Guggenheim Museum Announces Their Upcoming Exhibitions For 2011

The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918 February 4-June 1, 2011. This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation.

When Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group in late 1911, the artists predicted a watershed in the arts, a große Umwälzung (great upheaval) that would radically challenge traditional artistic production. Tremendous creativity and innovation characterized the years leading up to World War I. European cities were evolving, and the artistic avant-garde likewise adapted and responded to twentieth-century modernity, from its spectacles and technological feats to the social fragmentation and alienation of the modern metropolis. Cubism achieved recognition in Paris, sparking new directions in France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Russia. Art's more expressionistic manifestations were at an equally momentous stage in Germany and Austria; Kandinsky wrote his influential treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei (On the Spiritual in Art: And Painting in Particular) in late 1911, and abstraction took hold. The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918 illuminates the dynamism of this fertile period, as artists hurtled toward abstraction and the ultimate "great upheaval" of a catastrophic war, and also highlights the masterpieces of modern art that launched the museum's collection. The exhibition unites the Guggenheim Foundation's remarkable collections in New York and Venice in order to trace the origins of the museum and capture the spirit and dynamism of the European avant-garde. Featuring more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by Umberto Boccioni, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich, Marc, and Pablo Picasso, among others, The Great Upheaval attests to this period of collaboration, interchange, synthesis, and innovation. The exhibition is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, and Megan Fontanella, Assistant Curator of Collections and Provenance. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

In conjunction with The Great Upheaval, the Guggenheim will present two performance programs produced by Charles Fabius and generously supported by the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation:

On April 14, artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will create an installation performance in the Guggenheim rotunda, titled T.1912 and inspired by the historic tragedy that occurred on April 14, 1912. Gavin Bryers's work The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) will be at the core of the installation, performed by Wordless Music Orchestra. There will be two performances and limited tickets.
On April 30, the Guggenheim will present REIGEN ad lib, an adaptation of Der Reigen (1897) by playwright Arthur Schitzler, performed in English by Dood Paard, an avant-garde theater collective based in Amsterdam. Born in Vienna, Schniztler was first trained as a psychiatrist. A close friend of Freud and often considered his literary counterpart, Schnitzler wrote a series of influential works, including Der Reigen (Hands Around), a play considered so scandalous at the time due to its sexual content that it remained banned for more than twenty years, with only one unauthorized performance in Budapest in 1912. Four performances will be held in the Peter B. Lewis Theater. This program is supported in part by public funds from the Netherlands Cultural Services. Two performances will be held in the Peter B. Lewis Theater.
The Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim: Found in Translation
February 11-May 1, 2011
This exhibition is made possible by Deutsche Bank.

In our globalized world, with political, economic, and cultural issues intertwined across nations, boundaries between the local and global have all but disintegrated. The necessity, and the difficulty, of communicating across cultural and historical divides is now an unavoidable aspect of our reality. Within this context, we must consider what can be lost-and gained-in translation, and what effects these endless transformations have on our lives. Found in Translation brings together recent artworks that look to translation, in both its linguistic and more figurative senses, as a means of understanding the world around us. The works in Found in Translation explore the intersections between past political and cultural figures and contemporary history and fantasy, transposed from one culture to another through written or spoken text. Drawn equally from private loans and from the Guggenheim's extensive collection of video, film, and new media, the exhibition focuses on artists who have come of age professionally within the past fifteen years, as political and artistic practice has increasingly engaged the contemporary era of globalization. Among the artists to be included are Patty Chang, Omer Fast, ShaRon Hayes, Steve McQueen, Lisa Oppenheim, and Sharif Waked.

Organized by Associate Curator Nat Trotman, Found in Translation, the third exhibition in the Deutsche Bank Series at the Guggenheim, will travel to Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, in early 2012.

Intervals: Futurefarmers
May 4-13, 2011

San Francisco-based art collective Futurefarmers creates projects that are diverse both in terms of production and in their strategies of audience engagement. Yet as in recent works ranging from antiwar computer games to an online registry of urban land potentially feasible for food cultivation, their projects consistently balance critical and optimistic thought and the use of inventive and pragmatic design elements. In 2005 the group examined the vanishing art of shoemaking in the installation Shoelace Exchange; for the Guggenheim's Intervals series, the group further investigates this craft with a new project created as a site-specific installation for the museum.

As an extension of the existing seating on the ground floor of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda, the cobbler's bench, materials, and racks of a shoemaker's atelier form the nucleus of a series of events in the museum and around the city that address the relationship between the sole and the soul. The atelier is an open interpretation of the studio of Simon the shoemaker in fifth-century Athens, where Socrates led extensive philosophical discussions with Simon and local youth to create an informal classroom.

Futurefarmers opens their ten-day "thinkery" with Sole/Soul Sermons, written and delivered by contemporary writers in the shoemaker's atelier. Futurefarmers will also venture outside the museum and into the urban fabric of New York for more intimate public dialogues with contemporary thinkers in shoe production. The group will also collect sidewalk dirt that will become the main ingredient for a Futurefarmers-made ink. Passersby will print transcripts of the Soul/Sole Sermons and the public dialogues by foot with this ink on sheets of paper laid on the sidewalk in a series of participatory urban actions called the Pedestrian Press.

The exhibition is curated by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design.

THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010: Hans-Peter Feldmann
May 20-September 5, 2011
This exhibition is made possible by HUGO BOSS.

