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AUGUST - SEPTEMBER 2016 The bimonthly electronic journal of the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation
EDITORIAL TEAM
Georgia Alevizaki, Paraskevi Gerolymatou, Andreas Georgiadis, Maria Koutsomallis, Alexandra Papakostopoulou, Kleio Panourgias, Irene Stratis Designed and edited by
Τ + 30 210 - 72 52 896 www.moca-andros.gr | www.goulandris.gr
C ON T EN T S
George Zongolopoulos
INTERMINABLE PLENITUDE IN THE VASTNESS OF ABSTRACTION
INTRODUCTION
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By Kyriakos Koutsomallis, Director of the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation
PA R T I
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The early representational period
PA R T I I
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Allusive fidelity to realism
PA R T I I I
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Zongolopoulos in public spaces
PA R T I V
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Geometric & kinetic compositions
I N S I D E T H E F O U N D AT I O N ' S P E R M A N E N T C O L L E C T I O N
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George Zongolopoulos, Lens with Three Umbrellas
I N T E R N AT I O N A L L I S T I N G S / C U LT U R E A list of major art shows around the world
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E X H I B I T I ON Museu m o f Contem p o rary A r t o n A nd r o s
INTERMINABLE PLENITUDE IN THE VASTNESS OF ABSTRACTION This summer, the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation is organising a retrospective exhibition of the work of the distinguished sculptor George Zongolopoulos. This artistic homage to George Zongolopoulos whose life, full of unappeased passion and mental and physical verve was synonymous with art, is a retrospective into all the categories and aspects of the totality of his work. Although established as an eminent sculptor he was also an inspired architect of the modern movement and a charismatic handler of the paintbrush and stylus. Overcoming the stereotypical adversities of the Interwar period, which was in fact one of the most fertile for all the forms, expressions and aspects of art and during which he matured artistically, he attempted with knowledge, action, boldness and passion, the creation of an innovative artistic language, a refreshing redefinition of positions and principles by placing the relationship between space and the object and anthropocentrism on a new basis. The exhibition is structured in four sections and representative works of all these phases are presented in this retrospective homage. George Zongolopoulos, with ceaseless plenitude and tireless energy, dedicated seventy of the 100 years of his physical life, to that which he had set as the purpose of his life, to Art. It is Art that helped him cross the threshold of immortality. Yet another retrospective of Zongolopoulos’ work would be of reduced significance unless its stated purpose was to expand the interpretational horizon and allow for a more flexible interpretative approach. This is achieved partially by the insightful texts penned by renowned researchers and connoisseurs of his work published in the volume that accompanies the exhibition and carries the aesthetic and editorial mark of Mikri Arktos.
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George Zongolopoulos From suggestive realism to organic geometric abstraction Written by Kyriakos Koutsomallis
George Zongolopoulos’ service to the visual arts was a long, painful and agonising passage, tireless but also irresistible; it begun as a latent suggestive reference to realism and developed, advancing in an uninterrupted evolutionary flow and progression, towards an increasingly abstract adherence to the basic principles of the great movement of cubism. His life was identified with art. He surrendered to it with both physical and ‛intellectual beauty’ in accordance with Socrates who thought of art ‛as the most attractive, pleasant, beloved, desirable and erotic characteristic of the soul.’ Blessed with a sharp and idealised sense of visualisation, an extremely fertile reconstructive and reformative imagination, with clarity and sobriety, with mathematical verve and philosophical scholarship, but also with youthful robustness, he created archetypal formalist motifs with design and stylistic features that led in a coherent and disciplined manner, to his inclusion in the closed circle of the reformers of the Greek sculptural avant-garde. Overcoming stereotypical difficulties, he attempted through knowledge and actions and a distinct artistic language to redefine positions and principles by placing the relationship between space and object on a new basis. He approached and negotiated the image as a conceptual notion. Using new methods and materials, the fanciful shapes of modern typology, personal expressive idioms, suggestions of aesthetic excellence and originality and a freedom unbound from the rules and conventional burdens of the past, he redefined and transformed his initial youthful suggestive realism into innovative Euclidean transformations, into shapes and forms acceptable by the demands of his time and the broader ambient revivalist demand for modernity. His capable, solid and rounded education in determined combination with his imaginative experiential inventiveness supported the transition — the passage, in other words — from archaic simplicity towards the development of complex innovative formations which presupposed a free spirit, clarity, integrity of structure and compatibility with the new aesthetically dominating trends within which a variety of innovative artistic morals and principles were hatched. Within the framework of his own creative era, George Zongolopoulos saw himself as a man of his era. He wanted the ‛boundaries of his (visual) language’ to be ‛the boundaries of his world’ (Wittgenstein). The spatiotemporal creative conjuncture within the framework of which his language was set and his belief was experienced, had the superiority of the intellectual over the visible faultlessness and perfection of the depicted object as its acceptance axis. He did not perceive the sense of beauty as elegance and sensuality but as a way of highlighting eurhythmy, measure and proportion as well as the level of crystallisation of the action and the dynamic that occurs from the agony of the mutational process. The primary elements that comprise his semiotic expressive code were bound to be the result of cerebral formulations which, in addition to the optical visual uptake, primarily target the cerebral process.
