Art Magazine by malinowska.zu

N°1 # 2019 MARCH | AUGUST | MAY | JUNE | JULY

Guggenheim Bilbao

JORGE OTEIZA MARK ROTHKO YVES KLEIN RICHARD SERRA ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG ANTONIO SAURA ROBERT MOTHERWELL WILLEM DE KOONING CY TWOMBLY CLYFFORD STILL ANTONI TÀPIES ANSELM KIEFER EDUARDO CHILLIDA JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

TABLE OF CONTENTS THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

THE BUILDING

THE ARCHITECT

THE COLLECTION JORGE OTEIZA MARK ROTHKO YVES KLEIN RICHARD SERRA ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG ANTONIO SAURA ROBERT MOTHERWELL WILLEM DE KOONING ANSELM KIEFER CY TWOMBLY CLYFFORD STILL ANTONI TÃ&#x20AC;PIES EDUARDO CHILLIDA JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

14 16 18 20 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42

THE EXHIBITIONS HENRI MICHAUX APPARITIONS AND “PHANTOMISM” THE LIFE OF SIGNS MANIPULATING THE PSYCHE ESTHER FERRER INTERTWINED SPACES MICHAEL SNOW

46 47 48 49 50

CLOSED CIRCUIT

THEATER OF THE WORLD

ART AND CHINA AFTER 1989 THEATER OF THE WORLD AND THE BRIDGE

5 HOURS: CAPITALISM, URBANISM, REALISM OTHERWHERE: TRAVELS THROUGH THE IN-BETWEEN WHOSE UTOPIA: ACTIVISM AND ALTERNATIVES CIRCA CODA CHAGALL

54 56 57 58 59

THE BREAKTHROUGH YEARS, 1911–1919 PARIS, HIVE OF ARTISTS FROM PARIS TO VITEBSK, PASSING THROUGH BERLIN TRADITION AND REVOLUTION JOANAVASCONCELOS

60 61 62 63

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION

S. R. GUGGENHEIM

One of Krens's most significant initiatives was to expand the foundation's international presence. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in 1997. Designed by Frank Gehry, the titanium, glass and limestone Guggenheim Bilbao is a centerpiece of the revitalization of the Basque city of Bilbao, Spain. The building was greeted with glowing praise from architecture critics. The Basque government funded the construction, while the Foundation purchased the artworks and manages the facility. The museum's permanent collection includes works by modern and contemporary Basque and Spanish artists like Eduardo Chillida, Juan Munoz and Antonio Saura, as well as works from the foundation, and it has organized various exhibitions curated by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Solomon Robert Guggenheim (February 2, 1861 – November 3, 1949) was an American businessman and art collector. He is best known for establishing the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Born into a wealthy mining family, Guggenheim founded the Yukon Gold Company in Alaska, among other business interests. He began collecting art in the 1890s, and after World War I, he retired from his business to pursue full-time art collecting. Eventually, under the guidance of artist Hilla von Rebay, he focused on the collection of modern and contemporary art, creating an important collection by the 1930s and opening his first museum in 1939.

Founded in 1937, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is dedicated to promoting the understanding and appreciation of art, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, through exhibitions, education programs, research initiatives, and publizcations. The Guggenheim constellation of museums that began in the 1970s when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, was joined by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, has sinWce expanded to include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (opened 1997), and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (currently in development). The Guggenheim Foundation continues to forge international collaborations that celebrate contemporary art, architecture, and design within and beyond the walls of the museum, including the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative. Committed to innovation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation collects, preserves, and interprets modern and contemporary art, and explores ideas across cultures through dynamic curatorial and educational initiatives and collaborations. With its constellation of architecturally and culturally distinct museums, exhibitions, publications, and digital platforms, the foundation engages both local and global audiences. The mission of the foundation is “to promote the understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, and other manifestations of visual culture, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, and to collect, conserve, and study” modern and contemporary art. The Foundation seeks, in its constituent museums, to unite distinguished architecture and artworks. The foundation’s first permanent museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is housed in a modern spiral building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Guggenheim Bilbao was designed by Frank Gehry. Both of these innovative designs received wide press and critical attention. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is housed in an 18th-century Italian palace, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal. The permanent collection of the foundation is based primarily on nine private collections: Solomon R. Guggenheim’s collection of non-objective paintings; Karl Nierendorf’s collection of German expressionism and early abstract expressionism; Katherine S. Dreier’s gift of paintings and sculptures; Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, concentrating on abstraction and surrealism; Justin K. and Hilde Thannhauser’s collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern masterpieces; part of Hilla von Rebay’s collection; Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s holdings of American minimalist, post-minimalist, environmental and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s; a collection of photographs and mixed media from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; and the Bohen Foundation’s collection of film, video, photography and new media.

In 1937, Guggenheim established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to foster the appreciation of modern art, and in 1939, he and his art advisor, artist Baroness Hilla von Rebay, opened a venue for the display of his collection, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, at 24 East 54th Street. Under Rebay’s guidance, Guggenheim sought to include in the collection the most important examples of non-objective art available at the time, such as Kandinsky’s Composition 8 (1923), Léger’s Contrast of Forms (1913) and Robert Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows (2nd Motif, 1st Part) (1912). By the early 1940s, the museum had accumulated such a large collection of avant-garde paintings that the need for a permanent building to house the art collection had become apparent. In 1943, Guggenheim and Rebay commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new museum building.In 1948, the collection was greatly expanded through the purchase of art dealer Karl Nierendorf’s estate of some 730 objects, notably German expressionist paintings. -By that time, the museum’s collection included a broad spectrum of expressionist and surrealist works, including paintings by Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Joan Miró. Guggenheim died in 1949 on Long Island, New York, and the museum was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952. The museum opened in New York City on October 21, 1959.

ABOUT

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

ABOUT

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1937 by philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and his long-time art advisor, artist Hilla von Rebay. The foundation is a leading institution for the collection, preservation, and research of modern and contemporary art and operates several museums around the world. The first museum established by the foundation

THE FUNDATION OF GUGGENHEIM

Solomon R. Guggenheim 1935 © Archives Guggenheim Photo: Jason Andrew/Getty Images

was The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in New York City. This became The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952, and the foundation moved the collection into its first permanent museum building, in New York City, in 1959. The foundation next opened the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, in 1980. Its international network of museums expanded in 1997 to include the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, and it expects to open a new museum, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates in 2017. The mission of the foundation is “to promote the understanding and appreciation of art, architecture, and other manifestations of visual culture, primarily of the modern and contemporary periods, and to collect, conserve, and study” modern and contemporary art. The Foundation seeks, in its constituent museums, to unite distinguished architecture and artworks. The foundation’s first permanent museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is housed in a modern spiral building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Guggenheim Bilbao was designed by Frank Gehry. Both of these innovative designs received wide press and critical attention. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is housed in an 18th-century Italian palace, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal. The permanent collection of the foundation is based primarily on nine private collections: Solomon R. Guggenheim’s collection of non-objective paintings; Karl Nierendorf’s collection of German expressionism and early abstract expressionism; Katherine S. Dreier’s gift of paintings and sculptures; Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, concentrating on abstraction and surrealism; Justin K. and Hilde Thannhauser’s collection of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern masterpieces; part of Hilla von Rebay’s collection; Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s holdings of American minimalist, post-minimalist, environmental and conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s; a collection of photographs and mixed media from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; and the Bohen Foundation’s collection of film, video, photography and new media. The foundation’s collections have expanded greatly through eight decades and include every major movement of 20th- and 21st-century art. Its directors and curators have attempted to form a single collection that is not encyclopedic, but rather based on their unique visions. The collection has grown in scope to include new media and performance art, and the foundation has entered into collaborations with YouTube and BMW.

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

ABOUT

When the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened to the public in 1997, it was immediately hailed as one of the world’s most spectacular buildings in the style of Deconstructivism (although Gehry does not associate himself with that architectural movement), a masterpiece of the 20th century. Architect Philip Johnson described it as “the greatest building of our time”,while critic Calvin Tomkins, in The New Yorker, characterized it as “a fantastic dream ship of undulating form in a cloak of titanium,” its brilliantly reflective panels also reminiscent of fish scales. Herbert Muschamp praised its “mercurial brilliance” in The New Y b ork Times Magazine. The Independent calls the museum “an astonishing architectural feat”. The building inspired other structures of similar design across the globe. The museum is seamlessly integrated into the urban context, unfolding its interconnecting shapes of stone, glass and titanium on a 32,500-square-meter (350,000 sq ft) site along the Nervión River in the ancient industrial heart of the city; while modest from street level, it is most impressive when viewed from the river. With a total 24,000 m2 (260,000 sq ft), of which 11,000 m2 (120,000 sq ft) are dedicated to exhibition space, it had more exhibition space than the three Guggenheim collections in New York and Venice combined at that time. The 11,000 m2 of exhibition space are distributed over nineteen galleries, ten of which follow a classic orthogonal plan that can be identified from the exterior by their stone finishes. The remaining nine galleries are irregularly shaped and can be identified from the outside by their swirling organic forms and titanium cladding. The largest gallery measures 30 meters wide and 130 meters long. In 2005, it housed Richard Serra’s monumental installation The Matter of Time, which Robert Hughes dubbed “courageous and sublime”.

THE BUILDING

Designed by American architect Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao building represents a magnificent example of the most groundbreaking 20th-century architecture. With 24,000 m2, of which 11,000 are dedicated to exhibition space, the Museum represents an architectural landmark of audacious configuration and innovating design, providing a seductive backdrop for the art exhibited in it. Altogether, Gehry’s design creates a spectacular sculpture-like structure, perfectly integrated within Bilbao’s urban pattern and its surrounding area. Once inside the Hall, visitors access the Atrium, the real heart of the Museum and one of the signature traits of Frank Gehry’s architectural design. With curved volumes and large glass curtain walls that connect the inside and the outside, the Atrium is an ample space flooded with light and covered by a great skylight. The three levels of the building are organized around the Atrium and are connected by means of curved walkways, titanium and glass elevators, and staircases. Also an exhibition space, the Atrium functions as an axis for the 20 galleries, some orthogonally shaped and with classical proportions and others with organic, irregular lines. The play with different volumes and perspectives generates indoor spaces where visitors do not feel overwhelmed. Such variety has demonstrated its enormous versatility in the expert hands of curators and exhibition designers who have found the ideal atmosphere to present both large format works in contemporary mediums and smaller or more intimate shows. In addition to the gallery space and a separate office building, the Museum has a visitor orientation room, Zero Espazioa; an auditorium seating 300; a store/bookstore; a cafeteria; and two restaurants: a bistro and a one Michelin star haute cuisine restaurant. Surrounded by attractive avenues and squares, the Museum is located in a newly developed area of the city, leaving its industrial past behind. The Museum plaza and main entrance lie in a direct line with Calle Iparragirre—one of the main streets running diagonally through Bilbao—, extending the city center right up the Museum’s door. Once in the plaza, visitors access the Hall by making their way down a broad stairway, an unusual feature that successfully overcomes the height difference between the areas alongside the Nervión River, where the Museum stands, and the higher city level. This way, Gehry created a spectacular structure without it rising above the height of adjacent buildings. The highest part of the Museum is crowned by a large skylight in the shape of a metal flower covering the Atrium, one of the building’s most characteristic features. It is possible to walk all the way around the Museum, admiring different configurations from each perspective and also a number of artworks installed outside by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Eduardo Chillida, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, or Fujiko Nakaya. The Museum site is crossed at one end by La Salve Bridge that, since 2007, supports the sculpture commissioned from Daniel Buren entitled Arcos rojos / Arku Gorriak. Stretching under the bridge, gallery 104—an enormous, column-free space that houses Richard Serra’s installation The Matter of Time—ends in a tower, a sculpture gesture that brings the architectural design to a crescendo that appears to envelop the colossal bridge and effectively incorporates it into the building.

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

ABOUT

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry and opened to the public in 1997, was immediately vaulted to prominence as one of the world’s most spectacular buildings in the style of Deconstructivism. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao work is perceived to be Gehry’s most iconic and representative work, and was a culmination of Gehry’s new directions and experimentation with surfaces and shapes. The museum’s design and construction serve as an object lesson in Frank Gehry’s style and method. Like much of Gehry’s other work, the structure consists of radically sculpted, organic contours. Sited as it is in a port town, it is intended to resemble a ship.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation selected Frank Gehry as the architect, and its director, Thomas Krens, encouraged him to design something daring and innovative. The curves on the exterior of the building were intended to appear random; the architect said that "the randomness of the curves are designed to catch the light". The interior "is designed around a large, lightfilled atrium with views of Bilbao's estuary and the surrounding hills of the Basque country". The atrium, which Gehry nicknamed The Flower because of its shape, serves as the organizing center of the museum.

Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum

Building

private collection, 2016

FRANK GEHRY

THE ARCHITECT

The Guggenheim’s satellite in Bilbao, Spain, multiplied the museum’s exhibition space in a mountain of stone, glass, and titanium that follows the contours of the Nervión river. Design and construction of the Guggenheim Bilbao went largely unnoticed in the press, so the building’s 1997 opening produced an explosion of publicity, securing Gehry’s place as a master among architects and jolting the Bilbao economy.

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

ABOUT

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

ABOUT

Gehry's best-known works include the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, France; MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Vontz Center for Molecular Studies on the University of Cincinnati campus; Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle; New World Center in Miami Beach; Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and the MARTa Herford museum in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque Française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street in New York City.

Frank Gehry is considered one of the most relevant and influential architects in the world. He is internationally renowned for his unique designs that incorporate new shapes and materials, and is especially sensitive towards his buildings’ surroundings. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is continued those design experiments in two popuone of Frank Gehry’s most celebrated works. Gehry has He lar lines of corrugated cardboard furniture, Easy Edges received the most prestigious architecture prizes, such (1969–73) and Experimental Edges (1979–82). Gehry’s as the Pritzker, which he was awarded in 1989 or the ability to undermine the viewer’s expectations of traditional materials and forms led him to be grouped with the Praemium Imperiale Award in 1992. His office, Gehry deconstructivist movement in architecture, although his Partners LLP, is currently established in Los Angeles and play upon architectural tradition also caused him to be Gehry continues designing and directing projects for cli- linked to postmodernism. Treating each new commission as “a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with ents around the world. light and air,” Gehry was rewarded with commissions the Frank Owen Gehry, born February 28. 1929 is a Canadian-born American architect, residing in Los Angeles. A number of his buildings, including his private residence, have become world-renowned attractions. His works are cited as being among the most important works of contemporary architecture in the 2010 World Architecture Survey, which led Vanity Fair to label him as “the most important architect of our age”. Gehry’s best-known works include the titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, France; MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Vontz Center for Molecular Studies on the University of Cincinnati campus; Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle; New World Center in Miami Beach; Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; Dancing House in Prague; the Vitra Design Museum and the MARTa Herford museum in Germany; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Cinémathèque Française in Paris; and 8 Spruce Street izvvvn New York City. It was his private residence in Santa Monica, California that jump-started his career. Gehry is also the designer of the future National Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial. Gehry’s family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1947. He studied architecture at the University of Southern California (1949–51; 1954) and city planning at Harvard University (1956–57). After working for several architectural firms, he established his own company, Frank O. Gehry & Associates, in 1962 and established its successor, Gehry Partners, in 2002. Reacting, like many of his contemporaries, against the cold and often formulaic Modernist buildings that had begun to dot many cityscapes, Gehry began to experimentwith unusual expressive devices and to search for a personal vocabulary. In his early work he built unique, quirky structures that emphasized human scale and contextual integrity. His early experiments are perhaps best embodied by the “renovations” he made to his own home (1978, 1991–94) in Santa Monica, California. Gehry essentially stripped the two-story home down to its frame and then built a chain-link and corrugated-steel frame around it, complete with asymmetrical protrusions of steel rod and glass. Gehry made the traditional bungalow—and the architectural norms it embodied—appear to have exploded wide open.

world over throughout the 1980s and ’90s. These works possessed the deconstructed quality of his Santa Monica home but began to display a pristine grandeur that suited his increasingly public projects. Notable structures from the period include the Vitra Furniture Museum and Factory (1987) in Weil am Rhein, Germany; the American Center (1988–94) in Paris; and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum (1990–93) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. vGehry’s reputation soared in the late 1990s. By that time Gehry’s trademark style had become buildings that resemble undulating freeform sculpture. This form arguably reached its zenith in his Guggenheim Museum (1991–97) in Bilbao, Spain. In that structure Gehry combined curvaceous titanium forms with interconnecting limestone masses to create a sculptural feat of engineering. He further explored those concerns in the Experience Music Project (1995– 2000; renamed the Museum of Pop Culture in 2016) in Seattle. Constructed of a fabricated steel frame wrapped in colourful sheet metal, the structure was, according to Gehry, modeled on the shape of a guitar—particularly, a smashed electric guitar. As with the Guggenheim structure, he employed cutting-edge computer technology to uncover the engineering solutions that could bring his sculptural sketches to life. In his 2008 renovation of the Art Museum of Ontario in his hometown, Gehry retained the original building (1918) but removed an artistically unsuccessful entryway that had been added in the 1990s. Although the updated museum shows many characteristic Gehry touches, one critic called it “one of Mr. Gehry’s most gentle and self-possessed designs.” Gehry became known for his work on music venues. The Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles was designed before the Bilbao museum but was completed in 2003, to great acclaim. The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park was completed in 2004. Gehry also built a performing arts centre (1997–2003) for Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and designed the New World Center (completed 2011) for the New World Symphony orchestral academy in Miami Beach, Florida. As the 21st century continued, Gehry continued to receive numerous large-scale commissions.

THE COLLEC-

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE COLLECTION

JORGE OTEIZA

Jorge Oteiza Study for the Emptying Sphere 1958 Forged steel 50 x 49 x 39 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

These ideas of experimentation and spirituality, inspired by his reappraisal of works by masters such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, put into practice the process of emptying simple geometric forms such as the cylinder, the sphere, and the cube. He based this work on a range of attempts carried out on small models ordered in groups posing the same set of problems; these he referred to as “experimental families” or series.

