Sigmar Polke's thirty-five-year career, during which he has produced a vast range of work in all mediums, has earned him a reputation as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Born in 1941, he began his creative output around 1963 in Dusseldorf during a time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere. Few of his works demonstrate more vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and subversive approach than the drawings, watercolors, and gouaches produced during the 1960s and early 1970s. Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions.
Born in 1964, New York-based Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone is one of the leading voices in the contemporary visual arts. Using photography, video, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, and text in turn, he is a virtuoso of forms and techniques.Rondinone particularly enjoys destabilizing the viewers' perceptions and unsettling their certainties by developing surprising sensorial environments. Rearranging content and formal elements through a personal poetic filter while drawing directly on the outside world, he envelops the audience in a synesthetic experience.The artist has developed very precise and repetitive series--clown sculptures and videos, target acrylic paintings on linen, rubber masks, aluminum face sculptures, oversized wax lightbulbs, striped paintings on polyester, stone sculptures, landscape ink painting, bronze still-life objects, video and sound installations--through which he explores themes of fantasy and desire, branching out in literature and poetry, contemporary cinema, and the visual arts.A new series of three publications extensively documents three of his most renowned series: the Landscape paintings, the Horizon paintings, and the Sun paintings. In the third volume dedicated to the Landscapes paintings (1989-2011), critic and curator Bice Curiger proposes an historical and poetical reading of this body of work, while Kunsthalle Bremen Curator of Prints Anne Buschhoff offers an iconographic perspective on them.She concludes, "With his forest pieces, Rondinone has developed a private iconography of landscape--a pictorial reality, which plays with the purportedly real, and heightens it to the point of the surreal. In doing so, he opens spaces of imagination in the viewer. But above all, in doing so, he places nature entirely at his own disposal, turning it into the biographical. The forest is a psychological space--the forest is Rondinone.
Riotous Baroque" confronts pictures from the seventeenth century with art of the present day. The exhibition focuses on the "riotous" aspect and the proximity to life that is a recurring theme in the literature on the Baroque. The show wishes to extricate the concept of the Baroque from its conventional context within the history of style and to distance itself from formai artistic clichés. "Riotous Baroque" is not about pomp, ornament and gold, but about "Tributes to Precarious Vitality" - a vitality that is lived, rediscovered, lost, projected, and threatened by death.
In the 21st century we have witnessed a significant expansion in the field of transhistorical exhibition practice. A range of curatorial efforts have emerged in which objects and artefacts from various periods and art historical and cultural contexts are combined in display, in an effort to question and expand traditional museological notions such as chronology, context, and category. Such experiments in transcending art historical boundaries can result in fresh insights into the workings of entrenched historical presumptions, providing a space to reassess interpretations of individual objects. With contributions by Mieke Bal, Hendrik Folkerts, Nicola Setari, Maria Iñigo Clavo, and others.
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