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In their totality, whether monuments for public spaces, free compositions, two-dimensional relief surfaces, water-powered constructions, magnifying refractive lenses for maquettes or monumental works, his works are subject to an aesthetic practice which is dictated by the necessity to search for new possibilities ordained by the new social reality. Within the boundaries of this new reality using new materials and the possibilities of modern technology, solid or liquid elements, compact masses, the elements of nature itself — such as light, water which becomes a sculptural mass, a source of movement, a flow rhythm that produces movement with rectangular metal plates with vertical or horizontal formations and rhythmical gradations, elements that collide with strict constructivist structural claims, with geometrical eurhythmy, with clear thought in order to produce through the texture of straight or curved circular, semi-circular, spherical geometric formation via inventive constructionist ingenuity the formulation of compositions which contribute to the dominance of a new dialectic in Abstraction - George Zongolopoulos instigated a new questioning around form and its function in space and subsequently exposed viewers to a individual and adventurous search, which is intimately bound to the extent of their own subjective aesthetic cognitive preparedness. This is a creative constructive contrivance that supports the reformative mutational attempt of primogeniture and the approach and understanding of the causes and causalities that condition cosmogonic order or disorder. A cerebral creative verve which nestles in the silence of stochastic depth, in the silence of endless time. It is perhaps an exaggeration to remind viewers that before appearing as a sculptor in 1933 at the 3rd Exhibition of the Art Group (Omada Techni), Zongolopoulos was primarily known as a talented painter. His drawing talent highlighted him as a capable designer and engraver, while his heightened sense of space and ability for volumetric distribution in a vacuum, as a remarkable self-taught architect. He collaborated with and won competitions alongside distinguished architects of his time such as Karantinos, Mitsakis, Pikionis, Tombazis; some of these projects were executed while others remained on paper. It is clear that all these creative categories were extensions of drawing. This aspect sustained and offered the whole an internal unity and entity. During his recurrent stays in Paris and repeated trips to Europe he encountered, experienced, studied, assimilated and, largely, adopted the values, teachings and influences of the ongoing, innovative fermentations taking place there and treated them with subtlety and insight. If Greece had not been omitted from the very important exhibition organised in Paris in 1996 on the question ‛what is modern sculpture‘ — which attempted a summative approach to the principles that characterize and define contemporary sculpture as this was composed and expressed by the leaders of this three-dimensional avant-garde percept, which did aside with the static immobility and philological fixity of sculpture-making, Zongolopoulos would have
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help pride of place. Henri Laurens, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Archipenko, Germaine Richier, Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, Marino Marini, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ossip Zadkine all influenced his work and this is clear through both perceptible and imperceptible allusions and references. It is worth mentioning that in Paris, where he arrived in 1949 after winning a French government scholarship, he met and encountered bright figures of the Greek intelligentsia including Kostas Axelos, Nikos Svoronos, George Kandylis, Takis Zenetos and the sculptors Memos Makris and Costas Koulentianos who contributed to and facilitated his contacts there. From the beginning of the 1950s, clearly influenced by European avant-garde developments and particularly the cubist sculptures of Laurens whom he met personally, he began to display a progressive stylization in his works and to subdue formal identification, naturalistic and physiognomic resemblance in favour of abstractive geometries. The monumental composition The Dance of Zalongo (Horos tou Zalongou) of 1954 is a tangible example of this shift. This was the beginning of a long journey towards