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Geneva, Switzerland
Musée Rath
Alberto Giacometti
Dates: 5 Nov 09 - 21 Feb 10
Categories: Modern (1900-1945)
Post-War (1945-70)
Address: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 1, Place Neuve Geneva CH-1204
Tel: +41 (0)22 3105270 Website
After a 20-year break from Giacometti (the last Genevan exhibition was in 1986), the curator of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Nadia Schneider, has designed an exhibition of sculpture, drawings, notebooks and photographs illustrative of his career between 1835 and 1946. In this period, he abandoned the influences of his impressionist-inspired father, Giovanni, and of the surrealists, and turned to figurative art, in particular to representations of the human body. The early part of this period sees the diminution of heads and figures which later becomes an investigation of the relationship between distance and dimension. This chapter is bracketed by earlier and later works to highlight this radical change. The exhibition has been made in collaboration with the Fondation Alberto Giacometti, Zurich, which has loaned a number of the exhibits.
Man Walking in the Rain, 1948
Houston, USA
Menil Collection
Body in Fragments
Dates: 21 Aug 09 - 28 Feb 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 1515 Sul Ross Houston 77006
Tel: +1 713 525 9400 Website
Kansas City, USA
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
WIthout Place, without Time, without Body
Dates: 26 Sep 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 4525 Oak Street Kansas City 64111-1873
Tel: +1 816 561 4000 Website
London, United Kingdom
Hayward Gallery
Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting
Dates: 14 Oct 09 - 10 Jan 10
Categories: Post-War (1945-70)
Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road London SE1 8XX
Tel: +44 (0)20 7921 0813 Website
“Each piece cultivates its own labyrinth that you can enter in to, if you were to spend a little time thinking about it.” So says Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff, but it’s not a sentence you would immediately associate with the minimal paintings of Ed Ruscha. Rugoff says that through his experience of curating this autumn’s exhibition, he has discovered “layers and layers” to these “deceptively simple-looking” paintings. “The more you think about them, the more you can spin out all sorts of references and resonances that these works are setting into play,” he told The Art Newspaper.
The show of 78 works, many of which haven’t been shown before in the UK, celebrates 50 years since Ruscha first made paintings that he would include in his “official body of work”. “These were works that he made when he was still a student, but works that he feels could represent him,” says Rugoff.
Ruscha started out in the late 1950s looking at print media, magazines and books, which led to his focus on words, but treating words as objects or images rather than carriers of linguistic meaning. He became interested in the graphic potential of words and the ambiguity of communication. “One thing Ed often says is that he associates the word, because of the way it unfurls horizontally, with landscape,” Rugoff says. “He is taking a very broad definition of what landscape might be. Unless you’re painting people, which is something he doesn’t do, all painting might be related to landscape.”
Ruscha has also been very influenced by film, particularly widescreen formats such as cinemascope. Often the proportions of his work reflect this way of framing the world, with pieces that are four or fives times as wide as they are high. “It’s about a type of look, a scanning look,” says Rugoff. “It’s not a static look at one object that’s fixed in place, it’s about a landscape you might be driving through. It’s very much a product of car culture, a reflection on that.” But there is also a fascination with the sublime in Ruscha’s work, images of majestic snow-covered mountains, fiery sunsets or rays of light, a recurring motif in his paintings. “He’s very interested in ideas of grandeur, and how even when these have become clichés, they still awaken certain yearnings in us, we’re still susceptible to them,” says Rugoff.
Following this exhibition, the gallery will be closed until May 2010 for renovations. The show travels to Haus der Kunst, Munich (12 February-2 May 2010) and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (29 May-5 September 2010).R.S.
Standard Station, 1966
New York, USA
Brooklyn Museum
Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets
Dates: 19 Nov 09 - 2 Oct 11
Categories: Archaeology & Ancient art
Address: 200 Eastern Parkway New York 11238-6052
Tel: +1 718 638 5000 Website
Tokyo, Japan
Museum of Contemporary Art
Rebecca Horn
Dates: 31 Oct 09 - 24 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: 4-1-1 Miyoshi, Koto-ku Tokyo 135
Tel: +81 (0)3 5245 4111 Website
It is perhaps surprising that it is only now, at the age of 65, that Rebecca Horn has been honoured by a solo exhibition in Japan. Significant both as a post-war German artist and as a woman artist, Horn was prominent among the creative generation that emerged in the 1960s, producing a body of work that has remained consistent across a wide range of artistic practices, from drawing and photography through performance and film to kinetic sculpture and installation. She has traced her artistic vision to the year she spent convalescing after almost poisoning herself to death at the age of 20 while working with fibreglass without a mask: confined to bed, she passed the time designing extensions to her limbs and body.
A work that brought her early acclaim was Unicorn, 1970, in which a young woman is filmed walking through a wheat field wearing only a tall prosthetic horn on her head; the piece seemed very contemporary, but also tapped into the timeless and mythic. Later extensions often included feathers, and eventually they left the human body behind, to become strangely elegant and affecting automata, often described as “machines with souls”. This exhibition provides an overview of Horn’s 40-year career, from early film works to the “bodylandscapes” of recent years. B.M.
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