Jorge Oteiza was born in 1908, in Orio, Spain. Returning to Spain’s Basque region in 1947 from a long sojourn in South America, he assimilated the impact of sculptor Henry Moore’s work and developed what he called his intención experimental (experimental purpose). This work arose out of his notion that all artistic practice surges from a void that eventually reaches a nothing that is everything. Inspired by his reappraisal of works by modernists such as Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian, Oteiza’s ideas of experimentation and spirituality put into practice the process of emptying simple geometric forms such as the cylinder, sphere, and cube. In 1958, Oteiza began working on his highly geometric, matter-free spatial signs, considered by many to be proto-Minimalist sculptures. The sculptor interpreted the void within these works as a point of arrival and the sign that one process has concluded and another is beginning. Empty Box with Large Opening (Caja vacía con gran apertura, 1958), for instance, belongs to the last great series known as Empty Boxes (Cajas vacías, 1957–58) and represents a remarkably subtle box, where space and form flow much more openly than they do in other components of the same series. In 1959, after years of artistic activity, Oteiza concluded that he had taken his line of experimentation as far as it would go and elected to concentrate on cultural, political, and educational activism in the Basque country. In 1957, Oteiza was awarded the Grand Prize for sculpture at the São Paulo Biennial; in 1985 he won the Gold Medal for Fine Arts (Medalla de oro al merito en las bellas artes), awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture; and in 1996 he received the Pevsner Prize, Paris. His work has been installed in numerous international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennial (1976, 1988) and Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne? (1986) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 1960, Galería Neblí, Madrid, hosted his final exhibition, issuing a catalogue that explained his reasons for abandoning sculpture. Oteiza died on April 9, 2003, in San Sebastian, Spain. In 1959, after years of artistic activity, Jorge Oteiza concluded that he had taken his fine of experimentation as far as it would go and gave up sculpture to concentrate on cultural, political, and educational activism in the Basque country. Back in the Basque country in 1947

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE COLLECTION

from a long sojourn in South America, he assimilated the impact of Henry Moore’s work before beginning to develop what he called his “Experimental Purpose.” This work arose out of a series of conceptual considerations and from a particular way of working on sculpture-related issues: his notion that all artistic practice surges from a void that is nothing yet eventually reaches a Nothing that is Everything . So moments when expressive capacity and the amount of material increase, when the role of the spectator is purely receptive, will be followed by others in which the important thing is the fading out of expression, when the material is de-occupied and space takes on a predominant role, with the formerly passive spectator activated before the void of the sculpture. These ideas of experimentation and spirituality, inspired by his reappraisal of works by masters such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, put into practice the process of emptying simple geometric forms such as the cylinder, the sphere, and the cube. He based this work on a range of attempts carried out on small models ordered in groups posing the same set of problems; these he referred to as “experimental families” or series. Only the most representative or intense of these models were eventually transferred to the definitive material state, always on a modest scale. At around that time, as part of his Vacating of the Sphere series, he also produced Hillargia, 1957, Empty Construction with Five Curved Malevich Units (Construcción vacía con cinco unidades Malevich curvas), 1957, and Study for the Emptying of the Sphere (Ensayo de desocupación de la esfera), 1958. The first work makes good use of a study of motion fromz a structural viewpoint, while at the same time figuratively referring to the phases of the moon. The second is a close relation of one of Oteiza’s essential works, Homage to Malevich (Homenaje a Malevich). In these works, owing to the combined use of welding techniques and forging, the sculpture seems to act as both spatial cause and effect: while space is defined in its concavities, by putting pressure on the forms space actually seems to be the ultimate cause of the concavities themselves. 1958’s Study for the Emptying of the Sphere is clearly approaching the experimental conclusion of the series. In 1958, Oteiza began working on his “conclusive works”, which were highly geometric, matter-free spatial signs, later considered to be examples of proto-Minimalist sculptures. The sculptor interprets the void of which these works consist as a point of arrival and the sign that one process has concluded and another is beginning. Metaphysical Box by Conjunction of Two Trihedrons. Homage to Leonardo (Caja metafísica por conjunción de dos triedos. Homenaje a Leonardo), 1958, forms part the conclusive works created at the pinnacle of Jorge Oteiza’s fruitful artistic career. These sculptures, the experimental nucleus of his work, are the most important and have had the greatest impact on the development of modern sculpture. Although Oteiza experimented with different types of geometric shapes, the cube provided the artist with the solution to his personal search as a sculptor: to define an empty space which could be filled with spiritual energy. This sculpture is an excellent example of the artist’s metaphysical boxes. A dark and mysterious space is created in the interior, and when the boxes were placed on a stone or marble base the sensation the artist was after became even clearer: the feeling of a sacred space. Empty Box with Large Opening (Caja vacía con gran apertura), also from 1958, belongs to the last great series known as Empty Boxes (Cajas Vacías), and represents a remarkably subtle box, where space and form flow much more than they do in other components of the same series.

In later years, Frank Gehry, the architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim, oddly called Oteiza “the Picasso of sculpture”. The Picasso of sculpture has only ever been Pablo Picasso: the only point of contact between the work of the two men was that, possibly, the abstract sculpture of Oteiza could not have existed without the precedent of cubism.

Jorge Oteiza

Metaphysical Box

by Conjuction of Two Trihedrons. Homage to Leonardo (Caja metafísica por conjunción de dos triedros. Homenaje a Leonardo), 1958 Steel 28.5 x 25 x 26.5 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

While he was deeply involved in abstract research in the early 1950s, Oteiza accepted the job of producing the statues for the new Basilica in Arantzazu. This project gave Oteiza the opportunity to link this notion of a new aesthetic spirituality rooted in modern art with popular religious feeling, and to do this he abandoned one form of strictly abstract expression for another, that even though it included the spatial innovations of the trans-statue, would be able to reach out to a group for whom figurative references were vital. Despite this, the statues that Oteiza began in 1952, were banned by the church in 1954, and couldn’t be finished until 1969.

https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/

GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE COLLECTION

ROTHKO MARK

1957

Oil on canvas 299.5 x 442.5 cm Tate

One of the central figures of the New York School, Mark Rothko is best known for his mature idiom, first seen in his paintings of 1949—large-scale compositions comprising stacked, hovering rectangular fields of luminous color. Rothko emphatically rejected the reading of his work in merely formal, aesthetic terms, insisting that he was “not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else.” Rather, he used abstract means to express “basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” earnestly striving to create an art of awe-inspiring intensity for a secular world. Those viewers who broke down and wept before his paintings, he stated, had “the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Untitled was featured prominently in a 1954 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the first solo exhibition of Rothko’s mature work in a major American museum. The show comprised eight paintings carefully arranged in a relatively compact and low-ceilinged gallery. Hanging freely from the ceiling near the entrance, Untitled established the prevailing tone, receiving visitors with an inescapable frontality that allowed them no refuge in distance.2 Scale was an enormously important factor for Rothko: as he explained in a 1951 symposium, he painted on such a large scale not in order to produce something “grandious and pompous,” but rather “precisely because I want to be intimate Mark Rothko and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself Untitled, 1952–53 outside your experience, to look upon an experience as Oil on canvas a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However 299.5 x 442.5 cm you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t some- Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa thing you command.” In the later 1950s and the 1960s Rothko was commissioned to produce several mural ensembles for specific interior spaces: the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building, New York (a selection of which was ultimately donated to the Tate in London as a “Rothko Room”), Harvard University’s Holyoke Center, and what became known as the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Although Untitled is an autonomous work and was not conceived with a particular site in mind, this monumental piece—one of only two paintings from this period on such an immense scale—might be considered among the first of Rothko’s true murals. The painting is somewhat unusual in its horizontality, as Rothko tended to prefer a vertical format. Later in his career, several isolated horizontal-format works would appear, but their lateral expansion was not as extreme. Here, experienced at relatively close proximity as the artist intended, the extended format expands beyond the observer’s lateral field of vision, so that the painting seems to open itself up and transcend its limits.

Rothko maintained the social revolutionary ideas of his youth throughout his life. In particular he supported artists' total freedom of expression, which he felt was compromised by the market. This belief often put him at odds with the art world establishment, leading him to publicly respond to critics, and occasionally refuse commissions, sales and exhibitions.

Mark Rothko Light Red Over Black

Mark Rothko Rust and Blue

1953 Oil on canvas 299.5 x 442.5 cm Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

In the autumn of 1923, Rothko found work in New York's garment district. While visiting a friend at the Art Students League of New York, he saw students sketching a model. According to Rothko, this was the beginning of his life as an artist. He later enrolled in the Parsons The New School for Design, where one of his instructors was the artist and class monitor Arshile Gorky. This was probably his first encounter with a member of the American avant-garde. However, the two men never became close, due to Gorky's dominating nature. Rothko referred to Gorky's leadership in the class as "overcharged with supervision".

Orange and Yellow reflects Mark Rothko’s mature style, in which two or three rectangles are set within a background that surrounds them all, but divides them gently from one another. The edges of the rectangles are never distinct, avoiding an optical break and allowing viewers’ eyes to move quietly from other area to another in a contemplative way. Rothko did not want us to think about him when looking at his paintings, so he tried to remove all evidence of the creation process. To accomplish this, he applied numerous layers of thin paint with a brush or rag to unprepared canvas, which absorbed the colors into its fabric. The many thin washes help to give his paintings a lightness and brightness, as if they glow from within.

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Mark Rothko Orange and yellow

1956 Oil on canvas 299.5 x 442.5 cm Private collection

Y V E KLEIN

1960 Dry pigment and synthetic resin on paper mounted on canvas 287.8 x 430 x 4 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Yves Klein Large Blue Anthropometry

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Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.

L ar the ge Blu his apoth e Ant h B pai attle eosis o ropo ntin s (B f K me t As lein ry a g ta N and an R an ass illes), ’s “liv is one i to s index osenth ociati a term ng bru of a g ro u on how ical sh th a its l , in t l has o furth at evo ” tech p of f e iter he s b o n ens serve r sugg kes th ique. ur wo al t rac e es.” e that d, Kle ested art-h Klein rks th a i c the i b y “a n’s An y the storic alled t repr th es al ppe thr la ar b opo rge s genre ese w ent or oth met cale o of t f hist ks to i ries o llus h a trat re bo e wor ry t k e a sub h icon s. jec i t an c d

Yves Klein 1959 © Archives Guggenheim Familly, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2018 Photo: Jean-Louis Losi

Although Klein had painted monochromes as early as 1949, and held the first private exhibition of this work in 1950, his first public showing was the publication of the artist's book Yves Peintures in November 1954. Parodying a traditional catalogue raisonné, the book featured a series of intense monochromes linked to various cities he had lived in during the previous years. Yves Peintures anticipated his first two shows of oil paintings, at the Club des Solitaires, Paris, October 1955 and Yves: Proposition monochromes at Gallery Colette Allendy, February 1956. Public responses to these shows, which displayed orange, yellow, red, pink and blue monochromes, deeply disappointed Klein, as people went from painting to painting, linking them together as a sort of mosaic.

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In his brief, seven-year artistic career—cut short by his premature death in 1962—Yves Klein created a heterogeneous and critically complex body of work that anticipated much of the art of the succeeding decades, from Conceptual art to performance art. Although Klein began by creating monochrome canvases in the mid-1950s, he abandoned the specificity of the pictorial in favor of a conception of art as independent of any particular medium or technique. A postmodern artist ahead of his time, Klein conceived of art that was invisible, composed the Monotone Silence Symphony (Symphonie Monoton Silence), imagined an “air architecture,” presented his actions in public, turned to photography, and commissioned “documentation” recording his more ephemeral works. His program focused less on the particular skill of the artist and more on the artist’s ability to put forth a mythic presence generating works in every genre: “A painter has to create only one masterpiece—himself, constantly—and to become a kind of atomic battery, a kind of generator of constant radiation that impregnates the atmosphere with all of his pictorial presence, which remains fixed in space after he passes through it.”

Anxious to break with all forms of expressionism, Klein had, practically from the outset of his career, “rejected the brush,” which he felt was “too psychological,” in favor of rollers, which were more “anonymous” and enabled him to “create a ‘distance’ between and canvases. Between 1958 and 1960 he perfected a technique that allowed him to expand on this idea: he used nude models as “living brushes” (pinceaux vivants) that created marks and impressions under his supervision. The Anthropometries, as they would be branded by Klein’s friend, the critic Pierre Restany, maintained Klein’s insistent separation between the work and his own body, and also allowed him to revive the nude without resorting to traditional means of representation. Klein presented a demonstration of the technique at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain in Paris on March 9, 1960, attended by approximately one hundred guests. As musicians played Klein’s Monotone Silence Symphony, the tuxedo-clad artist directed the actions of three nude models, who spread paint on their torsos and thighs and pressed or dragged their bodies on sheets of white paper. In addition to one “corporeal monochrome,” the resulting paintings comprised both simple static impressions and dynamic traces of bodies in motion. Large Blue Anthropometry is one of a group of four works that represent the apotheosis of Klein’s “living brush” technique. Klein called these works his Battles (Batailles), a term that evokes the art-historical genre of history painting—an association further suggested by the large scale of the works. As Nan Rosenthal has observed, Klein’s Anthropometries are both iconic and indexical, in the sense that they “appear both to illustrate a subject and to show its literal traces.” Nevertheless, some of the resulting traces are more abstract than others; in Large Blue Anthropometry , the specific corporeal forms of the figures have become largely illegible, and their movements across the paper register more as explosive bursts, splatters, and smears of paint, as though to parody European Art Informel or American Abstract Expressionist painting.

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Richard Serra

RICHARD

SERRA

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Richard Serra was born on November 2, 1938, in San Francisco as the second of three sons. His father, Tony, was a Spanish native of Mallorca who worked as a candy factory foreman. His mother, Gladys Feinberg, was a Los Angeles-born Russian Jewish immigrant from Odessa. He went on to study English literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957 before transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating with a B.A. in 1961. While at Santa Barbara, he studied art with Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun. On the West Coast, he helped support himself by working in steel mills, which was to have a strong influence on his later work. Serra discussed his early life and influences in an interview in 1993. He described the San Francisco shipyard where his father worked as a pipe-fitter as another important influence to his work, saying of his early memory: “All the raw material that I needed is contained in the reserve of this memory which has become a reoccurring dream.”

Serra studied painting in the M.F.A. program at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture between 1961 and 1964. Fellow Yale Art and Architecture alumni of the 1960s include the painters, photographers, and sculptors Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Gary Hudson and Robert Mangold. He claims to have taken most of his inspiration from the artists who taught there, most notably Philip Guston and the experimental composer Morton Feldman, as well as designer Josef Albers. With Al- Serra studied painting in the M.F.A. program at the Yale bers, he worked on University School of Art and Architecture between 1961 his book Interaction and 1964. Fellow Yale Art and Architecture alumni of the of Color (1963). He 1960s include the painters, photographers, and sculptors continued his train- Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Gary Huding abroad, spending son and Robert Mangold. He claims to have taken most a year each in Flor- of his inspiration from the artists who taught there, most ence and Paris. In notably Philip Guston and the experimental composer 1964, he was awarded Morton Feldman, as well as designer Josef Albers. With a Fulbright Scholar- Albers, he worked on his book Interaction of Color (1963). ship for Rome, where He continued his training abroad, spending a year each he lived and worked in Florence and Paris. with his first wife, sculptor Nancy Graves. Since then, he has lived in New York, where he first used rubber in 1966 and began applying his characteristic work material lead in 1968. In

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Since 1983, Gagosian has presented more than twenty-five major exhibitions of Serra’s work in the U.S. and Europe, including “Intersection II” (Gagosian New York, 1993); “Switch,” (Gagosian New York, 1999); “Wake Blindspot Catwalk Vice-Versa,” (Gagosian New York, 2003); “Junction/Cycle,” (Gagosian New York, 2011); “Drawings,” (Gagosian Paris, 2011–12); “Double Rifts,” (Gagosian Beverly Hills, 2013); “New Sculpture,” (Gagosian New York, 2013–14); “Black door pipeline, ramble, dead load, London Cross,” and “Drawing,” (Gagosian London, 2014–15); “Ramble Drawings,” (Gagosian New York, 2015); and “Ramble Drawings,” (Gagosian Paris, 2016). Serra has participated in Documenta in 1972, 1977, 1982, and 1987; and in the Biennale di Venezia in 1980, 1984, 2001, and 2013. In 2015, Serra was awarded Les Insignes de Chevalier de l’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur, France. In September 2018, Serra will accept the J. Paul Getty Medal, which honors extraordinary contributions to the practice, understanding, and support of the arts.

In 1966, Serra made his first sculptures out of nontraditional materials such as fiberglass and rubber.[13] Serra's earliest work was abstract and process-based made from molten lead hurled in large splashes against the wall of a studio or exhibition space. In 1967 and 1968 he compiled a list of infinitives, titled "Verb List," that served as catalysts for subsequent work: "to hurl" suggested the hurling of molten lead into crevices between wall and floor; "to roll" led to the rolling of the material into dense, metal logs.

For documenta VI (1977), Serra designed Terminal, four 41-foot-tall trapezoids that form a tower, situated in front of the main exhibition venue. After long negotiations, accompanied by violent protests, Terminal was purchased by the city of Bochum and finally installed at the city’s train station in 1979.[26] Carnegie (1984–85), a 39-foothigh vertical shaft outside the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, received high praise.[5] Similar sculptures, like Fulcrum (1987), Axis (1989), and Torque (1992), were later installed in London’s Broadgate, at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, and at Saarland University, respectively. Initially located in the French town of Puteaux, Slat (1985) consists of five steel plates - four trapezoidal and one rectangular - each one roughly 12 feet wide and 40 feet tall, that lean on one another to form a tall, angular tepee. Already in 1989 vandalism and graffiti prompted that town’s mayor to remove it, and only in December 2008, after almost 20 years in storage, Slat was re-anchored in La Défense. Because of its weight, officials chose to ground it in a traffic island behind the Grande Arche. Richard Serra’s Tilted Spheres in Terminal 1 Pier F at Toronto’s YYZ airport. In 1981, Serra installed Tilted Arc, a gently curved, 3.5 meter high arc of rusting mild steel in the Federal Plaza in New York City. There was controversy over the installation from day one, largely from

altered experience of space. In particular, he has explored the effects of torqued forms in a series of single and double-torqued ellipses. He was invited to create a number of artworks in France: Philibert et Marguerite in the cloister of the Musée de Brou at Bourg-en-Bresse (1985); Threats of Hell (1990) at the CAPC (Centre d’arts plastiques contemporains de Bordeaux) in Bordeaux; Octagon for Saint Eloi (1991) in the village of Chagny in Burgundy; and Elevations for L’Allée de la Mormaire in Grosrouvre (1993). Alongside those works, Serra designed a series of forged pieces including Two Forged Rounds for Buster Keaton (1991); Snake Eyes and Boxcars (1990-1993), six pairs of forged hyper-dense Cor-Ten steel blocks; Ali-Frazier (2001), two forged blocks of weatherproof steel; and Santa Fe Depot (2006). In 2000, he installed Charlie Brown, a 60-foot-tall sculpture in atrium of the new Gap Inc. headquarters in San Francisco. To encourage oxidation, or rust, sprinklers were initially directed toward the four German-made slabs of steel that make up the work (see External links). Working with spheroid and toroid sections for the first time, Betwixt the Torus and the Sphere (2001) and Union of the Torus and the Sphere (2001) introduced entirely new shapes into Serra’s sculptural vocabulary. Wake (2003) was installed at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, with its five pairs of locked toroid forms measuring 14 feet high, 48 feet long and six feet wide apiece. Each of these five closed volumes is composed of two toruses, with the profile of a solid, vertically flattened.

Richard Serra is one of the most significant artists of his generation. He has produced large-scale, site-specific sculptures for architectural, urban, and landscape settings spanning the globe, from Iceland to New Zealand. Serra’s first solo gallery exhibitions were held at Galleria La Salita, Rome, in 1966, and at the Leo Castelli Warehouse, New York, in 1969. His first solo museum exhibition was presented at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, in 1970.

New York, his circle of friends included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson. At one point, to fund his art, Serra started a furniture-removals business, Low-Rate Movers and employed Chuck Close, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, and others. Around 1970, Serra shifted his activities outdoors and became a pioneer of large-scale site-specific sculpture. Serra often constructs site-specific installations, frequently on a scale that dwarfs the observer. His site-specific works challenge viewers’ perception of their bodies in relation to interior spaces and landscapes, and his work often encourages movement in and around his sculptures. Most famous is the “Torqued Ellipse” series, which began in 1996 as single elliptical forms inspired by the soaring space of the early 17th century Baroque church San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Made of huge steel plates bent into circular sculptures with open tops, they rotate upward as they lean in or out. Serra usually begins a sculpture by making a small maquette (or model) from flat plates at an inch-to-foot ratio: a 40-foot piece will start as a 40-inch model. He often makes these models in lead as it is “very malleable and easy to rework continuously”; Torqued Ellipses, however, began as wooden models. He then consults a structural engineer, who specifies how the piece should be made to retain its balance and stability. The steel pieces are fabricated in Germany and installed by Long Island rigging company Budco Enterprises, with whom he has worked for most of his career. The weathering steel he uses takes about 8–10 years to develop its characteristic dark, even patina of rust. Once the surface is fully oxidized, the color will remain relatively stable over the piece’s life. Serra’s first larger commissions were mostly realized outside the United States. Shift (1970–72) consists of six walls of concrete zigzag across a grassy hillside in King City, Ontario. Spin Out (1972–73), a trio of steel plates facing one another, is situated on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. Schunnemunk Fork (1991), a work similar to that of his in the Netherlands can be found in Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York. Part of a series works involving round steelplates, Elevation Circles: In and Out (1972–77) was installed at Schlosspark Haus Weitmar in Bochum, Germany.