Abstraction, which was heightened in the mid-1960s and reached its peak in the middle of the following decade, whence began the period of optical transformations using refractive lenses that distorted the depicted figure. The abstract sculptures in bronze he exhibited at the 32nd Venice Biennale, where he represented Greece alongside his friends Spyros Vassileiou, Costas Koulentianos and Nikos Nikolaou, do not even suggest formalist and physiognomic elements of the perceptible world. George Zongolopoulos’ life spans an entire century (19032004) of physical presence while his artistic activity exceeds seventy years of fertile, productive avant-garde work. In inverse relation to his age, he maintained, to the end, thriving beliefs and a steady and robust youthful vigor. Productive, lucid and clearheaded he tirelessly maintained his teenage valence. He moved though time calmly and heroically without allowing it to dampen his enthusiasm and inherent idiosyncratic freedom. He persistently repelled age so as not to impede on his unrestricted experimental search, which helped create a body of work with its own hallmark and own entity. Undeniably, his sculpture expanded into new territories and opened new perspectives for the younger generation. Zongolopoulos lived his life in accordance to what Matisse had wished for: to remain young, however old he became. Sophocles is said to have written his last tragedy at the age of 99. At the same age, Zongolopoulos was still lucid, coherent and productive. ‛We hope to work for as long as we live. That is out only joy and out only love’, was a wish he expressed on the TV programme Paraskinio. Two years later he passed the threshold of eternity leaving behind a body of work which is impressive both in size and quality.
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PART I
The early representational period
The young Zongolopoulos came of age during the Interwar period, a time which was exceptionally fertile but also unstable for Europe, and Greece in particular, where fear was quickly succeeded by hope. The anthropocentricity inspired by archaic prototypes and the representation of reality can be seen in sculptures of this period as well as in paintings and in his ‛weak’ — according to him — drawings.
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PART II
Allusive fidelity to realism
His frequent stays in Paris and recurrent trips to Rome, Florence and Venice brought George Zongolopoulos into close contact with the principles and lessons of abstraction through the avant-garde fermentations taking place there. He processed them with subtlety and insight, assimilated and largely endorsed them.
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PART III
Zongolopoulos in public spaces
Zongolopoulos’ reputation literary took-off when the artist decided to pass through the labyrinthine road of abstraction, geometricity and monumental sculpture where he combined his natural inclination for architecture with his knowledge of public buildings in the architectural offices of the Ministry of Education. With his metal constructions, which disregard the laws of gravity, he entered the urban landscapes of Omonoia, Thessaloniki and Brussels but also locations where nature had not yet been tainted, on Mount Zalongo. Zongolopoulos managed to achieve exactly the opposite of what the history of art considered feasible until that moment: his sculpture is far from the ornamental element of a building and it is architecture itself that serves creativity.
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ομονοια square
‛evaGgelismos‘ metro station
syntagma square
megaron hall
αεροδρομιο
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thessaloniki
washington
Brussels
nea paralia, thessaloniki
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PART IV
Geometric & kinetic compositions
By nature but also due to his idiosyncrasy and education, George Zongolopoulos was open to the idea of innovation, of a new reality which included elements of modern technology and progress in the sense of the disconnection from conventional, static ideas. Umbrellas, the optical illusions of refracting lenses that deform the depicted object, water that is transformed into a sculptural texture, light that becomes a sculptural mass and source of movement, the rectangular metallic plates with vertical or horizontal formations and rhythmical graduations, are the elements which created his own artistic idiom recognisable by all.
