calendario eventi  :: 

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18/10/2010

Two exhibitions

Metropolitan Museum of Art - MET, New York

Innovative Furniture by American Designer
Charles Rohlfs Displayed at Metropolitan Museum

Praised by the international press and exhibited throughout the United States and Europe at the turn of the 20th century, the American furniture designer Charles Rohlfs (1853–1936) created innovative works that combined elements of Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, and proto-modernism in surprising and original ways. In a meteoric career that barely spanned one decade, he designed only a few hundred works—many of them for his own home. While Rohlfs's forms were too eccentric for the commercial market of his time, he achieved recognition as a unique voice and seminal force in the history of American art furniture.

Opening October 19 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art—the final stop in a five-city tour—the exhibition The Artistic Furniture of Charles Rohlfs examines the designer's singular style through 50 examples of furniture and related objects. Many of the works descended in his family; others are on loan from museums and private collections. The presentation at the Metropolitan will include several unusual works from private collections in the New York area that have not been displayed previously. Rare printed advertising cards and pamphlets for Rohlfs's work—all from the collection of the Metropolitan—will also be shown.

Exhibition Overview

The exhibition explores Rohlfs's life and career, including the activities of his wife, the artist and successful mystery novelist Anna Katharine Green; the far-ranging sources of his idiosyncratic motifs; his commissioned interiors; his efforts at self-promotion and marketing; and his attempts to define a conceptual framework for his artistic endeavor.

Born in Brooklyn in 1853 to a German émigré cabinetmaker, Charles Rohlfs studied drafting and design at the Cooper Union in Manhattan. He earned a living as a designer of cast-iron stoves, was a patternmaker for foundries, and also—with less success—pursued a career as an actor. He married Anna Katharine Green in 1884, and the couple moved to Buffalo in 1887. New research shows that Rohlfs's early experiments with furniture design—which furnished the couple's home—involved close collaboration between husband and wife. When neighbors and guests asked Rohlfs to make furniture for them as well, the hobby became a business. He set up a workshop with a few freelance carvers and, by the 1890s, was promoting himself as a designer of "artistic furniture." Rohlfs produced furniture on commission for the great lodges of several wealthy patrons in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York; received critical acclaim for work he submitted to international exhibitions such as the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and the 1902 Turin International Exposition of Modern Art; and signed a distribution contract with the Chicago department store Marshall Field & Company. Despite these successes, his workshop was in existence for only a few years. As mass-produced furniture became readily available and styles changed, Rohlfs's eccentric ideas did not attract enough of a following to sustain the business. He all but abandoned cabinetry and became active in civic affairs.

Made of oak stained a matte brown, Rohlfs's furniture was embellished primarily by means of elaborate carving. Although the designer denied any connection to a particular movement or style, his inventive silhouettes and imaginative carving combined many different sources, from the abstract naturalism of Art Nouveau to the bold shapes and materials characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement. His virtuosic carving recalled Chinese and Japanese forms and highly stylized renditions of nature. He claimed that his individual inspiration came from the natural grain of oak and his own creative imagination. As an example, the carving on one desk chair resembles the cellular structure of oak as seen through a microscope. Other unusual works include a table with legs at the mid-point of each side (rather than at the corners), numerous three-legged chairs with sculptural or filigreed arm- and backrests, and a tapered clock.

Publication and Related Programs
A fully illustrated catalogue by Joseph Cunningham, published by Yale University Press in association with American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation, will be available for purchase in the Museum's bookshops ($65 hardcover; $50 paperback).

Education programs organized in conjunction with the exhibition include a Sunday at the Met lecture program on December 5, gallery talks and documentary films for general audiences, and gallery conversations for teens (ages 11–14 and 15–18), all of which are free with Museum admission.

The exhibition will be featured on the Museum's website.

Credits
The exhibition was organized by Joseph Cunningham, curatorial director of American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation. At the Metropolitan, the exhibition is organized by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts. Exhibition design is by Michael Batista, Exhibition Design Manager; graphics are by Emil Micha, Senior Graphic Design Manager; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers, all of the Museum's Design Department. Prior to its showing at the Metropolitan Museum, the exhibition was on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), and The Huntington Library (San Marino, California).

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Katrin Sigurdardottir

Sculptural Installations by Contemporary Icelandic Artist Katrin Sigurdardottir on View October 19 at Metropolitan Museum.
Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met is an exhibition of two new sculptural installations created specifically for the Metropolitan by Sigurdardottir, an Icelandic artist (born in 1967), who lives and works in New York City and Reykjavik. Sigurdardottir is known for her highly detailed renditions of places, both real and fictional, that often incorporate an element of surprise.

Entitled Boiseries, the installations are full-scale interpretations of 18th-century French rooms preserved at the Metropolitan Museum, one from the Hôtel de Crillon (1777-80) on the Place de la Concorde, Paris, and the other from the Hôtel de Cabris (ca. 1774) at Grasse in Provence.

Visitors to the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing's south mezzanine gallery will encounter one Boiserie as the exterior of an enclosed chamber. Looking through surveillance mirrors, they will be able to see inside the room that Sigurdardottir has created, complete with replica furniture based on the Hôtel de Crillon period room in the Museum's Wrightsman Galleries.

In contrast, visitors to the north mezzanine gallery will be invited to walk among panels of the second Boiserie, based on the Hôtel de Cabris period room, where Sigurdardottir has altered scale and proportion to create something akin to a folding screen rather than an enclosed space.

The installations will address simultaneously the wonder and the complexities of presenting and viewing a period room as an object in a museum, and they will provoke self-conscious reflection of the museum experience. Inspired by authentic interiors, with carved and gilded paneling, the artist's distilled environments are composed of materials including fiberboard, mirrors, and white paint. One is entirely handcrafted, following centuries-old traditions; the other is digitally machined, using advanced technological and fabrication techniques.

Katrin Sigurdardottir at the Met is organized by Anne L. Strauss, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. It is the seventh in the Metropolitan's series of solo exhibitions of the work of contemporary artists at mid-career, which has featured Tony Oursler (2005), Kara Walker (2006), Neo Rauch (2007), Tara Donovan (2008), Raqib Shaw (2008-2009), and Pablo Bronstein (2009-2010).

Katrin Sigurdardottir's work has been the subject of exhibitions at galleries and museums, including S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent (2009), Reykjavik Museum of Art (2000-2008), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006), The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2005), Sala Siqueiros, Mexico City (2005), and Fondazione Sandretto Turin (2004).

Image: Katrin Sigurdardottir. Boiserie (detail), 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Communications Department
Contact: Elyse Topalian, Naomi Takafuchi
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198 tel (212) 570-3951 fax (212) 472-2764 communications@metmuseum.org

Press preview: Monday, October 18, 10:00 a.m.–noon
Openin 19 October 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
Hours: Tuesday–Thursday: 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
Friday and Saturday: 9:30 a.m.–9:00 p.m.
Sunday: 9:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.
(Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day)

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