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THE MATTER OF TIME

The Matter of Time allows the viewer to perceive the evolution of the artist’s sculptural forms, from the relative simplicity of a double ellipse to the complexity of a spiral. The last two pieces of this sculpture are created from sections of toruses and spheres that produce different effects on the movement and perception of the viewer. Richard Serra has long been acclaimed for his challenging and innovative work. As an emerging artist in the early 1960s, Serra helped change the nature of artistic production. Along with the Minimalist artists of his generation, he turned to unconventional, industrial materials and accentuated the physical properties of his work. Freed from the traditional pedestal or base and introduced into the real space of the viewer, sculpture took on a new relationship to the spectator, whose experience of an object became crucial to its meaning. Viewers were encouraged to move around—and sometimes on, in, and through—the work and encounter it from multiple perspectives. Over the years Serra has expanded his spatial and temporal approach to sculpture and has focused primarily on large-scale, site-specific works that create dialogue with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting. Snake, a work made for the inauguration of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, consists of three enormous, serpentine ribbons of hot-rolled steel that are permanently installed in the museum’s largest gallery. The two tilted, snaking passages capture a rare sense of motion and instability. Snake is now joined by seven commissioned works-creating the installation entitled The Matter of Time—Serra’s most complete rumination on the physicality of space and the nature of sculpture. The Matter of Time enables the spectator to perceive the evolution of the artist’s sculpted forms, from his relatively simple double ellipse to the more complex spiral. The final two works in this evolution are built from sections of toruses and spheres to create environments with differing effects on the viewer’s movement and perception. Shifting in unexpected ways as viewers walk in and around them, these sculptures create a dizzying, unforgettable sensation of space in motion. The entirety of the room is part of the sculptural field: As with his other multipart sculptures, the artist purposefully organizes the works to move the viewer through them and their surrounding space. The layout of works in the gallery creates passages of space that are distinctly different—narrow and wide, compressed and elongated, modest and towering—and always unanticipated. There is also the progression of time. There is the chronological time it takes to walk through and view The Matter of Time, between the beginning and end of the visit. And there is the experiential time, the fragments of visual and physical memory that linger and recombine and replay.

The Matter of Time enables the spectator to perceive the evolution of the artist’s sculpted forms, from his relatively simple double ellipse to the more complex spiral. The final two works in this evolution are built from sections of toruses and spheres to create environments with differing effects on the viewer’s movement and perception. Shifting in unexpected ways as viewers walk in and around them, these sculptures create a dizzying, unforgettable sensation of space in motion. The entirety of the room is part of the sculptural field: As with his other multipart sculptures, the artist purposefully organizes the works to move the viewer through them and their surrounding space. The layout of works in the gallery creates passages of space that are distinctly different—narrow and wide, compressed and elongated, modest and towering—and always unanticipated. There is also the progression of time. There is the chronological time it takes to walk through and view The Matter of Time, between the beginning and end of the visit. And there is the experiential time, the fragments of visual and physical memory that linger and recombine.

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The Matter of Time is an installation comprising eight pieces of torqued ellipses made of weathering steel (COR-TEN steel), by the US sculptor Richard Serra. It incorporates a series of seven sculptures made of spot-welded sheets of steel that form 14-foot (4.3 m)-high curling walls positioned around the existing sculpture, Snake (Serpiente), that had been commissioned for the museum's opening in 1997. Commissioned by the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, it forms part of the permanent exhibition since 2005. Reviewing the work for The Guardian, art critic Robert Hughes, considered the work to be that of "the best sculptor alive".

The Matter of Time is an installation comprising eight pieces of torqued ellipses made of weathering steel, by the US sculptor Richard Serra. It incorporates a series of seven sculptures made of spot-welded sheets of steel that form 14-foot (4.3 m)-high curling walls positioned around the existing sculpture, Snake, that had been commissioned for the museum's opening in 1997. Commissioned by the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, it forms part of the permanent exhibition since 2005. Reviewing the work for The Guardian, art critic Robert Hughes, considered the work to be that of "the best sculptor alive..." going on to add that Serra was also "the only great one at work anywhere in the early 21st century". Made at the rolling mill at Siegen, Germany, and weighing in total 1034 tonnes, it is installed in the museum's main gallery, the 430-foot (130 m) 80-foot (24 m) Arcelor Gallery, named after its sponsor, but originally known as the Fish Gallery.

Richard Serra

The Matter of Time,

1994–2005

Richard Serra

The Matter of Time,

1994–2005

Eight sculptures Weathering Steel Dimensions variable Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

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Robert

RAUSCHENBERG Robert Rauschenberg Barge 1962â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1963 Oil and silkscreen ink on canvas 208 x 980.5 x 5.2 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Collezione Panza, Varese, through 2010); and Botanical Vaudeville at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (2011). A memorial exhibition of Rauschenberg’s photographs opened October 22, 2008, (on the occasion of what would have been his 83rd birthday) at the Guggenheim Museum. Further exhibitions include: Decades of Printmaking, Leslie Sacks Contemporary (2012); Robert Rauschenberg: Jammers, Gagosian Gallery, London (2013); Robert Rauschenberg: Hoarfrost Editions, Gemini G.E.L. (2014); Robert Rauschenberg: The Fulton Street Studio, 1953–54, Craig F. Starr Associates (2014); Collecting and Connecting, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (2014); A Visual Lexicon, Leo Castelli Gallery (2014); Robert Rauschenberg: Works on Metal, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (2014). Robert Rauschenberg, de Sarthe Gallery, Hong Kong (2016), Museum of Modern Art retrospective (2017), and Rauschenberg: The 1/4 Mile at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. On June 4, 2004 the Gallery of Fine Art at Florida SouthWestern State College was renamed the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, celebrating a long-time friendship with the artist. The gallery has been host to many of Rauschenberg’s exhibitions since 1980.

The Matter of Time (in Spanish: La materia del tiempo) is an installation comprising eight pieces of torqued ellipses made of weathering steel (COR-TEN steel), by the US sculptor Richard Serra. It incorporates a series of seven sculptures made of spot-welded sheets of steel that form 14-foot (4.3 m)-high curling walls positioned around the existing sculpture, Snake (Serpiente), that had been commissioned for the museum's opening in 1997. Commissioned by the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, it forms part of the permanent exhibition since 2005. Reviewing the work for The Guardian, art critic Robert Hughes, considered the work to be that of "the best sculptor alive..."[ 3] going on to add that Serra was also "the only great one at work anywhere in the early 21st century." Made at the rolling mill at Siegen, Germany, and weighing in total 1034 tonnes,it is installed in the museum's main gallery, the 430-foot (130 m) 80-foot (24 m) Arcelor Gallery, named after its sponsor, but originally known as the Fish Gallery

Robert Rauschenberg has been identified as a forerunner of virtually every postwar American art movement since Abstract Expressionism, though he remained fiercely independent of any particular affiliation throughout his long career. At the time that he began making art, in the late 1940s, his belief that "painting relates to both art and life" presented a direct challenge to the prevalent modernist aesthetic. He achieved particular prominence in the mid- to late 1950s with his Combines, works that brought together real-world artifacts and abstract painting, thus subverting the firm division between painting and sculpture. In 1962 Rauschenberg began using silkscreens to introduce existing images—from his own photographs to found images culled from popular media sources—into his paintings. During the preceding four years he had employed a direct-transfer technique to incorporate the contents of newspapers and magazines, including ads, images, maps, and comics, into his drawings; however, a visit to the studio of the then relatively unknown Andy Warhol in the summer of 1962 introduced him to the possibilities afforded by commercially available silkscreens. Whereas the transfer technique required that the transferred image be the same size as the original, silkscreening allowed Rauschenberg to transcribe images at a much greater scale, as well as to easily reuse them in varied contexts. Barge, a single canvas measuring almost 10 meters in width, is the largest of Rauschenberg's Silkscreened Paintings. This monumental work in black, white, and gray incorporates many of the themes and images to which he returned repeatedly in his 79 Silkscreened Paintings, including the urban environment (water towers on a rooftop), space exploration and flight (a satellite, a rocket, radar dishes, mosquitoes, and birds), modes of transportation (a truck), and examples from art history (Diego Velázquez's The Toilet of Venus ["The Rokeby Venus"], 1647–51). Rauschenberg's use of recognizable popular imagery and a commercial technique led critics to identify him with other artists working in this idiom, such as Warhol. In comparison with the often coolly executed paintings of the Pop artists, however, Rauschenberg's works are emphatically gestural and handmade. In paintings such as Barge, an expressive quality results from the hand-painted areas, the collagelike overlays of photographic images, and the intentional slippages and irregularities introduced by the artist in the screening process. In 1951 Rauschenberg had his first one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery and in 1954 had a second one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery. In 1955, at the Charles Egan Gallery, Rauschenberg showed Bed (1955), one of his first and certainly most famous Combines. Rauschenberg had his first career retrospective, organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1963, and in 1964 he was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). After that time, he enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. A retrospective organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), Washington, D.C., traveled throughout the United States in 1976 and 1978. A retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1997), traveled to Houston, Cologne, and Bilbao (through 1999). Recent exhibitions were presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2005; traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, through 2007); at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2009; traveled to the Tinguely Museum, Basel, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Villa

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Antonio Saura (September 22, 1930 – July 22, 1998) was a Spanish artist and writer, one of the major post-war painters to emerge in Spain in the fifties whose work has marked several generations of artists and whose critical voice is often remembered. He began painting and writing in 1947 in Madrid while suffering from tuberculosis, having already been confined to his bed for five years. In his beginnings he created numerous drawings and paintings with a dreamlike surrealist character that most often represented imaginary landscapes, employing a flat smooth treatment that offers a rich palette of colors. He claimed Hans Arp and Yves Tanguy as his artistic influences. He stayed in Paris in 1952 and in 1954–1955 during which he met Benjamin Péret and associated with the Surrealists, although he soon parted with the group, joining instead the company of his friend the painter Simon Hantaï. Using the technique of scraping, he adopted a gestural style and created an abstract type of painting, still very colorful with an organic, aleatory design. The first appearances in his work of forms that will soon become archetypes of the female body or the human figure occur in the mid1950s. Starting in 1956 Saura tackled the register of what will prove to be his greatest works: women, nudes, self-portraits, shrouds and crucifixions, which he painted on both canvas and paper. In 1957 in Madrid he founded the El Paso Group and served as its director until it broke up in 1960. During this period Saura met Michel Tapié. During the 1950s he had his first solo exhibition at the Rodolphe Stadler Gallery in Paris, where he regularly exhibited throughout his life. Stadler introduced him to Otto van de Loo in Munich and Pierre Matisse in New York City, both of whom exhibited his work and represented him, and eventually his paintings were collected by major museums. Limiting his palette to blacks, grays and browns, Saura asserted a personal style that was independent of the movements and trends of his generation. His work followed in the tradition of Velasquez and Goya. Starting in 1959 he began creating a prolific body of works in print, illustrating numerous books including Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nöstlinger’s adaptation of Pinocchio, Kafka’s Tagebücher, Quevedo’s Three

ANTONIO SAURA

26 Visions, and many others. In 1960 Saura began creating sculptures made of welded metal elements which represented the human figure, characters and crucifixions. In 1967 he settled permanently in Paris, and joined the opposition to the Franco dictatorship. In France he participated in numerous debates and controversies in the fields of politics, aesthetics and artistic creation. He also broadened his thematic and pictorial register. Along with his Femmefauteuil. He also worked on the series “Imaginary Portraits”,and Goya’s Dog and Imaginary Portraits of Goya begin to take shape. In 1971 he temporarily abandoned painting on canvas to devote himself to writing, drawing and painting on paper. In 1977 he began publishing his writings, and he created several stage designs for the theatre, ballet and opera, thanks to the collaboration with his brother, the film director Carlos Saura. Antonio Saura was struck at an early age both aesthetically and emotionally by the work of Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya, two of Spain’s greatest masters. But as a painter setting out in the repressive political and cultural climate of early-1950s Spain, he sensed that this grand tradition had to be wrested from the grasp of Francoist culture, which was setting it up in opposition to contemporary European Art Informel. Paradoxically, it was by subjecting high Spanish tradition to the most radical new modes of painting that Saura managed to free it and give it a powerful new life: he took the gestural painting associated with Art Informel and American Action painting and applied it to the figure and to traditional Spanish themes. After a short period in Paris in the 1950s, during which he briefly associated with the Surrealists, Saura returned to Spain and founded the group El Paso (1957-60), which in its work and in its eponymous publication promoted the advanced forms of painting being developed elsewhere in Europe and the United States. (Saura was one of the first to champion Jackson Pollock in Spain.) During this period Saura limited his palette to white and black and began the thematic series that would occupy him for much of the rest of his career. “Crucifixions,” “Women,” “Nudes,” .

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1959- 1963 Oil on canvas 148,5 x 171 x 4 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Antonio Saura Crucifixion

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s Crucifixion (Crucifixión) is one of the most striking of Saura’s many paintings on the theme, which he began in 1957 and continued to work on until his death in 1997. This frenetically scrawled painting epitomizes what gave Saura’s work a unique significance in Spain at the time: the bold and forceful way in which he took the great model created by Velázquez—he was responding in particular to Velázquez’s famous Crucifixion (ca. 1632) in the Museo Nacional del Prado—and, by giving it a modern treatment, opened it up to critical debate. The crucifixion ceases to be a Christian or a cultural emblem and becomes instead an image of nothing less than the tragedy of the human condition itself. Indeed, Saura explained that there was no religious motive behind his embrace of this traditional biblical subject. The painting is an artistic and political response to the world that confronted Saura—a “blast of protest,” as he termed it, that turns the traditional “Man of Sorrows” into a secular figure.

He began painting and writing in 1947 in Madrid while suffering from tuberculosis, having already been confined to his bed for five years. In his beginnings he created numerous drawings and paintings with a dreamlike surrealist character that most often represented imaginary landscapes, employing a flat smooth treatment that offers a rich palette of colors. He claimed Hans Arp and Yves Tanguy as his artistic influences. He stayed in Paris in 1952 and in 1954–1955 during which he met Benjamin Péret and associated with the Surrealists, although he soon parted with the group, joining instead the company of his friend the painter Simon Hantaï. Using the technique of scraping, he adopted a gestural style and created an abstract type of painting, still very colorful with an organic, aleatory design.

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MOTHERWELL

ROBERT

In 1958–59, Motherwell was included in "The New American Painting" exhibition, initiated by the Museum of Modern Art, which traveled across Europe. That year he traveled in Spain and France, where he started his Iberia series. During the 1960s, Motherwell exhibited widely in both America and Europe and in 1965 he was given a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art; this show subsequently traveled to Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Essen, and Turin.[In 1962, Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler spent the summer at the artists’ colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the coastline inspired the Beside the Sea series of 64 paintings, the oil paint splashed with full force imitating the sea crashing on the shore in front of his studio. The 1963 untitled oil on canvas painting in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art exemplifies this stage in the artist’s career

Robert Motherwell was among the youngest of the disparate group of American abstract artists that emerged during the 1940s and came to be known as the New York School or the School of New York—a term he was responsible for inventing. Unlike fellow Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Motherwell spent his formative years acquiring a university background, studying philosophy—above all aesthetics—before shifting to art history. Through Meyer Schapiro, a distinguished art historian at Columbia University, he was introduced to a number of the European artists who had taken refuge in New York with the outbreak of World War II, particularly Matta and other Surrealists, whose automatist methods had a major influence on him. By 1941 Motherwell had decided to become a full-time artist, and he rapidly gained attention for his collages and abstract paintings in the early to mid-1940s, showing at Peggy Guggenheim's museum/gallery Art of This Century and, by 1946, at the Museum of Modern Art. Motherwell's position in American art Unlike fellow Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock history rests not only on and Mark Rothko, Motherwell spent his formative years acquir- his oeuvre as a painter, but also on his prodigious acing a university background, studying philosophy—above all aes- complishments as a public thetics—before shifting to art history. Through Meyer Schapiro, intellectual: he served as a distinguished art historian at Columbia University, he was intro- an important spokesperduced to a number of the European artists who had taken refuge son for the group of New in New York with the outbreak of World War II, particularly Mat- York artists around him and left behind an extensive ta and other Surrealists, whose automatist methods had a major body of writings. influence on him. Motherwell was only 21 years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, but its atrocities made an indelible impression on him, and beginning in 1948 he devoted what is perhaps his best-known series, Elegies to the Spanish Republic, to the theme. The Elegies were not Motherwell's only references to Spain. Among the many such works was the 1958 series Iberia, born with the artist's first visit to Spain that year. Motherwell was well aware of the depredations wrought by the Franco regime even before his visit, but undoubtedly his powers of observation enabled him to feel deeply the gloomy situation that prevailed in the country at that time. The grimness is registered as a black mood that threatens to obliterate everything. In the large Iberia in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao collection—one of the most severe works in the series—the surface darkness is relieved only by a very small opening at the lower left. Motherwell worked this surface extensively; the weight of its darkness is produced by the many brushstrokes that coalesce and separate and even suggest a kind of infernal chaos. From a distance, the suffocating atmosphere seems impenetrable. Motherwell's daring approach to a highly charged emotional theme is epitomized in this major work.