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I NS I D E T H E F OUN D A T I ON ' S PER M A NEN T C OLLE C T I ON
George Zongolopoulos (1903 – 2004)
Lens with Three Umbrellas Stainless steel, wire grid and plexiglas, 183 x 120 x 59 cm Within the boundaries of this new reality using new materials and the possibilities of modern technology, solid or liquid elements, compact masses, the elements of nature itself – such as light, water which becomes a sculptural mass, a source of movement, a flow rhythm that produces movement with rectangular metal plates with vertical or horizontal formations and rhythmical gradations, elements that collide with strict constructivist structural claims, with geometrical eurhythmy, with clear thought in order to produce through the texture of straight or curved circular, semi-circular, spherical geometric formation via inventive constructionist ingenuity the formulation of compositions which contribute to the dominance of a new dialectic in Abstraction - George Zongolopoulos instigated a new questioning around form and its function in space and subsequently exposed viewers to a individual and adventurous search, which is intimately bound to the extent of their own subjective aesthetic cognitive preparedness. This is a creative constructive contrivance that supports the reformative mutational attempt of primogeniture and the approach and understanding of the causes and causalities that condition cosmogonic order or disorder. A cerebral creative verve which nestles in the silence of stochastic depth, in the silence of endless time. Extract from Mr Kyriakos Koutsomallis text for the exhibition: George Zongolopoulos – Interminable plenitude in the vastness of abstraction
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INTERNATIONAL LISTINGS / CULTURE
LONDON
Tate Modern Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe is best known for her paintings of magnified flowers, animal skulls, and New Mexico desert landscapes. This exhibition brings together some of her most important works, including Jimson Weed/ White Flower No. 1 1932, the most expensive painting by a female artist ever sold at auction. Duration of exhibition until: 30/10/2016 http://www.tate.org.uk
LONDON
The National Gallery: Ρainters' Paintings - From Freud to Van Dyck
Painters' Paintings' takes its inspiration from works in the National Gallery Collection once owned by painters, revealing the private acquisitions of Freud, Matisse, Degas, Leighton, Watts, Lawrence, Reynolds, and Van Dyck. The exhibition investigates why these painters acquired other painters' works – for artistic inspiration, to support fellow artists, as status symbols, as investments, even out of obsession. Duration of exhibition until: 2/10/2016 www.nationalgallery.org.uk
LONDON
Royal Academy of Arts David Hockney
David Hockney returns to the RA with a remarkable new body of work. Embracing portraiture with a renewed creative vigour, he offers an intimate snapshot of the LA art world and the people who have crossed his path over the last two years. Duration of exhibition until: 02/10/2016 www.royalacademy.org.uk
ROME
MAXXI: EXTRAORDINARY VISIONS. L’ITALIA CI GUARDA
To mark the 70th anniversary of the Italian Republic, MAXXI is presenting a group exhibition featuring shots by great Italian and international photographers who have focused on Italy: a poetic and yet documentary, socialand institutional “atlas” of the Italy of recent decades. On show are sublime and blighted landscapes, ideal cities and neglected suburbs, great architecture and marginal urban spaces. Duration of exhibition until: 23/10/2016 www.fondazionemaxxi.it
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ROME
Scuderie del Quirinale Capolavori della Scultura buddhista Giapponese
Twenty-one absolute masterpieces (totalling thirty-five items), stretching from the Asuka (7th – 8th centuries AD) to the Kamakura periods (1185 – 1333), will be on public display in Italy for the very first time. Traditionally considered to be cult objects, many of these items are difficult to move and are not easy to access even in Japan, either because they are displayed in the semi-darkness of temples and shrines or because they are heavily protected in the collections of the country's leading national museums.