German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann is the eighth artist to win THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE, which was established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. The biennial prize, which is administered by the Guggenheim Foundation, carries an award of $100,000 as well as a solo exhibition at the museum.

Feldmann has spent over four decades conducting a profound investigation into the influence of the visual environment on our subjective reality. His primary strategy depends on the assembly of everyday images and objects into serial form or other carefully orchestrated installations, presenting uninflected archives of the ordinary, ranging from sunsets and unmade beds to children's toys and tourist souvenirs. Although it is often noted that the appropriated photography and artist's books that Feldmann first produced in the 1960s and 1970s anticipated artists' critique of authorship and originality in subsequent decades, his work has always studiously avoided any overt commentary on its subject matter. Unfailingly democratic in both the selection and presentation of his imagery, Feldmann achieves a distinctly unspectacular aesthetic that nonetheless achieves a subtle effect of poetic resonance and suggests the presence of elusive narratives. When asked about his preference for aggregation and collection, his answer is simple: "because you can get more truth."

The exhibition, which is organized by Katherine Brinson, Assistant Curator, will present a new body of work by Feldmann. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity
June 24-September 28, 2011
This exhibition is made possible with lead sponsorship from Samsung.

Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is the first North American museum retrospective devoted to artist, philosopher, and poet Lee Ufan, who has been active in Korea, Japan, and Europe over the last forty years. The exhibition charts the artist's creation of a visual, conceptual, and theoretical language that has radicalized and expanded the possibilities for sculpture and painting. Lee is acclaimed for an innovative body of work that emphasizes process, materials, and the experiential engagement of viewer and site. The exhibition features some ninety works from the 1960s to the present-including a new site-specific installation-and will be installed throughout the museum, beginning with the rotunda floor and extending up the six ramps of the building and into two Annex galleries. The selection of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and installations includes Lee's most iconic works, many presented in America for the first time.

Lee Ufan was born in Korea in 1936. He earned a degree in philosophy from Nihon University, Tokyo, and has from the earliest stages of his work been critically engaged with the writings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Nishida Kitaro. In the late 1960s, Lee came to international prominence as the visionary theorist and most representative practitioner of the influential Japanese art movement Mono-ha (School of Things), applying the theories of structuralism and phenomenology to construct a model of otherness that was highly critical of modernism and in dialogue with international Post-Minimalist practices.

Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art, and Nancy Lim, Asian Art Curatorial Fellow, provided curatorial support. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Maurizio Cattelan: All [Working Title]
Fall 2011-Winter 2012

This retrospective survey will provide an overview of the Italian-born artist's career, now nearly twenty years long but still vital and productive. Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. Working in a vein that can be described as hyperrealist, Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic sculptures and installations that reveal contradictions at the core of modern-day society. While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing cultural critique.

This presentation marks the first time that the entirety of Cattelan's oeuvre will be assembled into a coherent exhibition narrative, with more than 130 works borrowed from private and public collections around the world and ranging from the late 1980s to the present. Long interested in the display of his work as part of his overall conceptual practice, Cattelan has a history of responding to the various contexts in which his art is encountered. His survey exhibition at the Guggenheim will follow suit by providing a platform for him to create a site-specific installation designed to encapsulate his complete production to date. The exhibition will fill the Guggenheim's Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda in an unorthodox and dramatic installation designed by the artist.

The retrospective will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a critical overview of Cattelan's work by the exhibition's curator Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Guggenheim Foundation, and detailed entries about each work on view.

The Harmony of Silence: Kandinsky's Painting with White Border [Working Title]
October 21, 2011-January 15, 2012
This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation.

Vasily Kandinsky's canvas Painting with White Border (Bild mit weissem Rand) was inspired by a trip to Moscow in fall 1912. Upon his return to Munich in December, Kandinsky searched for a way to visually record the "extremely powerful impressions" of his native homeland that lingered in his memory. Over a period of five months, he explored various motifs and compositions in study after study, moving freely between pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and oil. After he produced at least 16 studies, Kandinsky finally arrived at the pictorial solution to the painting: the white border. This focused exhibition, co-organized with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., will bring the Guggenheim's final version of the painting together with more than 12 preparatory drawings and watercolors and two major oil sketches, as well as feature the results of an extensive conservation study of the Phillips and Guggenheim paintings. A rare glimpse into Kandinsky's creative process, this presentation reveals the gradual and deliberate way the artist sought to translate his ideas into a bold new language of abstraction. This exhibition is curated by Elsa Smithgall, Curator, the Phillips Collection, and Tracey Bashkoff, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition will be presented at the Phillips Collection from June 11 to September 4, 2011.

Kandinsky's work is a cornerstone of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's collection. The museum's founder, industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim, began acquiring Kandinsky's paintings as early as 1929, and today, the Guggenheim's holdings of his work are among the most extensive in the world. In 2009, as part of its 50th anniversary celebration, the museum mounted the major retrospective Kandinsky.

VISITOR INFORMATION
Admission: Adults $18, students/seniors (65+) $15, members and children under 12 free. Admission includes an audio tour of the current exhibition available in English, and of highlights of the Guggenheim's Permanent Collection, available in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

Museum Hours: Sun-Wed, 10 am-5:45 pm; Fri, 10 am-5:45 pm; Sat, 10 am-7:45 pm; closed Thurs. On Saturdays, beginning at 5:45 pm, the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information, call 212 423 3500 or visit guggenheim.org.

 

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