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Robert Motherwell Iberia

1977 Acrylic and charcoal on ct Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Robert Motherwell Phoenician Red Studio

1958 Oil on canvas 182.2 x 233.3 x 2.6 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

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Willem de Kooning Villa Borghese 1960 Oil on canvas 206.5 x 181.4 x 8.2 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

WILLEM DE KOONING

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Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on April 24, 1904. His parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced in 1907, and de Kooning lived first with his father and then with his mother. He left school in 1916 and became an apprentice in a firm of commercial artists. Until 1924 he attended evening classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen (the academy of fine arts and applied sciences of Rotterdam), now the Willem de Kooning Academie.In 1926 de Kooning travelled to the United States as a stowaway on the Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina, and on August 15 landed at Newport News, Virginia. He stayed at the Dutch Seamen's Home in Hoboken, New Jersey, and found work as a house-painter. In 1927 he moved to Manhattan, where he had a studio on West Forty-fourth Street. He supported himself with jobs in carpentry, house-painting and commercial art. De Kooning began painting in his free time and in 1928 he joined the art colony at Woodstock, New York. He also began to meet some of the modernist artists active in Manhattan. Among them were the American Stuart Davis, the Armenian Arshile Gorky and the Russian John Graham, whom de Kooning collectively called the "Three Musketeers". Gorky, who de Kooning first met at the home of Misha Reznikoff, became a close friend and, for at least ten years, an important influence. Balcomb Greene said that "de Kooning virtually worshipped Gorky"; according to Aristodimos Kaldis, "Gorky was de Kooning's master". De Kooning's drawing Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother, from about 1938, may show him with Gorky; the pose of the figures is that of a photograph of Gorky with Peter Busa in about 1936. De Kooning joined the Artists Union in 1934, and in 1935 was employed in the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, for which he designed a number of murals including some for the Williamsburg Federal Housing Project in Brooklyn. None of them were executed, but a sketch for one was included in New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art, his first group show. Starting in 1937, when De Kooning had to leave the Federal Art Project because he did not have American citizenship, he began to work full-time as an artist, earning income from commissions and by giv-

ing lessons. That year de Kooning was assigned to a portion of the mural Medicine for the Hall of Pharmacy at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, which drew the attention of critics, the images themselves so completely new and distinct from the era of American realism. De Kooning met his wife, Elaine Fried, at the American Artists School in New York. She was 14 years his junior. Thus was to begin a lifelong partnership affected by alcoholism, lack of money, love affairs, quarrels and separations. They were married on December 9, 1943. De Kooning worked on his first series of portrait paintings: standing or sedentary men like Two Men Standing, Man, and Seated Figure (Classic Male), even combining with self-portraits as with Portrait with Imaginary Brother (1938–39). At this time, de Kooning's work borrowed strongly from Gorky's surrealist imagery and was influenced by Picasso. This only changed when de Kooning met the younger painter Franz Kline, who was also working with the figurative style of American realism and had been drawn to monochrome. Kline died young and he was one of de Kooning's closest artist friends. Kline's influence is evident in de Kooning's calligraphic black images of this period. In the late 1950s, de Kooning's work shifted away from the figurative work of the women (though he would return to that subject matter on occasion) and began to display an interest in more abstract, less representational imagery. He became a US citizen on 13 March 1962, and in the following year moved from Broadway to a small house in East Hampton, which Elaine's brother Peter Fried had sold to him two years before. He built a studio near by, and lived in the house to the end of his life. It was revealed toward the end of his life that de Kooning had begun to lose his memory in the late 1980s and had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for some time. This revelation has initiated considerable debate among scholars and critics about how responsible de Kooning was for the creation of his late work. vSuccumbing to the progress of his disease, William de Kooning painted his final works in 1991. He died in 1997 at the age of 92 and was cremated. Although often cited as the originator of Action painting, an abstract, purely formal, and intuitive means of expression, Willem de Kooning most often worked from observable reality, primarily from figures and the landscape. From 1950 to 1955 de Kooning completed his famous Women series, integrating the human form with the agressive paint application, bold colors, and sweeping strokes of Abstract Expressionism. These female “portraits” provoked controversy not only for their

The artist was featured in a number of solo exhibitions from 1948 to 1966, many in New York but also nationally and internationally. Specifically, he had fourteen separate exhibitions and even had two exhibitions per annum in the years 1953, 1964, and 1965. He was featured at the Egan Gallery, the Sidney Janis Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Arts Club of Chicago, the Martha Jackson Gallery, the Workshop Center, the Paul Kantor Gallery, the Hames Goodman Gallery, the Allan Stone Gallery, and the Smith College Museum of Art. Most of the exhibitions lasted for 3 weeks to one month.

vulgar carnality and garish colors, but also because of their embrace of figural representation, a choice deemed regressive by many of de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, but one to which he returned repeatedly over the course of his career. In the latter half of the 1950s de Kooning turned to the landscape as the basis for a series of abstract compositions. At first these reflected the urban surroundings of his studio in downtown Manhattan: in a series of energetic, heavily worked paintings that the critic Thomas Hess termed “abstract urban landscapes” (1955–58), de Kooning conveyed the frenetic pace of city life without representing any identifiable forms or figures. Toward the end of the decade, as he began to spend more time working in East Hampton on Long Island—where he would ultimately move in 1963—the referent for his paintings became increasingly pastoral. This change in subject matter was accompanied by a corresponding formal shift, as the frenzied proliferation of forms and planes that had characterized the abstract urban landscapes yielded to compositions of relative restraint and clarity, with broad brushstrokes reminiscent of the paintings of de Kooning’s friend Franz Kline. One of the very few large-format paintings produced by de Kooning in 1960, Villa Borghese was based on the artist’s encounter not with New York or its environs but with Rome, where he spent roughly five months in 1959–60. The location is alluded to not only by the painting’s title, which refers to a large and well-known public park in the Italian capital, but also by its bright Mediterranean palette. The expansive areas of color, painted in wet-on-wet layers, suggest naturalistic correspondences—yellow sunlight, blue sky and water, and green grass and foliage.

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ANSELM KIEFER Anselm Kiefer (born 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah. In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. His works are characterised by an unflinching willingness to confront his culture's dark past, and unrealised potential, in works that are often done on a large, confrontational scale well suited to the subjects. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or historical places. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with the movements New Symbolism and Neo–Expressionism. Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1992. Since 2008, he has lived and worked primarily in Paris and in Alcácer do Sal, Portugal. Kiefer is best known for his paintings, which have grown increasingly large in scale with additions of lead, broken glass, and dried flowers or plants, resulting in encrusted surfaces and thick layers of impasto. By 1970, while studying informally under Joseph Beuys at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, his stylistic leanings resembled Georg Baselitz’s approach. He worked with glass, straw, wood and plant parts. The use of these materials meant that his art works became temporary and fragile, as Kiefer himself was well aware; he also wanted to showcase the materials in such a way that they were not disguised and could be represented in their natural form. The fragility of his work contrasts with the stark subject matter in his paintings. This use of familiar materials to express ideas was influenced by Beuys, who used fat and carpet felt in his works. It is also typical of the Neo-Expressionist style. Kiefer returned to the area of his birthplace in 1971. In the years that followed, he incorporated German mythology in particular in his work, and in the next decade Kiefer is best known for his paintings, which have grown increasingly large in scale with additions of lead, broken glass, and dried flowers or plants, resulting in encrusted surfaces and thick layers of impasto. By 1970, while studying informally under Joseph Beuys at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, his stylistic leanings resembled Georg Baselitz’s approach. He worked with glass, straw, wood and plant parts. The use of these

materials meant that his art works became temporary and fragile, as Kiefer himself was well aware; he also wanted to showcase the materials in such a way that they were not disguised and could be represented in their natural form. The fragility of his work contrasts with the stark subject matter in his paintings. This use of familiar materials to express ideas was influenced by Beuys, who used fat and carpet felt in his works. It is also typical of the Neo-Expressionist style. Kiefer returned to the area of his birthplace in 1971. In the years that followed, he incorporated German mythology in particular in his work, and in the next decade he studied the Kabbalah, as well as Qabalists like Robert Fludd. He went on extended journeys throughout Europe, the USA and the Middle East; the latter two journeys further influenced his work. Besides paintings, Kiefer created sculptures, watercolors, photographs, and woodcuts, using woodcuts in particular to create a repertoire of figures he could reuse repeatedly in all media over the next decades, lending his work its knotty thematic coherence. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Kiefer made numerous paintings, watercolors, woodcuts, and books on themes interpreted by Richard Wagner in his four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).[10] In the early 1980s, he created more than thirty paintings, painted photographs, and watercolors that refer in their titles and inscriptions to the Romanian Jewish writer Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”). A series of paintings which Kiefer executed between 1980 and 1983 depict looming stone edifices, referring to famous examples of National Socialist architecture, particularly buildings designed by Albert Speer and Wilhelm Kreis. The grand plaza in To the Unknown Painter (1983) specifically refers to the outdoor courtyard of Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer in 1938 in honor of the Unknown Soldier. In 1984–85, he made a series of works on paper incorporating manipulated black-and-white photographs of desolate landscapes with utility poles and power lines. Such works, like Heavy Cloud (1985), were an indirect response to the controversy in West Germany in the early 1980s about NATO’s stationing of tactical nuclear missiles on German soil and the placement of nuclear fuel processing facilities. By the mid-1980s, Kiefer’s themes widened from a focus on Germany’s role in civilisation to the fate of art and culture in general. His work became more sculptural and involved not only national identity and col-

lective memory, but also occult symbolism, theology and mysticism. The theme of all the work is the trauma experienced by entire societies, and the continual rebirth and renewal in life. During the 1980s his paintings became more physical, and featured unusual textures and materials. The range of his themes broadened to include references to ancient Hebrew and Egyptian history, as in the large painting Osiris and Isis (1985– 87). His paintings of the 1990s, in particular, explore the universal myths of existence and meaning rather than those of national identity. From 1995 to 2001, he produced a cycle of large paintings of the cosmos. He also started to turn to sculpture, although lead still remains his preferred medium. Since 2002, Kiefer has worked with concrete, creating the towers destined for the Pirelli warehouses in Milan, the series of tributes to Velimir Khlebnikov (paintings of the sea, with boats and an array of leaden objects, 2004-5), a return to the work of Paul Celan with a series of paintings featuring rune motifs (2004–6), and other sculptures. In 2006, Kiefer’s exhibition, Velimir Chlebnikov, was first shown in a small studio near Barjac, then moved to White Cube in London, then finishing in the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. The work consists of 30 large (2 x 3 meters) paintings, hanging in two banks of 15 on facing walls of an expressly constructed corrugated steel building that mimics the studio in which they were created. The work refers to the eccentric theories of the Russian futurist philosopher/poet Velimir Chlebnikov, who invented a “language of the future” called “Zaum”, and who postulated that cataclysmic sea battles shift the course of history once every 317 years. In his paintings, Kiefer’s toy-like battleships—misshapen, battered, rusted and hanging by twisted wires—are cast about by paint and plaster waves. The work’s recurrent color notes are black, white, gray, and rust; and their surfaces are rough and slathered with paint, plaster, mud and clay. In 2009 Kiefer mounted two exhibitions at the White Cube gallery in London. A series of forest diptychs and triptychs enclosed in glass vitrines, many filled with dense Moroccan thorns, was titled Karfunkelfee, a term from German Romanticism stemming from a poem by the post-war Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. In The Fertile Crescent, Kiefer presented a group of epic paintings inspired by a trip to India fifteen years earlier where he first encountered rural brick factories.

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Born in Germany just months before the final European battle of World War II, Anselm Kiefer grew up witnessing the results of modern warfare and the division of his homeland. He also experienced the rebuilding of a fragmented nation and its struggle for renewal. Kiefer dedicated himself to investigating the interwoven patterns of German mythology and history and the way they contributed to the rise of Fascism. He confronted these issues by violating aesthetic taboos and resurrecting sublimated icons. In one of his earliest projects, his 1969 Occupations (Besetzungen) series, Kiefer photographed himself mimicking the Nazi salute at various sites during a journey through Switzerland, France, and Italy. Subsequent paintings—immense landscapes and architectural interiors, often encrusted with sand and straw—invoke Germany's literary and political heritage; references abound to the Nibelung legends and Richard Wagner, Albert Speer's architecture, and Adolf Hitler. Beginning in the mid-1980s, and especially following his move to southern France in the early 1990s, Kiefer's iconography expanded to encompass more universal themes of civilization, culture, and spirituality, drawing upon such sources as the Kabbalah, alchemy, and ancient myth.

Anselm Kiefer Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Cedar Forest II (Gilgamesh und Enkidu im Zedernwald II)

1981 Oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on original photograph over cardboard 57 x 43 x 12 cm, 46 pages Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Kiefer's works are included in numerous public collections, including the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; the Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Albertina, Vienna. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns 20 of the artist’s rare watercolors. Notable private collectors include Eli Broad and Andrew J. Hall.

His works are characterised by an unflinching willingness to confront his culture's dark past, and unrealised potential, in works that are often done on a large, confrontational scale well suited to the subjects. It is also characteristic of his work to find signatures and/or names of people of historical importance, legendary figures or historical places. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with the movements New Symbolism and Neo–Expressionism. Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1992. Since 2008, he has lived and worked primarily in Paris[ 3] and in Alcácer do Sal, Portugal. In 2018, he was awarded Austrian citizenship.

Over the course of his career, Kiefer has depicted a number of real and mythological women, from Elizabeth of Austria to Brunhilde and Lilith. Berenice (1989) refers to the third-century BCE legend of Princess Berenice of Cyrene (present-day Libya). To ensure the safe return of her husband, Berenice sacrificed her long locks of hair and dedicated them to Venus; the locks subsequently disappeared from the temple where they had been laid and were said to have been transformed into a new constellation in the night sky. In this sculpture, Kiefer alludes to the myth by means of the partial wreckage of an airplane made of lead—a wing and a fuselage that emits a disturbing stream of human hair, suggesting spent fuel or toxic black fumes. Lead airplanes are a recurring motif in Kiefer's iconography. Lead has been a key material in the artist's work as a whole since the mid-1980s and is replete with a range of associations, both historical (stemming from its importance in alchemy) and personal. The disjunctive combination of the plane and the smokelike plume of hair lends this work a charged and unsettling quality.

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CY TWOMBLY

The Commodus paintings were first exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in March 1964, appearing before an American audience still in the thrall of Pop art and Minimalism. In this context, Twombly's messy and esoteric Commodus paintings seemed severely out of place and out of date. They attracted scathing reviews, which tellingly focused on Twombly's absence from the New York art scene, implying his abandonment of the United States and carrying the distinctly chauvinistic subtext that these paintings had been imported from "old Europe." Given their intrinsic reliance on narrative and sequence, it can hardly have helped the situation that the Commodus paintings were installed in a jumbled and confused order at Castelli Gallery, leaving their overall trajectory undecipherable. After this ignominious reception, the Commodus paintings, all unsold, were returned to exile in Italy. The controversy over the works and its aftermath had far-reaching repercussions on Twombly's painting and career, reverberating in his diminished output during the following two years and perhaps acting as a catalyst for his subsequent change in direction with

1963 Part III Oil, wax crayon, and pencil on canvas 204 x 134 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Cy Twombly Nine Discourses on Commodus,

During the period from 1962 to 1963 Twombly's paintings and their historical referents assumed a much more somber and anxious tone, as Twombly took up a panoply of historical assassinations as his point of departure-a shift perhaps reflective of the darkening mood of the early 1960s, which witnessed the Cuban Missile crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Produced in the winter of 1963, the painting cycle Nine Discourses on Commodus serves as a summation of this agonized and singular phase in his career. The cycle is based on the cruelty, insanity, and eventual murder of the Roman emperor Aurelius Commodus (161–192 CE). Conflict, opposition, and tension dominate the paintings' composition. Two whorls of matter hold the central focus of each piece, ranging in mood from serene, cloudlike structures to bleeding wounds and culminating in a fiery apotheosis in the final panel. Despite the paintings' intrinsic aesthetics of chaos and instability, a tightly controlled armature governs their composition. The gray background acts as a negative space to counterbalance the bloody whirls of paint and scabs of congealed impasto. Over this neutral backdrop, the line that runs along the middle of the paintings serves as a guiding mark to subdivide the composition. Many of the Commodus paintings also feature numerical sequences, often articulating the grids, graphs, and geometric axes that form the paintings' skeleton.

10.

In the mid-1950s, while working as a cryptographer in the US Army, Cy Twombly developed his signature style of graffiti-like scratches, scribbles, and frenetic lines that simultaneously referenced and subverted the then-dominant painterly mode of Abstract Expressionism. Following Twombly's permanent move to Rome in 1957, the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism was counterbalanced by and tethered to the weight of history. A series of works from the late 1950s and early 1960s chart Twombly's deepening fascination with Italian history, ancient mythology, and classical literature.

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the "blackboard" series. It was not until the summers of 1977 and 1978, while preparations were under way for a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, that Twombly would create another historical ensemble, Fifty Days at Iliam. When the Whitney retrospective opened in 1979, it was only the second time the Commodus paintings had been exhibited. It would take many years for the true impact of the Commodus paintings to become apparent. Today, distanced from the rivalries and debates of the 1960s, the strength of Twombly's painting is no longer obscured by such polemics. The Commodus paintings-previously seen as peripheral or aberrant by Twombly's contemporaries-now clearly occupy a unique and central position in the history of postwar painting. Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly Jr. April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns but chose to live in Italy after 1957. His paintings are predominantly large-scale, freely-scribbled, calligraphic and graffiti-like works on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. Many of his works are in the permanent collections of most of the museums of modern art around the world, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London and the New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He was also commissioned for the ceiling of a room of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Many of his later paintings and works on paper shifted toward “romantic symbolism”, and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poets as Stéphane Mallarmé, Rainer Maria Rilke and John Keats, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of inscriptions of the word “VIRGIL”. In a 1994 retrospective, curator Kirk Varnedoe described Twombly’s work as “influential among artists, discomfiting to many critics and truculently difficult not just for a broad public, but for sophisticated initiates of post-

war art as well.” After acquiring Twombly’s Three Studies from the Temeraire (1998–99), the Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales said, “Sometimes people need a little bit of help in recognising a great work of art that might be a bit unfamiliar.” Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel.

Cy Twombly Nine Discourses on Commodus,

1963 Oil, pencil, and wax crayon on canvas Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Cy Twombly's work can be understood as one vast engagement with cultural memory. His paintings, drawings and sculptures on mythological subjects have come to form a significant part of that memory. Usually drawing on the most familiar gods and heroes, he restricts himself to just a few, relatively well-known episodes, as narrated by poet-historians, given visible shape by artists and repeatedly reinterpreted in the literature and visual art of later centuries.....His special medium is writing. Starting out from purely graphic marks, he developed a kind of meta-script in which abbreviated signs, hatchings, loops, numbers and the simplest of pictographs spread throughout the picture plane in a process of incessant movement, repeatedly subverted by erasures. Eventually, this metamorphosed into script itself.

Erotic and corporeal symbols became more prominent, whilst a greater lyricism developed in his 'Blackboard paintings'. Bet ween 1967 and 1971, he produced a number of works on gray grounds, the 'grey paintings'. This series features terse, colorless scrawls, reminiscent of chalk on a blackboard, that form no ac tual words. Twombly made this work using an unusual technique: he sat on the shoulders of a friend, who shuttled back and forth along the length of the canvas, thus allowing the artist to create his f luid, continuous lines. In the summer and early autumn of 1969, Twombly made a series of fourteen paintings while staying at Bolsena, a lake to the north of Rome.

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CLYFFORD 11. STILL

Clyfford Still Untitled, 1964 Oil on canvas 273.5 x 236 x 3.5 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

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By 1947 Clyfford Still had begun working in the format that he would intensify and refine throughout the rest of his career—a large-scale color field crudely applied with palette knives. Still liberated color from illusionary design by allowing large, uninterrupted tonal areas to interlock on a flat plane. He dispensed with typically "beautiful" colors in favor of more disquieting hues to create unsettling impressions. Although Still scorned categorization, his expansive canvases dominated by jagged fields of color were influential among the Abstract Expressionist artists he was grouped with, in particular Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who shared his interest in the metaphysical sublime. These artists believed that a painting could convey meaning without reference to anything outside its inherent formal and material qualities. Rather than capture a realistic representation of the world in his abstract paintings, Still sought to create a transcendental experience that was purely visual and impossible to describe with words. Still espoused what he regarded as particularly American ideals, such as absolute freedom and individuality, which were manifested in his artistic career as well as in his works. Although he was given solo exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim’s museum/gallery Art of This Century in 1946 and Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947, he disdained the commercial aspects of the art world and became increasingly aloof from the burgeoning New York School, to the point of refusing to exhibit for a period between 1952 and 1958. Untitled dates from after Still left New York permanently for the isolation of a farm in rural Maryland in 1961. The work is notable for its prominent bare canvas, which imbues it with an overall luminosity, as well as its insistent verticality—the 2.5-meter-high red line as well as the ocher forms seem to thrust upward and break the bounds of any enclosing strictures. Untitled employs a spartan economy of means to intimate illimitable energies. As Still tersely observed: "The best works are often those with the fewest and simplest of elements—pictures that are almost obvious until you look at them a little more and things begin to happen.

Clyfford Still

"I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit." "It's intolerable to be stopped by a f-rame's edge." "I am not interested in illustrating my time. A man's "time" limits him, it does not truly liberate him. Our age - it is one of science, of mechanism, of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mechanism of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of a graphic homage."

Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904–June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s. vStill was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada. In 1925 he visited New York, briefly studying at the Art Students League. He attended Spokane University from 1926 to 1927 and returned in 1931 with a fellowship, graduating in 1933. That fall, he became a teaching fellow, then faculty member at Washington State College (now Washington State University), where he obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1935 and taught until 1941. He spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation (now Yaddo) in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1937, along with Washington State colleague Worth Griffin, Still co-founded the Nespelem Art Colony that produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting Colville Indian Reservation Native American life over the course of four summers. In 1941 Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where he worked in various war industries while pursuing paint-

ing. He had his first solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) in 1943. He taught at the Richmond Professional Institute (RPI), now Virginia Commonwealth University, from 1943 to 1945, then went to New York City. Mark Rothko, whom Still had met in California in 1943, introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her gallery, The Art of This Century Gallery, in early 1946. The following year Guggenheim closed her gallery and Still, along with Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists, joined the Betty Parsons gallery. Still returned to San Francisco, where he became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), teaching there from 1946 to 1950.[3] He lived in New York for most of the 1950s, the height of Abstract Expressionism, but also a time when he became increasingly critical of the art world. In the early 1950s, Still severed ties with commercial galleries. In 1961 he moved to a 22-acre farm near Westminster, Maryland, removing himself further from the art world. Still used a barn on the property as a studio during the warm weather months. In 1966, Still and his second wife purchased a 4,300-square-foot house at 312 Church Street in New Windsor, Maryland, about eight miles from their farm, where he lived until his death. Still is considered one of the foremost Color Field painters — his non-figurative paintings are non-objective, and largely concerned with juxtaposing different colors and surfaces in a variety of formations. Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, who organized their colors in a relatively simple way (Rothko in the form of nebulous rectangles, Newman in thin lines on vast fields of color), Still’s arrangements are less regular. His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been “torn” off the painting, revealing the colors underneath. Another point of departure with Newman and Rothko is the way the paint is laid on the canvas; while Rothko and Newman used fairly flat colors and relatively thin paint, Still uses a thick impasto, causing subtle variety and shades that shimmer across the painting surfaces. His large mature works recall natural forms and natural phenomena at their most intense and mysterious; ancient stalagmites, caverns, foliage, seen both in darkness and in light lend poetic richness and depth to his work. By 1947, he had begun working in the format that he would intensify and refine throughout the rest of his career — a large-scale color field applied with palette knives. Among Still’s well known paintings is 1957-D No. 1, 1957, (above), which is mainly black and yellow with patches of white and a small amount of red. These four colors, and variations on them (purples, dark blues) are predominant in his work, although there is a tendency for his paintings to use darker shades.

Still is considered one of the foremost Color Field painters – his non-figurative paintings are non-objective, and largely concerned with juxtaposing different colors and surfaces in a variety of formations. Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, who organized their colors in a relatively simple way (Rothko in the form of nebulous rectangles, Newman in thin lines on vast fields of color), Still's arrangements are less regular. His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been "torn" off the painting, revealing the colors underneath. Another point of departure with Newman and Rothko is the way the paint is laid on the canvas; while Rothko and Newman used fairly flat colors and relatively thin paint, Still uses a thick impasto, causing subtle variety and shades that shimmer across the painting surfaces.

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12.

AMBROSIA In the years after World War II, both Europe and the United States saw the rise of predominantly abstract painting concerned with materials and the expressive, gestural marking of the canvas. In the United States this development was dubbed Abstract Expressionism, while the pan-European phenomenon was named Art Informel (literally, "unformed art"). The Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies was identified with a variety of the latter called Tachisme—from the French word tache, meaning a stain or blot—for the rich textures and pooled colors that seemed to have occurred almost accidentally on his canvases. In his "matter paintings," begun in the mid1950s, Tàpies reevaluated humble natural materials, such as sand and straw, and the refuse of humanity: string, bits of fabric, and so on. By calling attention to seemingly inconsequential matter, he suggested that beauty could be found in unlikely places. Tàpies saw his works as objects of meditation that each viewer would interpret according to personal experience. "What I do attempt," he stated, "is to create images that will cause the observer to look upon reality in a more contemplative way." While Ambrosia dates from later in Tàpies's career, it belongs to a period when the artist returned to many of his earlier ways of working and reflects processes and themes that have remained constant throughout his oeuvre. Like many of his matter paintings, this immense work resembles a wall that has been marred by human intervention and the passage of time: the rough, cracking gray and white surface—made of ground white marble dust mixed with pigment, which the artist further modified both by adding paint and by scraping away at the surface—suggests concrete that has been scrawled with graffiti. The title, which appears in the painting itself, refers to the legendary nectar of the Greek gods that was said to make whoever ate it immortal. Tàpies has frequently expressed an ambition for his art to hold such spiritual and salutary power; the allusion may also reflect his belief in the transformative power of the most humble, quotidian things.

1989 Mixed media on canvas 250 x 601 cm Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Tàpies was perhaps the best-known Spanish (Catalan) artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà, published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. On a French government scholarship in the early 1950s he lived in Paris, to which he often returned. Both in Europe and beyond, the highly inf luential French critic and curator Michel Tapié enthusiastically promoted the work of Antoni Tàpies.

Antoni Tàpies Ambrosia

ANTONI TÀPIES

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Antoni Tàpies Puig was born in Barcelona on 13 December 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government. Due to this, Tàpies grew up in an environment where he was very much exposed to a cultural and social experiences of leaders in the Catalan public life and its republicanism. His maternal grandmother also exposed him to this world with her great involvement in civil and political activities. Tàpies was first introduced to contemporary art as he entered secondary school in 1934. He saw a famous Christmas issue of the magazine, D’ací i d’allà, which contained reproductions of works by artists such as Duchamp, Braque, Kandinsky, and Picasso. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis. He spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art that had already expressed itself when he was in his early teens. Tàpies studied at the German School of Barcelona. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. In 1945 Tàpies began experimenting with more rinse materials. He would mix oil paint with whiting. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy, especially that of Sartre as well as Eastern thought. He became known as one of Spain's

most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. His abstract and avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world. In 1954 Tàpies married Teresa Barba Fabregas. Together they had three children Antoni, Miguel and Clara. He lived mainly in Barcelona and was represented by the Galerie Lelong in Paris and the Pace Gallery in New York. Tàpies died on 6 February 2012. His health had been suffering since 2007. Tàpies was perhaps the best-known Spanish (Catalan) artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà, published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. On a French government scholarship in the early 1950s he lived in Paris, to which he often returned. Both in Europe and beyond, the highly influential French critic and curator Michel Tapié enthusiastically promoted the work of Antoni Tàpies. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. The main leader and founder of Dau al Set was the poet Joan Brossa. The movement also had a publication of the same name, Dau al Set. Tàpies started as a surrealist painter, his early

works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an informal artist, working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. In 1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most original contribution to art. One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags (Grey and Green Painting, Tate Gallery, London, 1957). Canvas Burned to Matter from c. 1960, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of the artist’s mixed media assemblages that combine the principles of Dada and Surrealism. The paintings produced by Tàpies, later in the 1970s and in the 1980s, reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness, for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in Imprint of a Basket on Cloth (1980). Among the artists’ work linked in style to that of Tàpies is that of the American painter Julian Schnabel as both have been connected to the art term “Matter”.

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EDUARDO CHILLIDA

13. Eduardo Chillida Advice to Space V (Consejo al espacio V),

1993 Steel 305 x 143 x 207 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Born in San Sebastián to Pedro Chillida and the soprano Advice to Space V (Consejo al espacio V, 1993) was orig- to the discoverer of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming, for Carmen Juantegui on 10 January 1924, Eduardo Chilli- inally designed to sit before the Neue Pinakothek in Mu- a park in San Sebastián (it subsequently disappeared, but da grew up near the Biarritz Hotel, which was owned by nich when the first studies for the project were created a new version has been installed on the promenade at San his grandparents. Chillida had been the goalkeeper for in 1987. (Ten years later the artist composed Looking for Sebastián bay). By the early 1970s, his steel sculptures Real Sociedad, San Sebastián's La Liga football team, Light II [Buscando la luz II] for the nearby Pinakothek der had been installed in front of the Unesco headquarters where his knee was so seriously injured that he had five Moderne.) This piece, constructed from enormous sheets in Paris, the ThyssenKrupp building in Düsseldorf, and surgeries, ending a promising football career. He then of steel, combines an organic quality with a lightness that in a courtyard at the World Bank offices in Washington studied architecture at the University of Madrid from is unique to Chillida’s works in this medium. The structure At their best his works, although massive and monumen1943 to 1946. In 1947 he abandoned architecture for art, suggests a kind of chimney, a void of fire and heat that tal, suggest movement and tension. For example, the and the next year he moved to Paris, where he set up his infuses the surrounding space with vital energy. Like Em- largest of his works in the United States, De Musica is an first studio and began working in plaster 81-ton steel sculpture featuring two piland clay. He never finished his degree and According to Chillida’s plans for a Monument of Tolerance, an ar- lars with arms that reach out but do not instead began to take private art lessons. tificial cave is to be bored into the mountain. The huge cubic cave, touch. Much of Chillida’s work is inspired He lived in Paris from 1948 to 50 and at measuring 40 metres (131 ft) along each side, is to be dug from in- by his Basque upbringing, and many of Villaines-sous-Bois (Seine-et-Oise) from his sculptures’ titles are in the Basque 1950 to 1955. In 1950 Chillida married Pilar side a mountain that has long been revered by the inhabitants of language Euskera. His steel sculpture De Belzunce and later returned to the San Se- the dusty, barren island to the south of Lanzarote. About 64,000 Música III was exhibited at the Yorkshire bastián area, first to the nearby village of cubic metres of rock will be taken away from the mountain, which Sculpture Park in the UK, as part of a retHernani and in 1959 to the city of his birth, rises out of an arid landscape in the north of the island, to create rospective of Chillida’s work. where he remained. He died at his home Chillida’s cast iron sculpture Topos V has what Chillida called his ‘monument to tolerance’. Chillida’s origi- been displayed in Plaça del Rei, Barcelonear San Sebastián at the age of 78. nal idea was for visitors to experience the immensity of the space. na, since 1986. Eduardo Chillida studied architecture in Chillida also conceived a distinguished Madrid from 1943 to 1947, before deciding to turn to brace XI (Besarkada XI, 1996), also in the Guggenheim oeuvre of etchings, lithographs and woodcuts since 1959, painting and ultimately—after moving to Paris in 1948— Museum Bilbao collection, this work demonstrates the including illustrations for Jorge Guillen’s Mas Alla (1973) to sculpture. His early architectural training is apparent connection between Chillida’s work and nature. and various other books. in the underlying structure, attention to materials, and Chillida’s sculptures concentrated on the human form careful planning of spatial relationships that characterize (mostly torsos and busts); his later works tended to be his sculptures. Indeed, Chillida conceived of sculpture in more massive and more abstract, and included many relation to architecture: “To construct is to build in space. monumental public works. Chillida himself tended to reThis is sculpture, and generally speaking sculpture and ject the label of “abstract”, preferring instead to call himarchitecture,” he declared. Over the course of five dec- self a “realist sculptor”. Upon returning to the Basque ades, he established himself as one of the most important Country in 1951, Chillida soon abandoned the plaster he Basque artists of the 20th century and an internationally used in his Paris works – a medium suited to his study of recognized figure in postwar sculpture, leaving behind archaic figurative works in the Louvre. Living near Hera rich legacy in monumental, site-specific public sculp- nani, he began to work in forged iron with the help of the tures as well as more conventionally sized works. local blacksmith, and soon set up a forge in his studio. From 1954 until 1966, Chillida worked on a series entitled The materials Chillida turned to consistently informed his Anvil of Dreams, in which he used wood for the first time investigations of conceptual questions and metaphysi- as a base from which the metal forms rise up in explosive Chillida's sculptures concentrated on the human form (mostly cal concerns. His early sculptures in Paris were execut- rhythmic curves. He began to make sculpture in alabaster torsos and busts); his later works tended to be more massive ed in stone and plaster—materials suited to his study of 1965. Rather than turn over a maquette of a sculpture to and more abstract, and included many monumental public works. Chillida himself tended to reject the label of "abstract", preferarchaic works in the Louvre—and were drawn from the fabricators, as many modern artists do, Chillida worked ring instead to call himself a "realist sculptor". Upon returning to human figure as well as natural forms. Upon his return to closely with the men in the foundry. He then usually add- the Basque Country in 1951, Chillida soon abandoned the plaster the Basque Country in 1951, he began to focus more on ed an alloy that caused the metal to take on a brilliant rust he used in his Paris works – a medium suited to his study of archaic figurative works in the Louvre. Living near Hernani, he began the metamorphosis of space and the abstract definition color as it oxidizes. From quite early on, Chillida’s sculp- to work in forged iron with the help of the local blacksmith, and of spatial volume through form, and turned to iron and ture found public recognition, and, in 1954, he produced soon set up a forge in his studio. From 1954 until 1966, Chillida then wood and steel-materials that represented Basque the four doors for the basilica of Arantzazu, where works worked on a series entitled Anvil of Dreams, in which he used wood for the first time as a base from which the metal forms rise traditions in industry, architecture, and agriculture, and by other leading Basque sculptors – Jorge Oteiza, Agus- up in explosive rhythmic curves. He began to make sculpture in also recalled the region’s distinctive landscape and what tin Ibarrola and Nestor Basterretxea – were also being in- alabaster 1965. Rather than turn over a maquette of a sculpture Chillida described as its “dark light.” stalled. The following year, he carved a stone monument to fabricators, as many modern artists do,

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Jea n 1 9 8 -Mich 8 ) w el B fa m asq as wro e as p an Am uiat; D a L o w te enig r t o f S e r i c a n e c e m b whe er Eas matic AMO artist. er 22, e , ales re the t Side pigram an inf Basqu 1960– i A sion ced. B hip ho of Ma s in th ormal at first ugus p y n g e i The st pain the 1 , punk hatta cultu raffit achie t 12, 9 v n tive Whitn tings in 80s, h , and s durin ral hot i duo w ed e t b e o r g Bas f his a y Mus galler was e eet ar the ed of ho i l x suc quiat's rt in 19 eum o es and hibitin t cultu ate 19 the f h as r m 9 g e A art 2. mer useu his n s had 70s gat ion, w e a l t h f o c u s ican ms e c ated and Art inter o-expr over ed o n s e held a s ima poetr inner us po n "su a re tionall g y g tros y. mix e, abs , draw versus verty, gesti v i pec i Bas ed with tractio ng, and outer e ntegra e dich n t q o x i c , p o u a "s iat u onte figur ainti perie n ve tomi a m e n n p wel ringb sed so porar tion, a g, and ce. H rsus se s", l as oar e g n y c m d r a i ep a atta d to al co critiq hist whi oric rried t propri l e criti e his p cks on deepe mmen ue. a x l inf o p r orm t and died cism of etics w ower s truths tary in atio n On of a h coloni ere ac tructur about his pa e a t u e M i h l n r t s i o e s e t a ma ing by B ay 18 in o n ly po nd s indi v s cor asqui , 2017, erdose d supp litical ystem vidual" as at d d hi a a s t a S at h ort f nd d of r , as $110 gh e .5 m for a picting otheb is art st or class irect i acism, nt y' ud illio ny A s a n. me skull ( s aucti io at t truggle heir o h rica n ar "Untit n, a 19 e age . He o led 8 tist at a ") se 2 pain f 27. t uct t i ion a new ng , se lling refor

Basquiat went from being homeless and unemployed to selling a single painting for up to $25,000 in a matter of several years. SAMO color work at A's, Arleen Schloss, 1979. In 1976, Basquiat and friend Al Diaz began spray painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. The designs featured inscribed messages such as "Plush safe he think.. SAMO" and "SAMO as an escape clause". In 1978, Basquiat worked for the Unique Clothing Warehouse in their art department at 718 Broadway in NoHo and at night he began "SAMO" painting his original graffiti art on neighborhood buildings. Unique's founder Harvey Russack discovered Basquiat painting a building one night, they became friends, and he offered him a day job. On December 11, 1978, The Village Voice published an article about the graffiti. When Basquiat and Diaz ended their friendship, The SAMO project ended with the epitaph "SAMO IS DEAD", inscribed on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1979. In 1979, Basquiat appeared on the live public-access television show TV Party hosted by Glenn O'Brien, and the two started a friendship. Basquiat made

14.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

few years. w over the next o sh e th n o es nc and Test regular appeara the noise rock b ed rm fo at ui q layed , Bas Gray – which p That same year ed m na re r te 's", h was la ednesdays at A "W Pattern – whic e, ac sp en ss's op ong others, at Arleen Schlo at showed, am ui q as B 79 19 er b where in Octo r Xerox work. ael Hollo co O his SAM Dawson, Mich n o n an h S f o and sisted Vincent Gallo, d Gray also con an rd o liff C or, Wayne Max's Kansas man, Nick Tayl tclubs such as h g ni at ed rm , Basquithe band perfo d Club. In 1980 ud M e th d an h urra town 81, City, CBGB, H ent film Down d en ep d in 's quiat 'Brien t same year, Bas at starred in O ha T t. ea B rk New Yo presented to originally titled rant. Basquiat au st re a at l o h unned by met Andy War d Warhol was st an , rk o w is h f o s r collabtwo artists late Warhol sample e h T . re lu al d cordius an me of Gray's re Basquiat's gen so d re u at fe 1 town 8 red in the 1981 orated. Down uiat also appea q as B k. ac tr d inally intendings on its soun ," in a role orig re tu ap "R eo d vi ckey. Blondie music ghtclub disc jo ni a as , sh la F r solo aste akthrough as a re ed for Grandm b s t' ia u q as B s were The Times The early 1980 t participated in ia u q as B , 0 8 19 red by Colartist. In June hibition sponso ex t is rt -a ti ul m Fashion Square Show, a d (Colab) and te ra o rp co In s d curaject rious critics an laborative Pro va y b d ce ti o n saw e was Italian gallerist an Moda where h li, zo az M o lar Emili a (Italy) to tors. In particu quiat to Moden as B d te vi in d an n May 23, the exhibition that opened o , w o sh lo so t he Rafirs have his world ard published "T 82, ic R é en R , 81 ber 19 eptember 19 1981. In Decem magazine. In S m ru fo rt A in " and worked diant Child Nosei gallery a in n n A e th t AmerBasquiat joined w the gallery toward his firs o el ch 6 to b in a basement place from Mar k o to h ic h w , a, Italy, show rked in Moden ican one-man o w e h 2 8 19 March ition and from April 1, 1982. In d Italian exhib n co se is h n o nd-floor disagain to work from the grou ed rk o w t ia u q uilt below November, Bas agosian had b G ry ar L e ac sp series of play and studio ia, home and commenced a allery, iforn at Gagosian G his Venice, Cal nd co se s hi , w 1983 sho is girlfriend, paintings for a rought along h b e H . d o o w lly o osian rethen in West H Madonna. Gag l was er g n si g in ir p as . Jean-Miche then-unknown oing along fine g as w g in th ry we were having calls, "Eve lling them, and se as I w s, g in id, 'My girlmaking paint Jean-Michel sa ay d ne o en th ncerned a lot of fun. But ' I was a little co e. m h it w ay st w? So g to melet, you kno friend is comin o an il o sp n ca , 'Her eggs he said, He said -one too many d n A ' e? lik e evhat's sh be huge.' I'll n to g I said, 'Well, w in o g s e' nna and sh e out and name is Mado Madonna cam o S . at th id sa he like one er forget that e all got along w d an s th n o siderwm e he took con m stayed for a fe ti is th g n ri u ily." D big, happy fam

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able interest in the work that Robert Rauschenberg was producing at Gemini G.E.L. in West Hollywood, visiting him on several occasions and finding inspiration in the accomplishments of the painter. In 1982, Basquiat worked briefly with musician and artist David Bowie. In 1983, Basquiat produced a 12-inch rap single featuring hip-hop artists Rammellzee and K-Rob. Billed as Rammellzee vs. K-Rob, the single contained two versions of the same track: "Beat Bop" on side one with vocals and "Beat Bop" on side two as an instrumental. The single was pressed in limited quantities on the one-off Tartown Record Company label. The single's cover featured Basquiat's artwork, making the pressing highly desirable among both record and art collectors. At the suggestion of Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, Warhol and Basquiat worked on a series of collaborative paintings between 1983 and 1985. In the case of Olympic Rings (1985), Warhol made several variations of the Olympic five-ring symbol, rendered in the original primary colors. Basquiat responded to the abstract, stylized logos with his oppositional graffiti style. Basquiat often painted in expensive Armani suits and would even appear in public in the same paint-splattered clothes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Moses and the Egyptians

Basquiat's canon revolves around single heroic figures: athletes, prophets, warriors, cops, musicians, kings and the artist himself. In these images the head is often a central focus, topped by crowns, hats, and halos. In this way the intellect is emphasized, lifted up to notice, privileged over the body and the physicality of these figures commonly represent in the world. Kellie Jones, Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the (Re)Mix

Basquiat transitioned from being homeless and unemployed to selling a single painting for up to $25,000 in a matter of several years. In 1976, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz began spray painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. The designs featured inscribed messages such as "Plush safe he think.. SAMO" and "SAMO as an escape clause". In 1978, Basquiat worked for the Unique Clothing Warehouse in their art department at 718 Broadway in NoHo, and at night he began "SAMO," painting his original graffiti art on neighborhood buildings. Unique's founder Harvey Russack discovered Basquiat painting a building one night, they became friends, and he offered him a day job. On December 11, 1978.