VENICE
Palazzo Ducale VENICE, THE JEWS AND EUROPE
Organised on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the creation of Venice’s Ghetto, curated by Donatella Calabi with the scientific coordination of Gabriella Belli and the contribution of a large pool of scholars, the “Venice, the Jews and Europe 1516 – 2016” exhibition aims to describe the processes that led to the creation, implementation and transformation of the first “fence” for Jews in the world. Duration of exhibition until: 13/11/2016 palazzoducale.visitmuve.it
Duration of exhibition until:23/10/2016 www.scuderiequirinale.it
LIVERPOOL
Tate Liverpool: Francis Bacon Invisible Rooms
Francis Bacon often painted a ghost-like frame or structure around the subjects of his paintings. This powerful device skilfully draws our attention to the figures within his work, intensifying their emotional state to the viewer. Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms looks at some of the artist’s most iconic and powerful paintings with a special focus on this reoccurring motif in his paintings. Duration of exhibition until:18/09/2016 www.tate.org.uk
PA R I S
Centre Pompidou Pierre Paulin
With over seventy items of furniture and around fifty unpublished drawings, the exhibition on Pierre Paulin enables visitors to discover his work through fifty years of creation. As a designer and interior designer, Paulin sculpted space, laid it out and "landscaped it". His work was always motivated by a quest for comfort and a new lifestyle – at floor level! A chance for visitors to try out re-edited versions of several of his iconic seats. Duration of exhibition until: 22/09/2016 www.centrepompidou.fr
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INTERNATIONAL LISTINGS / CULTURE
HAMBURG
Bucerius Kunst Forum Τhe World Upside Down: Hieronymus Bosch’s Century
To mark the 500 years since the death of Hieronymus Bosch, the Bucerius Kunst Forum is highlighting scenes of hell and the dramatic depictions of sin that characterized Dutch art in the sixteenth century. The show will include around 90 works by artists in the generation following Bosch who took up and refined his pictorial vocabulary, spreading it by way of graphic reproductions.
PA R I S
Musée Jacquemart-André Rembrant
The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to the Leyden period (1625-1631). s of Emmaus. The second part will be dedicated to Rembrandt’s years of triumph in Amsterdam, from 1631 to 1635. The period of 1652-1669 is known as Rembrandt’s “late style”. Duration of exhibition until: 23/01/2017 www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com
Duration of exhibition until: 11/09/2016 www.buceriuskunstforum.de
Μαδρίτη
Museo del Prado: Bosch-The 5th Centenary Exhibition
Museo del Prado is presenting the exhibition that marks the 5th centenary of the death of Jheronimus Bosch, representing an unrepeatable opportunity to see a remarkable group of works comprising the eight original paintings by the artist to be found in Spain together with others loaned from collections and museums around the world. Duration of exhibition until:11/09/2016 www.museodelprado.es
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MADRID
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Caravaggio and the Painters of the North
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be presenting Caravaggio and the Painters of the North, an exhibition that focuses on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Milan, 1571 – Porto Ercole, 1610) and his influence on the northern European artists who were fascinated by his painting and disseminated his style. . Duration of exhibition until: 18/09/2016 www.museothyssen.org
NEW YORK
Metropolitan Museum of Art Diane Arbus – In the beginning
This landmark exhibition features more than 100 photographs that together redefine Diane Arbus, one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century. It focuses on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962, the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognized praised, criticized, and copied the world over. Duration of exhibition until: 19/11/2016 www.metmuseum.org
BILBAO
Guggenheim museum Windows on the city: the school of Paris 1900-1945
Bringing together masterpieces from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection, this exhibition offers a vibrant glimpse of a historic creative outpouring and includes some of the past century’s most important paintings and sculptures, works that remain influential today.
NEW YORK
Neue Gallerie: Selections from the Permanent Collection
The current installation incorporates a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts. The display of fine art is comprised of works by Richard Gerstl, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, George Minne, and Max Oppenheimer. The display of decorative arts includes work by figures such as Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Koloman Moser, Dagobert Peche, Joseph Urban, and Otto Wagner, among others. Duration of exhibition until: 19/09/2016 www.neuegalerie.org
DANEMARK - LOUISIANA Museum of Modern Art Picasso before Picasso
Shedding light on the birth of a genius, shown here are works by an adolescent that contain the seeds of the Picasso who left his mark on most of the history of art in the first half of the twentieth century. Duration of exhibition until: 11/09/2016 en.louisiana.dk
Duration of exhibition until: 23/10/2016 www.guggenheim.org
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