper Johns in 1988, and the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the prestigious festival.

On view in the exhibition are 20 paintings from the past decade that employ a figurative vocabulary that challenges stereotypes and engenders debate on the state of human relations in the United States. Now 72, the Arizona-based Robert Colescott continues to produce vitally significant work and is an important role model for a younger generation of artists exploring issues of racialization, identity, power, and gender. Employing a highly personal combination of narrative figuration blended with an ironic viewpoint to address the major social issues of his time, Robert Colescott has created one of the most powerful bodies of work in recent American art.

According to curator Miriam Roberts, "Like the world they depict, Colescott's polyrhythmic, improvisational paintings are full of surprises--in juxtapositions of forms and colors, in distortions of scale, in inventions and interplays of space and structure. They are filled with diverse references to the history of art itself, not only in homages to specific paintings, but to the traditional conventions of his chosen medium - history painting, portraiture, landscape, still life and allegory.

"Simultaneously seductive, hilarious and disturbing, the paintings of Robert Colescott depict a world of contradictions and dichotomies--between art and life, tragedy and comedy, men and women, black and white, oppressor and victim, Europe and Africa, past and present. It is a world of exploitation, missed opportunities, unfulfilled potential and lost love. Above all, it is a world of ironies, where people, things and events are never quite what they first seem."

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins with works from 1987, a year that marked a turning point in the artist's career. Though he continued to use satire and narrative figuration, he moved beyond the controversial images of racial stereotypes for which he had become known. Colescott expanded his range and began exploring universal themes, venturing into the realm of mythological and religious allegory and sophisticated literary allusions. Writing in Arts magazine in 1988, Linda McGreevy said: "Colescott proves himself a moralist, a history painter in the deepest sense, whose webs of cultural cause and effect have come full circle to illuminate the present."

Born in Oakland, California, in 1925, ROBERT COLESCOTT studied at the University of California at Berkeley and with Fernand Léger in Paris before participating in the resurgence of figurative art on the West Coast during the 1950s. But it was his sojourn in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1960s that compelled the artist to infuse his work with a dynamic blend of color, historical reference, and style. Three thousand years of non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color, and a sense of pattern--all these elements had a profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work. Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Colescott has received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983) and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for Creative Painting and Drawing (1985).

An illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition contains essays by Miriam Roberts and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and a leading Colescott scholar; a poem by Peabody Award and American Book Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe; a photographic portrait by photographer and conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems; an exhibition checklist; and selected biographical information.

The exhibition is an official presentation of the U.S. Government and was organized by Miriam Roberts for the U.S. Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in association with SITE Santa Fe.

WALKER ART CENTER

Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403

www.walkerart.org