1982 Acrylic and oil stick on canvas 185.9 x 137 x 4 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa Gift, Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich

Moses and the Egyptians and Man from Naples, both completed in 1982, were created at a particularly important moment in the career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, after his discovery as an artist, and before his period of maximum productivity. Both pieces are essential for understanding the development of his painting during the 1980s. At the center of the composition, one can distinguish the profile of Moses suggested with some white lines that appear to be the result of an instantaneous, unpremeditated impulse. This same color not only envelops the gigantic tablets of the law, but extend around the prophet’s profile in the form of expressive drips and drops. The tablets also contain a series of inscriptions in an arrangement that looks more orderly and contained, unlike the one in Man from Naples. This work obviously alludes to a biblical episode that can also be related to the history of Africa.

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An unclassifiable figure of the arts and literature of the 20th century, Henri Michaux (b. 1899, Namur, Belgium–d. 1984, Paris) greatly influenced the artists and writers of his time over the course of his long life. Both a “poets’ poet” and a “painters’ painter,” lionized by figures in both fields like André Gide and Francis Bacon, Michaux feverishly produced thousands of works on paper whose full extent is only now becoming apparent. This exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Michaux Archives in Paris, covers fifty years of Michaux’s creative activity, focusing on his most important periods and series. Bringing together some 230 of the artist’s visual works, documents, and personal objects, Henri Michaux: The Other Side is organized around three principal themes, offering a panoramic view of each: the human figure, the alphabet, and the altered psyche. The show emphasizes the formal and material parallels and convergences between these three themes, and reveals central aspects of the artist’s modus operandi, underscoring his constant interest in science, musicology, and ethnography. Some of Michaux’s fundamental series, like the fonds noirs (black backgrounds), the frottages (rubbings), the mouvements (movements), and the dessins mescaliniens (mescaline drawings), are amply represented in this show, which includes works never exhibited before as well as pieces from major national and international collections.

1963 India ink on paper 322 x 417 mm P rivate collection © Archives Henri Michaux, Bilbao, 2018 Photo: Jean-Louis Losi

THE OTHER SIDE

Henri Michaux Untitled,

HENRI MICHAUX

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G A L L E R Y

3 0 5

APPARITIONS AND “PHANTOMISM” A n in

In 1930–1931, Michaux visited Japan, China and India. The result of this trip is the book A Barbarian in Asia. Oriental culture became one of his biggest influences. The philosophy of Buddhism, and Oriental calligraphy, later became principal subjects of many of his poems and inspired many of his drawings. He also traveled to Africa and to the American continent, where he visited Ecuador and published the book Ecuador. His travels across the Americas finished in Brazil in 1939, and he stayed there for two years.Michaux is best known for his stories about Plume – "a peaceful man" – perhaps the most unenterprising hero in the history of literature, and his many misfortunes. All his writing is strange and original. As his translator put it in Darkness Moves, the most comprehensive Michaux anthology in English, his poems are "messages from his inner space."

d efa t i ga ble e n te r ex pe r ed the iment w er and o r l d of Paul K travel painti lee a n er, Mi ng th d Max cha ux co n t a a n Ernst, k s to t c t in t w it h w h e h w e ork s o mid–1 hom h pa pe r f 92 0 s . e first , we re T c a h h me in e w rit is fi rs t t u re , b to er’s to re s o u ut he ols , in rce s i n soon k r e g a rd and the pi d e ve l ed as oped c to r ia c h a ra t l e a c d h on a b ve n n iq u e c te r i s lack b tic of s that h a a i c s r k e w g pe r iod n ow ork , su ro u n d h e wo ch as t and a r e l k s m e o d in o singu p e ra f rot t a il a nd la r us ge. I n a e c o h r y f i s l a te r l ic . H e wa te r on ma co l o r a lso m ny d if a n a f e d d re n t t e ink T h ese y pes te c h n o f p i q a ues ha pe r. feat u r d the e of flu An indefatigable experimenter and traveler, Michaux entered the world of c o i m d it y a n d mon a cc i d e a prope nt s a n painting thanks to the works of Paul Klee and Max Ernst, with whom he first d ove ns it y f a ble f r or fl o wing, or a n a r t is t b ot h d came into contact in the mid–1920s. The writer’s tools, ink and paper, were his i n te r v w ho a esirl w ay s e ntio n of c so u g h first resources in the pictorial adventure, but he soon developed techniques a way h a n ce t the of col i n h l a b o ra is wo r es . W that are now regarded as characteristic of his work, such as tempera on a black ting w ks as ith a n i t h u n a k s n c etic a ow n f the sa orc- background and also frottage. In his later period he worked in oil and acrylic. nd s y me im s t p e u m l s e p ro atic s p g e n ic m pte d substa irit, nces in M ic h a co n s c order u x to io u s n tr y ha to obs ess in ll uci n erve t h e b ro ex pe r oh e behav ug ht t iment i h a o e prin l co n d r o the ms f the ci ples it io n s elves. . In th of h i s For M i p s w h ic h a intin way, ic h a u x the a r g to t h , pa i nt t is t d r e s i e n To us nses g is t h aws a n e h is o a t ot h infinit w e n r e s w i map. de of p r ise h o rd s , M ic h a i m s e lf u .” x H a l w ay b u t ra e neve s pa in ther s r be l ie te d “t o v u e g d in p h t to p o surm a te r redefi rovok ia l, c a n e e u d i s n ing th re s u l t defina unexp s, e eme b l e ev e c te d r e g n e fi t s in h n ce o g u re s b ra t e d is f amb , sig n s t a te m s, and ig uou e nt on s l w h ic h a and ndsca “t h e p he de pes . I he nom n ie d a n a he ad c e non ele ffiliati m i t te of pai o n to d n t a h t i n a n y scho cri be d t the o g” i n ol or t to wo nly m e u o n l v d d e be fa n of g h o enc y, ment to m i s he mi sts an m g d h e a t ( ppa rit b e a s‘phan pea r t to m i s io n s . U h ro u g m h n ’ o ) d : u efined an ar t t a ll hi of i m a s wo r k bein g gina r y , s w p t i h us a p th a sp o r t ra i t h is g a ts. Fo e c ia l a lle r y c c u b s o u i nda nc nta ins ng on M ic h a e t h is cl a wide ux’s ch ass ic g se le c t a ra c t e the sh e i on of n re , rs com eet of wo r k s e out pa pe r i n o w f h ic h the in to m e finite et the d e pt h a r t is t of a nd th e v iew er.

Calligraphic experimentation accounts for a vast portion of Michaux’s graphic output. Fascinated by Easterm scripts, and above all by Chinese ideograms, the artist worked from the beginning on the creation of invented alphabets with no phonetic or semantic correlation. These signs, Michaux said, are an always incomplete poetry, a literature of gesture and impulse, and the dance of the penstroke. At the same time, the flurry of strokes follows a continuous rhythmic principle: each drawing is at once an explosion and a current,

a “journey” in many different directions. Michaux cultivated his interest in pictographic scripts at the same time as he developed his passion for sound rhy thms and pat terns. Although he was a keen amateur musician, no document remains of his musical practice except for his drawings, which sometimes look like scores. In these works we find an abstract and intimate literature where the signs are figures in constant mutation. On many occasions these signs appear as separate letters, while at other times they develop animal or totemic features; in still further cases, like the period of experimentation with psychoactive substances in the 1950s and 1960s, the lines multiply over large areas of paper, acquiring connotations that align them with the practices of Abstract Expressionism.

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G A L L E R Y

| 3 0 6

THE LIFE OF SIGNS

Henri Michaux Untitled,

1956 India ink on paper 320 x 240 mm Private collection © Archives Henri Michaux, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2018 © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa Photo: Erika Barahona Ede

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G A L L E R Y

3 0 7

MANIPULATING THE PSYCHE

1981 Watercolor on paper 310 x 240 mm Private collection © Archives Henri Michaux, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2018 © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa Photo: Erika Barahona Ede

Haunting, too, is Michaux's emphasis on "the strangeness of natural things and the naturalness of strange things," as Andre Gide once described Michaux's philosophy. Like Swift, Flaubert, and Lautreament, Michaux created imaginery lands inhabited by equally chimerical creatures. The royal spider, the Hacs, the Emanglons, and the Gaurs are just a few of the inhabitants in what are considered his best works, including Voyage en Grande Garbagne, Au Pays de la magie, and Ici, Poddema. These creatures are portrayed as being more real than human beings. So are their worlds seen as being far less fantastic and less absurd than the one in which Michaux himself lives.

Henri Michaux Untitled,

In 1955, at a mature age, Michaux took part for the first time in an experiment with mescaline, an alkaloid extracted from the Mexican cactus known as peyote. Michaux was assisted for the purpose by doctors and scientists close to the literary world, including a neurologist from Bilbao, Julián de Ajuriaguerra. Dazzled by the psychic and sensorial mutations caused by this and other psychoactive substances, such as psilocybin and LSD 25, Michaux underwent numerous sessions up to the early 1960s, reflecting them in such well-known literary works as Miserable Miracle and Infinite Turbulence. At the same time, he produced a large number of minute drawings following a graphic matrix already intuited in previous years. This was a pattern of furrows and arborescences, often ascending, saturated with symmetries and micrographs. Both these graphic works and his literary output brought Michaux to prominence as a doyen of the incipient psychedelic culture and the underground mystique, although he always insisted on defining himself as a sober “water drinker” with no interest whatsoever in artificial paradises. In the years after he stopped experimenting with chemicals, Michaux continued to develop a “mescaline” style while working at the same time on his other series and his great artistic obsessions. In all of them he found fertile ground for the cartography of the imagination.

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THE EXHIBITIONS

ESTHER FERRER

March| 16 |2018|–|June | 10 | 2018|

She was the recipient of many awards in the past years, including the Gure Artea Award of the Basque Government in 2012, and the MAV (Women in Visual Arts) Awards, the Velázquez Award in Plastic Arts and the Prix Marie Claire de l’art contemporain in 2014.

INTERTWINED SPACES

Esther Ferrer 1980 © Archives Guggenheim Familly, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2018 Photo: Jean-Louis Losi

In 1966 she joined Walter Marchetti and Juan Hidalgo Codorniu in the Spanish performance art group Zaj, famous for its radical and conceptual performances, whose controversial "concerts" were presented in Spanish concert halls despite the censorship of Franco's regime. Zaj also performed in many other countries for 30 years, until 1996, when the group broke up after a retrospective in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. As a performer she has participated in festivals in Canada, Korea, the United States and Japan, and throughout Europe . Her production also includes objects, photos, video pieces, visual systems based on prime numbers, and a large collection of self-portraits in many media.

Esther Ferrer, born 1937 in San Sebastián, Spain, is one of the first Spanish artists to do performance art and one of the first Spanish women artists to receive international recognition and has received several important prizes. She received the national fine arts prize in Spain (1999), the Marie Claire prize in France and the Prix Velasquez. In 1966 she joined Walter Marchetti and Juan Hidalgo in the Spanish performance art group Zaj, famous for its radical and conceptual performances, whose controversial "concerts" were presented in Spanish concert halls despite the censorship of Franco's regime. Zaj also performed in many other countries for 30 years, until 1996, when the group broke up after a retrospective in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. As a performer she has participated in festivals in Canada, Korea, the United States and Japan, and throughout Europe (France, Italy, Holland Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, England, the Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Slovakia, Germany and Hungary). Her production also includes objects, photos, video pieces, visual systems based on prime numbers, and a large collection of self-portraits in many media. Ferrer represented Spain in the Venice Bienal in 1999, and did large individual shows in subsequent years in the FRAC Bretagne (Rennes, France), MACVAL (Val de Marne, France), and with the Instituto Cervantes in several South American cities. In 1963, Esther Ferrer, together with José Antonio Sistiaga, established the Taller de Libre Expresión (Free Expression Workshop) in San Sebastián, and later the Escuela Experimental (Experimental School) in Elorrio. In 1967, she joined the Zaj Group (formed in 1964 by Ramón Barce, Juan Hidalgo, and Walter Marchetti). Both individually and collectively, she took part in the group’s activities until it dissolved in 1996. In the early 1970s, she moved to Paris. Esther Ferrer holds a degree in Social Sciences and Journalism. In 1975, she began to publish her first articles about the contemporary cultural and social milieu in newspapers and magazines such as El País, Ere, Lápiz, El Globo and Jano. She resumed her career as an artist in the fields of photography, installation art, painting and drawing based on prime numbers or the creation of objects. In 1999, she represented Spain in La Biennale di Venezia. In 2008, her remarkable career earned her recognition in the form of the National Prize in Plastic Arts. Considered to be one of the pioneers of performance art in Spain, she has exhibited her work in a great number of countries and has been hugely influential among younger artists.

THE EXHIBITION Esther Ferrer is a pioneer in performance art in Spain, as well as one of the leading performance artists in the country. She took the first steps in her career in the late 1970s. Since then, she has developed several lines of thought through a variety of forms and materials. Her oeuvre is a part of the Minimalist and Conceptual Art movement. In the 1960s, she was under the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Perec, John Cage, and the feminist theorists of the day. In 1967, she joined Zaj, a group established by Walter Marchetti, Ramón Barce, and Juan Hidalgo. With Zaj, Ferrer found in action art her main medium. From 1970 on, however, she returned to the visual arts in the form of staged photographs, installations, paintings and drawings based on the prime number series, objects and sound recordings. With straightforward, subversive and shocking performances, the members of Zaj stuck together until 1996, when the group dissolved after a retrospective at the Reina Sofía Museum (MNCARS) in Madrid. According to Ferrer, performance art is “art that involves time and space with the presence of the audience—an audience that is made of participants rather than viewers.” She values the audience’s freedom above everything else. No conclusions are offered by the artist: only questions for the viewers to find an answer of their own, for them to generate their own personal interpretation of the artwork. Throughout her long career, Esther Ferrer has participated in countless action art festivals and shown her works in many museums. She is also the recipient of a high number of accolades. She represented Spain at the Biennale di Venezia (1999) and was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (2008), the Gure Artea Saria of the Basque Government (2012), the Marie Claire Prix de l’art contemporain (2014) and the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas (2014). Most of the works in this exhibition have never been shown before. They will be activated in special ways, by means of performances and interactions with visitors.

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THE EXHIBITIONS

INSTALLATIONS WITH CHAIRS

This exhibition presents two installations by Ferrer made with chairs: one is from the 1984 series Installations with Chairs (Instalaciones con sillas), and the other from the 2018 series Suspended Chairs (Sillas suspendidas). Both projects are here materialized for the first time in an exhibition space. The artist clarifies the concept in the exhibition catalog, which reads: I’ve always been interested in chairs, everyday and almost anodyne objects whose mere presence can nonetheless modify the space of a room. I have always been struck by the number of models that have been created, and will continue to be created, for something as everyday and elementary as a chair. But what attracts me the most is its structure: wood, plastic or another material, folding or not. Another interesting feature of the chair is its “anthropomorphic” quality of its structure, regardless of the material from which it is made. When stripped of upholstery and decoration, its “skeleton” forms a set of straight or curved lines organized in an almost organic manner. If the structural richness of a chair is combined in a set, either on a wall or in the round, the variety of resulting forms can be fascinating. Perhaps my interest in chairs could be traced back to the flying chairs I used to ride on when I was a little girl. They moved at vertigo-inducing speed, hanging from chains attached to the rotating top of the swing ride. I have created a number of installations with chairs. Sometimes, they are just different forms interacting with one another in space, hanging from thick or thin cables; other times, they carry a political or social meaning. I have set up installations and performances using just THE LAUGHS OF THE WORLD one chair or including other elements. I believe everyday objects are essential for performance art. Is there anything more ordinary than a chair? In any case, a chair “Warning: Laughter can be dangerous for your illness.” has endless possibilities; it has even become a sound Humor is indissociable from the work of Esther Ferrer. element in some of my acts. Indeed, it is her absurd view of society, laden with an irony peculiar to the artist, which allows her to construct an artistic corpus with a markedly critical character. For this installation, Ferrer has focused on laughter. She has hung a series of electronic devices from different points on a world map that is standing on the floor. These are thirty seven tablets showing images of mouths that belong to people of different ages, genders and provenances, while reproducing the sound of their laughs. The sound archives are activated by the interaction of visitors, since they are programmed to start every time they are approached, allowing the spontaneous production of what the artist calls “concerts of laughter” The installation is also designed to activate different laughter groups at random according to the visitors’ position on the map. The work is based on the sound of laughter as an ephemeral sound that can turn into a work of art. Ferrer takes a natural, organic sound—laughter— and extends it over time by means of the recordings, arranges it in space on the map, and leaves it in the hands of the viewer, who decides when each set of sounds starts playing as if they were elements in a musical composition. Esther Ferrer explains the aim of this installation: The installation The Laughs of the World is, by no means, laughter therapy. Its main goal is to make the viewer laugh and, at the same time, “listen to the laughter of the world”: children, adults, and old people from different countries and cultures laughing. For each culture, each language (some scholars believe that language developed out of laughter) gives shape to laughter in their own particular ways. Besides, the viewer can use a Laugh Lab (Laboratorio de la risa) to create, in the words of Ferrer, “other amazing, different forms of laughter that are hard, or rather impossible, for human vocal chords to produce.”

In some installations I decide to submit to a rule- it’s a way of eliminating my subjectivity as far as possible or to a system I’ve decided on, such as the series of prime numbers. On the other hand, there are others I structure in an aleatory fashion, allowing myself to be guided by an intuition that determines the rhythm.

ENT RAN

em h is Lati e de etwe o a The n “supe st supe epest th en two human w r r i s fi fi n k flec in is t cies”, cial, a g in m orlds, a being’s t h fi b a Sub s the de erefore ased in word th n”, but nd, as P rst ject pth a a a l i t or o of w ike the ts turn t com the sa ul of lo e b h uny ject of ve or a ich the surface on “fac s from me ield g t d i p e g o emo ing s iscrim ressio oet sp f a m s”, a f he i i o a n e n r t c r u i or th e gate onal c rce of ation, , mem aks. at re . t o o the way to ndition informa he skin ry, bea n o The ervous ur sen . Abov tion ab is also a rer of r it e s o s i n raise stallat ystem, ations o all, how ut our p sometim ual i w w h e o e tact veryo n title hich tr ing to ver, th ysical es a n d e of fe with an e’s awa Entra ansmits its inte skin is nd r n r e a t t e a c stim thers. xterna ness o e to a hem to ction w he l n f T u her late th he wo elemen their o exhibi the bra ith w p e r t k e “aler rcept viewe is de , in th n skin tion trie in. is th si iv r t s exh ”, a prep e capac ’s recep gned to case th rough to ibiti c t e a i i o of th on. “ ratory ty by cr veness arouse sensua ns I , Ferr e exhib t’s a ma timulus eating a and inc sensati lity i o t e f t s t sens r want ion is t er of f or the v tate of rease h ns, h e i s s o p i e e type ry exp to ma re for ling, n sit to th leasura or k e t ot th e b show of expe rience e a cle hat. inkin rest of t le d a r g; th he and s next i ience in elivere r distin e re s do d by abst c t t h st i o e grap m r n t r hics act con inated est of t he insta betwe h c b e und erly epts or y sobri e exhib llation a n the ing i i e n d t t i her eas, su y, min on. W d the Spa tial P ch as th imal ma hat she te e roje cts. mathe riality, mat ical

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I’ve never been especially interested in carrying out my projects in a physical space or on a large scale. If the model works, the work is done as far as I’m concerned. If I can’t set it up in a real space, never mind. What interests me is the process.

TO AN EXH IBIT ION

Esth Ent er Ferr rada er d a un escrib a ex e Life pos s the n ició clot is shrou n as ature an d h Valé ing, th ed in th follo d e r ws: purpo time y wrote frontie e skin, w se o , “th rb hic th f

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GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE EXHIBITIONS

MICHAEL SNOW

March | 22 | 2018 |–| July | 01 |2018|

CLOSED CIRCUIT

T h e F il m & G u g g e n h Vid e o p ro g ra m o f the e im M u s e um a special fo cus on artis B il b a o la y s tic practice lated to the s rem tal film, and oving image, experi m v enM ic h a e l S ideo installation. n o w ( b. 1 9 2 unanimous ly regarded 8 , To ro n t o ) is as one of th figures in th e e tal cinema development of expe key rimensince the 1 960s. Also er, photog a p rap Snow’s work her, sculptor, and m aintusic re it and his fu flects his multifacete ian, ndamenta d spirl in chanics of perception terest in the meAs he once and its para p d by a film-m ut it: “My paintings a oxes. re made aker, my sc ulptures are a musician , my films made by b y sometime s they all w a painter (…), and ork togeth nated by th er. e systems, S world’s visual repre ” Fascino se sculpting w w understands film a ntation s a form of ith light and ti time he de vises objec me, while at the same ts that will deflect, or mo blo manages to ck the observer’s vie nopolize, w re artwork, bu veal not only the ma . He thus terials of th t also its ab e ility to crea cuits of att te specific ention. c ir Connectin g of his prod four pieces from vari uc o ranges acro tion, the exhibition C us periods lo s is radically s various formats wh sed Circuit ere the ima dissociate d fr ge (1968) diag onally limit om film support. Sig s and restric ht the window ts th w thesis betw here it is installed, cre e view from ee ati In this unus n what is framed and ng a forced synual arrange what is fram m Site (1969/ 2016), who ent, perspective disa ing it. se ti pp onous with the previo tle is deliberately ho ears. us work, re mophwith the wo pla rd object, vag and the place evoke ces the image d ue is lost in th ly familiar in its desig with an abstract e e xc h a n g n. The refe e, w self as pres re ence and a hile the sculpture affi nce bsence. Ne two video d rm s itar evices exp lore other li these two works, sculpture, nks an casso Stre d place. The Corner between image, ets o of the Mus ( 2009) projects a v f Braque and P i- Michael Snow was born in Toronto and studied at Upper Caniew of the eum in rea ada College and the Ontario College of Art. He had his first ex l time onto ed out of p a screen co terior solo exhibition in 1957. In the early 1960s Snow moved to New edestals fr ns o rise to an e York with his wife, artist Joyce Wieland, where they remained phemeral a m other exhibitions truct,g nd Cubist using anoth for nearly a decade. For Snow this move resulted in a proliferform of cin iving e ation of creative ideas and connections and his work increasema. By while invite r closed circuit, Obs erv sv ingly gained recognition. He returned to Canada in the early ical angle th iewers to see thems er (1974) mean1970s "an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artelves from at reduces an a two-dimen their bodie ist, a filmmaker, and a musician." His work has appeared at sionality. s to a vertig typexhibitions across Europe, North America and South America. inous

Michael Snow, born December 10, 1928 is a Canadian artist working in painting, sculpture, video, films, photography, holography, drawing, books and music. His best-known films are Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971), with the former regarded as a milestone in avant-garde cinema. Michael Snow was born in Toronto and studied at Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art. He had his first solo exhibition in 1957. In the early 1960s Snow moved to New York with his first wife, artist Joyce Wieland, where they remained for nearly a decade. For Snow this move resulted in a proliferation of creative ideas and connections and his work increasingly gained recognition. He returned to Canada in the early 1970s “an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a musician.” His work has appeared at exhibitions across Europe, North America and South America. Snows’ works were included in the shows marking the reopening of both the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2000 and the MoMA in New York in 2005. In March 2006, his works were included in the Whitney Biennial.

Michael Snow Site,

1969/2016 Stainless steel, text card 172.7 x 71.1 x 71.1 cm 68 x 28 x 28 inches Courtesy Michael Snow and Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto © Michael Snow

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THE EXHIBITIONS

ART AND CHINA AFTER 1989 THEATER OF THE WORLD

This exhibition is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; with guest cocurators Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Hou Hanru, Artistic Director, MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome.

May|11|2018|– |September|23|2018|

Art and China after 1989 presents work by some sixty key artists and groups active across China and worldwide whose critical provocations aim to forge reality free from ideology, to establish the individual apart from the collective, and to define contemporary Chinese experience in universal terms. Bracketed by the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, it surveys the culture of artistic experimentation during a time characterized by the onset of globalization and the rise of a newly powerful China on the world stage. The exhibition title derives from an installation by Paris-based artist Huang Yong Ping. Theater of the World is a cage-like form whose interior holds different species of insects and reptiles. Constituting a metaphor for the era of globalization, it is inspired both by Chinese cosmology and by Western enlightenment ideas of the panopticon as a structure of control, together with Michel Foucault’s critiques of modernism. For art and China, the year 1989 was both an end and a beginning. The June Fourth Tiananmen Incident that saw a military crackdown on the student protest movement signaled the end of a decade of relatively open political, intellectual, and artistic exploration. It also marked the start of reforms that would launch a new era of accelerated development, international connectedness, and individual possibility, albeit under authoritarian conditions. Artists were at once catalysts and skeptics of the massive changes unfolding around them. Using the critical stance and open-ended forms of international Conceptual art, they created performances, paintings, photography, installations, and video art, and initiated activist projects to engage directly with society. Their emergence during the 1990s and early 2000s coincided with the moment the Western art world began to look beyond its traditional centers, as the phenomenon of global contemporary art started to take shape. Chinese artists were crucial agents in this evolution. Art and China after 1989 is organized

in six chronological, thematic sections throughout the museum’s second floor galleries. For all the diversity the exhibition encompasses, the artists here have all sought to think beyond China’s political fray and simple East-West dogmas. This freedom of a ‘’third space’’ has allowed for a vital distance, and a particular insight, as they contend with the legacies of Chinese history, international modernism, and global neoliberalism of the 1990s. Their rambunctious creativity can expand our ever-widening view of contemporary art and inspire new thinking at a moment when the questions they have faced — of identity, equality, ideology, and control This exhibition is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; with guest cocurators Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Hou Hanru, Artistic Director, MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome.

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GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE EXHIBITIONS

2 0 8

THEATER OF THE WORLD AND THE BRIDGE Huang Yong Ping’s two-part architectural installation is an arena of life. The Bridge, an arching, serpentine cage, contains snakes and turtles crawling among scattered Chinese bronze sculptures of mythological animal forms. Beneath it, live reptiles dart among hundreds of insects inside the tortoise-like structure called Theater of the World. Huang’s design refers to the panopticon, an eighteenth-century prison concept by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham that enabled constant surveillance from a single central point, and that was later taken up by Michel Foucault in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish as a metaphor for how modern societies control their subjects. Huang’s installation is also inspired by the mythological creature and Daoist deity Xuanwu, a hybrid animal with the head and tail of a snake and the body of a tortoise—symbolically the most potent pair in Chinese cosmology, whose union, according to some tales, created the universe. Drawing on Daoist cosmology and magic, Foucault’s theories on modernism as prison, and debates on the ills of globalization, Huang wrote: Is the Theater of the World an insect zoo? […] A space for observing the activity of “insects”? An architectural form as a closed system? A cross between a panopticon and the shamanistic practice of keeping insects? A metaphor for the conflict among different peoples and cultures? Or, rather, a modern representation of the ancient Chinese character gu ?

Qiu Zhijie Map of the Theater of the World, 2017 Ink on paper, mounted to silk, six panels, 240 x 720 cm overall. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift of the artist with additional funds contributed by the International Director’s Council T31.2017 © Qiu Zhijie. Installation view: Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 6, 2017–January 7, 2018.

1993 Wood and metal structure with warming lamps, electric cable, insects (spiders, scorpions, crickets, cockroaches, black beetles, stick insects, centipedes), lizards, toads, and snakes, 150 x 170 x 265 cm overall. litude, nstallation view: 1 & 108, Akad-emie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, October 12-November 14, 1993

Huang Yong Ping Theater of the World,

G A L L E R Y

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GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE EXHIBITIONS

NO U-TURN: 1989 China/Avant-Garde opened in Beijing at the National Art Gallery in early February 1989. This monumental exhibition, held in the institution that epitomized China’s socialist norms, canonized the conceptual and experimental art that had flourished throughout the 1980s. By presenting work that defied easy explanation, including performance art, installation, and ink abstractions, the participants announced a new direction for modern art in China. Gu Dexin installed a wall of blowtorched plastic debris resembling melted body parts, Huang Yong Ping offered a diagrammatic collage showing instructions for tearing down the museum building, and Xiao Lu fired a gun into her own installation, precipitating the first of the exhibition’s two closures. The exhibition’s logo, the “No U-Turn” traffic sign, suggested that after a decade of social and economic reforms there could be no going back. In May three China/Avant-Garde artists—Gu, Huang, and Yang Jiechang—traveled to Paris to participate in Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou. As “the first worldwide exhibition of contemporary art,” this landmark show proposed a reconsideration of Eu-

rocentric art-world hierarchies, juxtaposing established artists from the West with others from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. While the show was criticized for exoticizing work by folk and indigenous artists, its apt selection of Chinese artists hinted at the coming rise of global contemporary art with nuanced works offering radically non-Western viewpoints. Back in Beijing, in the early morning of June 4, the army cleared demonstrators from Tiananmen Square, killing thousands, marking the end of a democracy movement to which advanced art had been closely allied. In the months that followed, the publications and institutions that had catalyzed artistic discussion throughout the 1980s were reined in or shuttered. A period of reflection was followed by a prevailing mood of cynicism as artists and intellectuals lost faith in the party-state’s ideology of reform. Many artists left the country.

B ra c ke t e d b y t h e e n d o f t h e s t u d e n t p ro t e s t s i n Ti a n a n m e n Square in 1989 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World presents works by more than sixty artists and artists’ groups that anticipated, chronicled, and agitated for the sweeping social transformation that saw the rise of China as a global power in the new millennium. The exhibition examines conceptually based performances, paintings, photographs, installations, videos, and socially engaged projects that question consumerism, authoritarianism, and the rapid development transforming society and China’s role in the world, placing their experiments firmly in a global art-historical context. The artists serve as both skeptics of and catalysts for the massive changes unfolding around them, and their work continues to inspire new thinking at a moment when questions of identity, equality, ideology, and control have pressing relevance

NEW MEASUREMENT: ANALYZING THE SITUATION

The events of 1989 and their aftermath transformed China. Artists faced the era following the Tiananmen crackdown in a spirit of sustained, measured reflection, moving toward analytic, conceptual work that had begun to emerge during the 1980s. Across the country, a critical consciousness doubtful of authority systems, including bureaucracy, ideology, and language itself, drove artists to unmask social conventions and to try to expose the processes that perpetuated complicity. A loosely affiliated group of artists with ties to the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, including Geng Jianyi, Qiu Zhijie, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhang Peili, produced a steady stream of conceptual projects. Many of their works evinced mechanistic processes, documentary sensibilities, and minimalist means that slyly mimicked the systems the artists sought to subvert. In Beijing, the New Measurement Group—a collective of three artists whose cooperation aimed to eliminate all traces of any single individual’s input— pursued a distillation of art into itemized rules and instructions. In Shanghai, abstract painters such as Yu Youhan and Ding Yi developed rigorous mark-making systems. While they channeled the Conceptual practices of earlier artists in Europe, the United States, and Japan.

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THE EXHIBITIONS

2 0 5

FIVE HOURS: CAPITALISM, URBANISM, REALISM The spring of 1992—when Communist Party statesman Deng Xiaoping made his “Southern Tour” to promote a new chapter of economic liberalization—may have been an even more significant turning point for China than 1989. From that moment, the path forward turned away from socialist command and toward free-market capitalism and neoliberalism. Earlier dreams of democratic transition would succumb to a new kind of authoritarianism. Urbanization and globalization would occur at an unprecedented scale and speed. The key artistic impulse that accompanied this transition was the resurgence of “realism.” The first stirrings occurred in Beijing, as a group of figurative painters at the Central Academy of Fine Arts began to use the techniques of Socialist Realism to reveal the drab experiences of individuals in the throes of enormous social change. Like their contemporaries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, these artists turned their academic training to the hapless, disaffected lives of those at the fringes of a new society.

The speed and scale of the Pearl River Delta’s urban transformation was the most exaggerated. Its cacophony attracted Dutch architect and thinker Rem Koolhaas, who wrote in his groundbreaking research on this region, “A maelstrom of modernization is destroying everywhere the existing conditions and everywhere creating a completely new urban substance.” This urbanism, which Koolhaas saw as doubly characterized by a lack of “plausible, universal doctrines” and an “unprecedented intensity of production,” proved compelling to Guangzhou’s Big Tail Elephant Working Group, who used art to engage with and intervene in the rapidly changing environment. For artists working in cities throughout China, an urgent new reality became at once the inspiration and the medium for a new kind of social art, which used the raw conditions of daily life to comment on the velocity of economic transformation.

For artists working in cities throughout China, an urgent new reality became at once the inspiration and the medium for a new kind of social art, which used the raw conditions of daily life to comment on the velocity of economic transformation.

G A L L E R Y

Chen Shaoxiong Five Hours 1993/ 2003 Fluorescent lights, electricity meters, permanent marker on wood board, plastic tubes, and electrical wire, 72 x 120 x 90 cm overall. DSL Collection

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THE EXHIBITIONS

1996 36 chromogenic prints, 61 x 40 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery, Beijing

Runn i Chin ng alongs i a is a pa de the exhib iting rallel hist history of natio ory o a b ro conte a n f rary a al bienni d. In the Chinese mporary a a 1 a r r them t staged s ls and exh 990s and rtists wor t inside k weep es su e i i b n a i g an r tion ly 2 ch in Work s by C as identi g narrativ s of glob 000s, int d plars al co ty, di es en erhine n a i g stand n these e se artists spora, an aged wit tempod h x w cons the new w hibitions. ere often globaliza topical cious t ays in Som ion. p rom them e o , and f both wh which the artists ca inent exe Guo y wer me t mat thi -Q how, u o e Yang iang, C sing avrt s system being p underre ,t he m J ditio iechang n Zhen, hey migh ight expe sented, S nal C t ct fro re c o hen Y subv and h philo inese ae uped tra uan, and ert it. Cai m sthet soph cultu ic y r like g ally char , along w s g u i t h e m npowder e d m e d i t h ums s e l ve and i terna nk, to s as s t h the m ive reality amans o cast f th led in odern We at could an alc s sexp what Ch t’s ills. Th ounter e e e mult rience” o n called y reveiple t the “ f l i v ing i emp world n b t ra n or v unru iews. Th alities, cu et ween ly e l mid- conditio y sought tures, and 1990 n fan t o giv s ta critic a l l e n other arti stic form e t h a t s used . By t ses to ts ha h t d a new o serve th the ways turned t e h e t l h pend y global multicult eir work eir u e a portu d on thes rt world, ral dema was nd e inte e ve n nities muse rnatio in the as th s of u e ists su m and ga absence o nal exhib y dei t l c f i l on o e h a r we as ys their anxie Yan Lei a ystem ins ll-develop pnd Z es an ide C t y ab ed ho d o h forei satire to ut this in u Tiehai ina. Artg t e C h i n n curator expose th erface by xpressed s and ese a using e dis critic c re a s tortin rt wo h oa x s i In 20 ngly invo r l d . Re a l were wie g influen -w ld c lv 0 force 1 a U.S. ed China o r l d e ve ing over e spy p t d to h , n t s, w also b e la m land. Hu a n a k e a n e n e n i c k n e g a n t o h i c h i n m e rg plore amed inter g Yon v d e ical r the nuan g P ing’s ncy land “The Ba ene. Bat P ealiti t i c ” n e wa g d o es ar c o u n d o m p l e x i ro j e c t s h o n H a i n a n s ty the t u r n o of the sh w s h o w a r Is t f the i m i l l e f t i n g g e o p e xnnium olit.

Song Dong Stamping the Water

OTHERWHERE: TRAVELS THROUGH HE IN-BETWEEN

2 0 7&2 0 9

B r a c e y o u r s e l f f o r t h e G u g g e n h e i m ’s m u c h - h y p e d A r t a n d C h i n a A f t e r 1 9 8 9 : T h e a t e r o f t h e Wo r l d , a p o w e r f u l , e v e n u n n e r v i n g s h o w s h o t t h r o u g h w i t h v i o l e n c e a n d s t u d i e d u g l i n e s s . Fo r s t a r t e r s , t h e r e’s L i u X i a o d o n g ’s p a i n t i n g o f t w o y o u n g m e n a p a t h e t i c a l l y b u r n i n g a r a t a l i v e, Ze n g Fa n z h i ’s b u t c h e r s h o p s t o c k e d w i t h bloody meat and bony men, and Zhang Peili’s installation of TV moni t o r s w h e r e d i s e m b o d i e d f i n g e r s s c r a t c h a t s k i n u n t i l i t t u r n s r a w. Then there’s the gruesomeness we’ve been spared. Just before the show o p e n e d , t h e G u g g e n h e i m ya n ke d t h re e p i e c e s i n vo l v i n g a n i m a l s. In Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s video, “Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other”, enraged pit bulls leashed to treadmills strain towards each other in a ceaseless bloodthirsty run. In another video, Xu Bing filmed pigs c o p u l a t i n g i n a f ro n t o f a g a w p i n g g a l l e r y a u d i e n c e. S i n c e t h e p e rformers are hybrids of American Yorkshire and Changbai breeds, emblazoned with bicultural tattoos, the artist describes the spectacle as a parable for the violent but fruitful meeting of east and west.

G A L L E R Y

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THE EXHIBITIONS

G A L L E R Y

2 0 2&2 0 3

WHOSE UTOPIA: ACTIVISM AND ALTERNATIVES CIRCA In July 2001 Beijing won its bid to host the Olympics. In November of that year China was accepted into the World Trade Organization. The international validation conferred by these two events sparked a sense of anticipation that intensified as countdown clocks across China ticked down to the Opening Ceremony: at 8 p.m. on August 8, 2008, China took its place as a global power. But for many artists, Beijing’s spectacular pageant failed to rouse the expectedtriumphalism. Rather, what developed in 2008—the year that also saw the tragic Sichuan earthquake in May and the global financial collapse in October—was a concerted social activism born of an urgent need to change the course of events. Against this backdrop, several multiyear communal projects led by artists, critics, curators, and activists emerged around the country, ranging from Ai Weiwei’s political mobilization to Ou Ning’s rural reconstruction project. Skeptical of the party-state’s Olympic motto, “One World, One Dream,” the artists and collectives in this section created their own asylums, sanctuaries, and laboratories, seeking to effect social change through direct action in virtual and real communities. They were at the crest of a broad international current of artist-activists pushing for participatory, socially engaged practices—something beyond the white-cube gallery. The common medium was now the Internet, which provided both a social-network infrastructure, as in the Shanghai Contemporary Art Archive Project, and an alternative social reality, as in Cao Fei’s RMB City. These artists have been similarly engaged in constructing worlds outside the limitations of artistic space, shaping individual lives, and overcoming if not overturning endemic problems. They seek to change real-world conditions through the power of imagination and truth. Cao Fei Whose Utopia

2006 Color video, with sound, 22 min. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members 2007.130

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GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE EXHIBITIONS

2 0 3

CODA

Gu Dexin is the conscience of his generation. His frieze of thirty-five panels contains eleven sentences written in the font and vermilion red typical of official signage and political campaigns. The text repeats: We have killed people we have killed men we have killed women we have killed old people we have killed children we haveeaten people we have eatenhearts we haveeaten human brains we have beaten people we have beaten people blind we have beaten open people's faces. To the Chinese eye, these sentences, scrambled but recognizable through repetition, evoke the modern writer Lu Xun's masterpiece "Diary of a Madman" (1918), in which the protagonist gradually realizes that he is surrounded by cannibals. The story was a veiled critique of a culture that valued collectivism over the individual. As the subject of Gu's sentences, an unspecified we, takes responsibility for each unthinkable act, the work implicates the viewer in the moral failings that underlie the social order. By we, Gu means all of us. Ai Weiwei Foreground:

An Archive,

2017 Ink on rice paper, Huali wood Background:

Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation, 2008-11 Injket print

Left:

Yang Jiechang, Lifelines 1, 1999 Ink and acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas, 230 x 590 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Right: Gu Dexin, 2009–05–02

Paint on wood, 74 panels, 64 panels: approximately 200 x 110 cm, 10 panels: approximately 100 x 110 cm. Courtesy GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Habana.

The museum, which claimed to be prepared for controversy, lost its nerve in the face of protests and an online petition of 750,000 signatures. It also pulled the work that gave the exhibition its subtitle. Huang Yong P ing’s “Theater of the World” consists of a massive terrarium where reptiles and insects devour each other in an elaborate Hobbesian allegory. Curator Alexandra Munroe planned to install the piece as an opening flourish in the double-height gallery. She told Artnet that the work would confront visitors with the “visceral realism” that lay in store. “If you can’t survive the high gallery, don’t bother seeing the rest of the show,” Munroe said.

G A L L E R Y

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GUGGENHEIM BILBAO

THE EXHIBITIONS

G A L L E R Y

3 0 5

CHAGALL

THE BREAKTHROUGH YEARS, 1911–1919

May|2018|– | August |01|2018|

In M pai ay 1 Ma nter L 911, a w h x i m V éon f t e r s Sai o fou inav Bakst tudyi int nt Pet ght fo er, an and s ng at Mo roduc ersbu r equ impo ecuri the s on net, a ed h rg fo al rig rtant ng th choo l i ma y the nd M m to r Paris hts fo lawy e fina l of th e n s a a t r Ru ers t o tisse the m . Alth r Jew r and cial s e Rus s w f o , u s o s t a h i i u , h t did a, C o fi wa der gh M rtis ppo sian e ent a ser hag lled t early s in P nism it wa arc C tic pa rt of als s’ tow ies of all spe he wa avan aris t of C s Baks haga tron h o typ pro n, an draw nt a lls of t-gard at he ézann t who ll left d s t d sce ical J uce of B ings hort he L e bu disc e, M first Th nes t ewish d a se ella of his time ouvre t also overe anet R , e Ch se wo hroug settl t of p osen relati in Vit . Befo the g d not v e a a f e h r r e r m e i g e e On all ks a the en ntin ld, s, o bsk h r , lea at in M arriv ad d e cha stylis t, whi gs on his fia f his a wher ving Hiv ont ing in evelo racte tic pr ch de life i ncée nd hi e he n mia e), w parna Paris ped d rized ism o pict e the . The s parb , h u f v s roo of ev ere, se, b he li ring y the pop eryd shtelt re he wit ms a ery la in the ut so ved fo his st free ular R ay Je , the n De h writ d ch nd” w artis on m r a fe ay in S use o ussia wish f e l lau auna r Bla eap a as ga t’s ow oved w mo aint P colo n art. r n m t y n t i e t wo e A . Th se C ists’ here wor o “L ths ters r that pe rk, re pollin e De endr studio d. In t ds, “t a Ru in a st burg. a f r c mo imen errin aire, launa rs an s, he his gr he art he” ( udio g e y w d i s v t s a s e t e h t per me d w o it o s int arti ruc t hi tic b The him iod, w nt, a ith c as “s oon b roduc sts So k up f ve of ohefer , Ch hich nd his olors, upern ecam ed h nia a riend small i rat ent un agall refle own abst atura e a c m to nd Ro ships ee n r c i l h a i m a ” t v lan lem ers rrat the ag ct a . Th amp poet bert ist, guag ents es wh es his influ inings nd ge e art ion o Guila u Expr e of f conta ich th pers ence . In th ome ist the f his to nique essio usion ined e arti onal w of th e wo tric fo n ext do ell hi ama nist, O that c in it. L st uni orld e “ism rks of rms, , t w exa (191 s own lgam rph anno ike Y es th mad s” aro that i r i o d of mple 3), p story f sty c, or t be v dish ough e up o und t a rec he ci of th inted . The les th Surre iewe , his is the d f difd olle ty a e w a a i a p ctio nd ork in his ictur t he u list, b solel sing spay t u s e u s o h ns and e thi f this tudio Paris es an t rep as Cu lar ima ngs per in “L thr d tra rese bges hap iod, a R oug nsf nts of h pen whe uch h th orm is n ing t n h e”, i e W s ativ he is p s a ine V re is erce clea r iteb mi p sk. xed tion wit h

PARIS, HIVE OF ARTISTS

Marc Chagallv The Yellow Room (La chambre jaune),

1911 Oil on canvas 84.2 x 112 cm Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/ Basel, Ernst and Hildy Beyeler Collection Photo: Robert Bayer © Marc Chagall, Vegap, Bilbao 2018

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G A L L E R Y

3 0 6

FROM PARIS TO VITEBSK, PASSING THROUGH BERLIN

Goodman notes that during this period in Russia, Jews had two basic alternatives for joining the art world: One was to "hide or deny one's Jewish roots". The other alternative—the one that Chagall chose—was "to cherish and publicly express one's Jewish roots" by integrating them into his art. For Chagall, this was also his means of "self-assertion and an expression of principle." Chagall biographer Franz Meyer, explains that with the connections between his art and early life "the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment for his art." Lewis adds, "

The people whose company Chagall frequented in Paris appear in his Homage to Apollinaire (1913), a picture that arose from his admiration for the poet of the title, whose name is written on the canvas alongside those of Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, Italian journalist and dramatist Ricciotto Canudo (considered the father of film theory), and German gallerist and critic Herwarth Walden. Together they formed Chagall’s closest circle, represented as such by the artist in a work whose central theme is the birth of Adam and Eve according to Genesis in the Jewish oral tradition, which has it that God created man and woman in a single body. The heads in this work by Chagall are moreover rooted in the classical tradition of Masaccio. Herwarth Walden invited Chagall in 1914 to exhibit at his Berlin gallery, Der Sturm, and Chagall opened his first major solo exhibition there in June of that same year. Until then he had taken part in collective events, like the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, but at Der Sturm he presented 40 paintings and 160 drawings, gouaches, and watercolors from his Parisian period which made a considerable impression among the German Expressionists. He returned soon after to Vitebsk to attend his sister’s wedding and be reunited with his fiancée, but the outbreak of World War I trapped him inside Russia for what turned out to be eight years of tumultuous change. Chagall relates his experiences through his art. His drawings, rather like German Expressionist woodcuts, reflect the consequences of war, while in other works he depicts landscapes and everyday scenes in a more restrained language, with limited forms and colors that sometimes include “logical” associationsWWW and scales. However, Chagall’s imagination started to fly once more when he depicted his love for Bella Rosenfeld, as we can see in Birthday (1915) or Lovers in Blue (1914). Marc Chagall Self-Portrait

I lie between those two worlds, looking out of the window. —Marc Chagall, My Life

1914 Oil on cardboard mounted on canvas 50.5 x 38 cm Im Obersteg Collection, permanent loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel, 2004, Inv. Im 1081 © Marc Chagall, Vegap, Bilbao 2018

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TRADITION AND REVOLUTION During World War I, a large number of Jews were deported by Tsarist Russia under the accusation of collaborationism. Those were years when the Jewish cause and Sionism found some support in the international arena, but also encountered detractors. In this atmosphere of confrontation, Marc Chagall returned to themes related to his identity, the folklore and ethnography of his people, which he treated with the secular focus that characterizes him. Outstanding works of this period include the Jews in green, red, and black and white, seen together here, which formed part of what Chagall called his “Documents.” Here he does not take his memories as a starting point for his work, as he did in Paris, but instead draws all kinds of motifs from his immediate surroundings—a beggar, a clock, a mirror, or a newspaper vendor—and fills them with significance by adding texts in Yiddish, Hebrew, or Cyrillic and elements like the tallit (Jewish prayer shawl) or the tefillin (straps with small boxes containing texts). Also shown in this gallery are two practically identical works, both unofficially known as The Rabbi, whose principal difference lies in the period of more than a decade that separates their respective executions. When Chagall was trapped in Russia by the war, some of his acquaintances presumed he was dead. One was his gallerist in Berlin, who sold off many of the works Chagall had deposited at Der Sturm in 1914 to private collectors. The artist always regretted the loss of those works, prompting him to repaint some of them, and to acquire the habit from then on of making several versions of his favorite pieces. One example is Jew in Black and White, of which three versions exist today. After the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Jewish upper classes and intellectuals who had held important posts in the cities started to win certain freedoms that until then had been denied them. Chagall joined the Jewish Society for the Development of the Arts, and took an active part in it both with exhibitions and by carrying out major commissions, such as the murals for a professional school. He also illustrated Yiddish books and was commissioned by Alexander Granowsky to design the sets for the Moscow Jewish Chamber Theatre, besides becoming involved in other important events, such as the Jack of Diamonds exhibition, and enrolling in the artists’ union. Like other Jews who saw the Revolution as the solution to inequality, Chagall was an active agent in the Marc Chagall The Promenade (Promenade) 1917- 1918 Oil on canvas 170 x 163.5 cm State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg © Marc Chagall, Vegap, Bilbao 2018

early phases of the new Russia. In 1918 he was appointed Commissar of the Arts in Vitebsk, which gave him authority over the museums and art schools of the region and any artistic event taking place there. During this period, while living in his home town with his wife Bella and daughter Ida, he founded the People’s Art School and invited artists like Lissitzky and Malevich to join its teaching staff. Problems due to artistic and conceptual differences soon arose, and Chagall withdrew from the project in early 1920 and left Vitebsk, bringing this decisive phase of his life to a close.

—Marc Chagall, My Life

3 0 7 I never went out on the street with my box of paints.

I painted everything I saw. I painted at my window.

G A L L E R Y

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June|29|2018– |November|11|2018|

I’M YOUR MIRROR The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the first anthological exhibition in Spain to be devoted to Joana Vasconcelos, without doubt the most internationally reputed Portuguese artist (although born in Paris in 1971) of her generation especially after her participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale and her major exhibition at the Palace of Versailles in 2010. Joana Vasconcelos. I’m Your Mirror, whose title is a tribute to Nico, the celebrated German vocalist who sang I’ll Be Your Mirror with the New York band The Velvet Underground, is a retrospective featuring some thirty pieces produced between 1997 and the present day. Some of the selected worksaare among the best known of her career, such as Burka (2002) and The Bride (2001– 05), while others are more recent or have been created specially for this occasion, like the monumental Egeria (2018), installed in the Atrium. Two giant sculptures, Pop Rooster (2016) and Solitaire (2018), have also been set up outside the Museum. Vasconcelos’s production contains references both to the popular culture of her country (appropriating the rooster of Barcelos, the heart of Viana do Castelo, and the ceramics of Bordalo Pinheiro) and to the most recent theoretical debates in contemporary art, especial-

The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’s creative process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities. Sculptures and installations, which are revealing of an acute sense of scale and mastery of colour, as well as the recourse to performances and video or photographic records, all combine in the materialization of concepts which challenge the pre-arranged routines of the quotidian. Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the ready-made and the grammars of Nouveau Réalisme and pop, the artist offers us a complicit.

Lives and works in Lisbon. She has exhibited regularly since the mid-1990s. Her work became known internationally after her participation in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, with the work A Noiva [The Bride] (2001-05). She was the first woman and the youngest artist to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles, in 2012. Recent highlights of her career include the project Trafaria Praia, for the Pavilion of Portugal at the 55th Venice Biennale; the participation in the group exhibition The World Belongs to You at the Palazzo Grassi/François Pinault Foundation, Venice (2011); and her first retrospective, held at the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon. Other highlights include exhibitions at Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2018); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark (2016); Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2015); Waddesdon Manor - The Rothschild Foundation, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom (2015); Manchester Art Gallery (2014); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2013); Palácio Nacional da Ajuda, Lisbon (2013); CENTQUATRE, Paris (2012); Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark (2011); Es Baluard, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2009); Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2009); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2008); The New Art Gallery Walsall, United Kingdom (2007); Istanbul Modern (2006); Passage du Désir/BETC EURO RSCG, Paris (2005); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2003); Műcsarnok, Budapest (2002); Museu da Eletricidade, Lisbon (2001); and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2000). Her work is represented in private and public collections such as: Amorepacific Museum of Art; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum; Caixa Geral de Depósitos; Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear; Domaine Pommery; FRAC Bourgogne; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création; Fundação EDP; Gerard L. Cafesjian Collection; MUSAC; Museu Coleção Berardo; Pinault Collection.

Joana Vasconcelos

JOANA VASCONCELOS

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THE EXHIBITIONS

ly those concerned with fostering viewer participation in the interpretation of artworks. The artist uses many materials from everyday life, such as household appliances, wall tiles, fabrics, medicines, urinals, pans, and plastic cutlery, exploiting the narrative and emotional charge they hold or release. Her sculptures, usually large-format works that sometimes have movement, sound, or lights are characterized by their chromatic richness and their exuberance. With an attractive sense of humor that shuns dogmatism, her work also explores issues of identity ranging from very intimate questions to universal sociopolitical themes linked to globalized postcolonial societies, such as migration or the exploitation of women. to be produced for the main atrium of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will be one of the most ambitious of this important group of works inspired by the female characters from Norse mythology. Following the Valkyries created for spaces such as the Palazzo Grassi, in Venice, and the legendary Palace of Versailles, or the ARoS Museum of Art and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Joana Vasconcelos will combine different industrial textiles with traditional handmade techniques and LED lights. This series of iconic pieces is characterized by its suspension from the ceiling and its unusual organic forms. The Valkyries have known important and significant evolutions since the first work, created in 2004. This major installation will occupy the main atrium, interacting with Frank Gehry’s architecture, and the exterior through its large glass windows. Seductive bulbous shapes and elongated arms burst out of the main body reaching different levels of the building. Egeria will reveal an exuberant selection of colours, varied textures and rich details, resulting from an assertive combination of industrial textiles and artisanal techniques – patchwork, bead embroidery and crochet. The artist’s challenging work also incorporates thousands of LED lights, creating a spectacular play of light. Egeria will take on the character of a gentle guardian: the sublime heart of the museum that enlightens the creative spirit of woman.

EGERIA, 2018

The monumental Egeria to be produced for the main atrium of Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will be one of the most ambitious of this important group of works inspired by the female characters from Norse mythology. Following the Valkyries created for spaces such as the Palazzo Grassi, in Venice, and the legendary Palace of Versailles, or the ARoS Museum of Art and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Joana Vasconcelos will combine different industrial textiles with traditional handmade techniques and LED lights. This series of iconic pieces is characterized by its suspension from the ceiling and its unusual organic forms. The Valkyries have known important and significant evolutions since the first work, created in 2004. This major installation will occupy the main atrium, interacting with Frank Gehry’s architecture, and the exterior through its large glass windows. Seductive bulbous shapes and elongated arms burst out of the main body reaching different levels of the building. Egeria will reveal an exuberant selection of colours, varied textures and rich details, resulting from an assertive combination of industrial textiles and artisanal techniques – patchwork, bead embroidery and crochet. The artist’s challenging work also incorporates thousands of LED lights, creating a spectacular play of light. Egeria will take on the character of a gentle guardian: the sublime heart of the museum that enlightens the creative spirit of woman.

POP GALO, 2016

Pop Galo is a monumental public art work inspired by one of the most relevant symbols of popular Portuguese culture: the rooster of Barcelos. Aware of its aesthetic value and iconic power, the artist revisited the rooster of Barcelos with a contemporary look, allying the tradition of national handmade tile-making to the more modern LED technology. Keeping the aesthetic richness of the rooster of Barcelos, the artist makes four important transformations to this symbol: enlarges it to a monumental scale – 10 metres high; covers it with around 17 thousand handmade tiles – designed at the artist's studio and manually produced and painted at the centenarian Viúva Lamego factory; and introduces a dazzling game of sound and light, through the composition by musician Jonas Runa and thousands of LED lights – approximately 15 thousand – that fill the coloured surface of the work, conferring to this technological Rooster of Barcelos different interpretations, transforming the work from day to night. The extraordinary richness of the multiple symbologies associated to the rooster in different countries and cultures confer the work a singular capacity of international outreach.

A NOIVA, 2001-2005 Recognizable from a distance, an imposing chandelier displays a candid cascade of glistening pendants. When stepping closer to it, the viewer is surprised. Appearing at first to be made of glass or crystal, the thousands of pendants are in fact immaculate feminine tampons. Its shine results, after all, from the reflection of light upon the transparent plastic wrappings of the thousands of tampons composing The Bride; a work thus titled in order to expose the imposition of a hypocritical and repressed feminine sexuality to the corrosive action of irony and ambiguity.

CALL CENTER, 2014-2016 Call Center presents itself under the form of an enormous Beretta revolver built with recourse to the accumulation of 168 black landline telephones, each of the same exact model. The hyperbolized form of a Beretta revolver, built using dozens of telephones, points directly towards the violence that may be produced through the power of mass communication. The title, associated to the referenced objects, appears to report to the manipulation and dehumanized excess that is characteristic of many call centers. A weapon doesn’t free itself from its violent load - however noble may be the reason of its use; moreover, communication – when at a large scale, standardized, controlled aand manipulative – will always be an exercise that overpowers the individual’s infinite singularities. -Answering to the artist’s challenge, musician Jonas Runa composed an electroacoustic symphony for the telephone rings. Each ring was slightly altered in order to produce different notes, transforming the work into a musical instrument. Some of the suspended receivers and, most of all, the powerful speaker installed in the interior of the “revolver” cannon work as the vehicles for the electronics that integrate this singular and intense electroacoustic symphony, transporting us to multiple environments.

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2014–16 Alized and thermo-lacquered mild steel, sound system, and oscillators driven by microcontroller Music: Call Center: Electroacustic Symphony for 168 Telephones, composed by Jonas Runa, 20' 210 x 80 x 299 cm, Tia Collection © Joana Vasconcelos, VEGAP, Bilbao, 2018

exposing the artificiality of the boundaries between luxury and banality, popular culture and high culture. Independent Heart presents itself as a powerful and Red Independent Heart presents an enormous “heart emotive installation of sound and movement; a dipof Viana,” an iconic piece of Portuguese filigree, entiretych dedicated to wealth, love, and death, recurring ly comprised of red plastic cutlery. Suspended from an themes in the lyrics of fado. axe, the work makes a circular rotation movement evoking the cycle of life and the eternal return, accompanied by the sound of three meaningful fado songs, Estranha Forma de Vida [Strange Way of Life], Gaivota [Seagull], and Maldição [Curse], performed by Amália Rodrigues, diva of Portuguese music in the second half of the 20th century. The title of the work is taken precisely from a verse of the first of these fados, written by Alfredo Duarte (Marceneiro) and Amália Rodrigues, whose lyrics invoke the conflict between emotion and reason. By using a large amount of plastic cutlery, this artwork, inspired by a precious piece of filigree, reaches the abstraction of its original forms, so that the initial referents are transfigured by the suggested new social and artistic systems, thus

Joana Vasconcelos Call Center,

INDEPENDENT HEART

concept & design

Zuzanna Malinowska

promoter

prof. nadzw. Sławomir Kosmynka

edit & text from the website

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photos from the website

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font

Verlag Publication only for the diploma of graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź.