calendario eventi  :: 

X

19/5/2011

Two exhibitions

Malmo Konsthall, Malmo

Anna Maria Maiolino

An exhibition organised by Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, and coproduced with Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, and Malmö Konsthall.

Malmö Konsthall is pleased to present the first major European retrospective of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942). Maiolino’s complex works have developed through a variety of media: poetry, woodcuts, photography, film, performance, sculpture, installation and, above all, drawing. The wide spectrum of subjects, interests and attitudes that underlies her work does not follow a linear development, either in the work itself or in time. Rather, through the diversity of her work, she creates a web where themes and attitudes intertwine while meanings slip between one work and another.

In this way, the subject of her first woodcuts and reliefs from the mid-1960s, which relate language to food and allude to scatology, reappear in two actions from 1978 (Monumento à Fome (Monument to Hunger) and Estado Escatológico (Scatological State)), which exemplify Maiolino’s embracement of the theme of the body: to connect what comes in and out of it. This subject reappears in the 1990s, firstly in the sculptures that evoke food on a platter or scatological forms, and later in the installations where the artist accumulates basic clay forms that resemble pre-industrial accumulations or excrement. These installations of rudimentary, equal and different forms, directly moulded from primordial and repetitive hand gestures, evoke the pulse of life in everyday objects and insignificant gestures. Made of unfired clay, these big installations are ephemeral, as the clay, once dry, slowly turns to dust. The sculptures and installations from this period appeal to our tactile senses rather than the visual. Anna Maria Maiolino will make a site-specific clay installation for Malmö Konsthall’s project space, C-salen.

The correspondence of Maiolino’s work with excrement is directly related to the construction of subjectivity. The subject is formed by language but also by the abject, by what has been expelled from the body and transformed into an alien element. And therefore, the abject establishes not only the limits of the body that are socially regulated and controlled, but also the limits of the subject.

For Maiolino, subjectivity is relational and her work moves between dichotomies — in-out, positive-negative, absence-presence — that are constantly reconnecting in a process of transformation. In her drawings from the 1970s, which she defines as works ‘with’ paper, not ‘on’ paper, Maiolino is interested in the space that is not visible, in what lies behind. To that end, she cuts, tears, rips and then stitches or superimposes the different papers, incorporating the back of the work, in an attempt to unite dichotomies and explore the corporality of the material. The artist uses paper as space and body. These works reveal an intimate negotiation of space, and the holes seem to allude to the interior space we imagine within ourselves

In Maiolino’s work, there are also numerous allusions to the political situation in Brazil during the years of the dictatorship. Her film In-Out (Antropofagia) (In-Out (Anthropophagy)), 1973, unites language and body through saliva, while talking about censorship and the lack of freedom during those years. This subject is present in many of the artist’s works, such as the performances Entrevidas (Between Lives), 1981. Here, the artist walks slowly on a floor full of eggs that evoke the biological mandate of reproduction, while the path taken by the artist suggests a caring for life and its potentiality. This performance was realised at a time when Brazil was beginning to open up to democracy.

Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Scalea, Calabria, in 1942. She emigrated with her family to Venezuela, before settling permanently in Brazil at the age of 18. She participated in various events and exhibitions of the Neo-Concrete movement, together with Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, although, being much younger, she never belonged to the group. This movement, which renovated Brazilian art, abandoned the dominant trend for geometrical abstraction and sought to reconnect art and life by echoing the social resurgence of the body and subjectivity.

Solo exhibitions include among others Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2010); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2005), and The Drawing Center New York, USA (2002). She has also participated in several group exhibitions, such as Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2010, 1998 and 1994) and Sidney Biennial, Australia (2008).

-----------

Poul Gernes
Retrospective

Organized by Malmö Konsthall and Lunds konsthall in cooperation with Deichtorhallen Hamburg

The painter, sculptor and filmmaker Poul Gernes (1925-1996) is considered a modern classic and numbers among the most influential of Scandinavian artists. He constantly sought to link art to life by means of colour and design. In the 50 years Poul Gernes was active he had numerous exhibitions and he shaped the face of more than 150 buildings in Denmark. He left behind an impressive oevre, which is fascinating on account of its extraordinary complexity.

Malmö Konsthall and Lunds konsthall are staging a dual exhibition that provide a comprehensive insight into his art. The exhibition sheds clear light on the important stages in Gernes’ development – from virtually unknown studies from the 1940s meticulously drawn in the style of the Old Masters through to the large-format stylized floral and linear forms that featured in his late flower paintings of the 1990s.

In 1961, Poul Gernes joined forces with art historian Troels Andersen to establish the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen, which was known as Eks-skolen for short, and quickly became an indispensable part of the Danish art scene. Characteristic of his work are the picture series from the 1960s and 1970s that can be located somewhere between Minimalism and a Pop Art feel. In them, simple circles, letters, plain patterns or targets are varied. In addition to producing paintings and sculptures, from 1977 onwards Gernes concentrated on the painting and interior decoration of public buildings.

Occasionally, Gernes pointed out that most of his larger works were only ever exhibited once, namely at the location for which they were intended. For the first time this exhibition provides his extensive and intensively coloured painterly abstractions in a setting commensurate with their spatial dimensions. In this way, the monumental scale of Gernes’ pieces that oscillates between abstraction and ornamental design becomes appropriately tangible as an objective of his art.

Gernes constantly questioned what art was, and undermined customary concepts of art, whether in the use of materials, the inclusion of everyday actions in his works or in his reflecting on industrial production processes and becoming actively involved in them as a designer. He used extremes to provoke. For instance in his film Vomit (1963), in which he employed his own body for a soiling action. In 1969, at the Festival 200 exhibition in the Copenhagen Charlottenborg Art Gallery Gernes installed a public baths and invited the public to shower in an institutional setting.

Alongside these rebellious aspects, his enthusiasm for craftsmanship and his intuitive knowledge of the right touch were essential elements of his artistic work. He earned his money as a drawing instructor in evening classes for women, became a teacher and idol for the young Copenhagen avant-garde scene, before finally in the 1980s teaching as a professor at the Royal Danish Art Academy in the Institute for Mural and Spatial Art. Gernes wanted his art to appeal to people. “Aesthetic ego-trips” as he called them, were not his thing.

Poul Gernes was familiar with the various historical forms of the avant-garde. He moved between the genres and traditions, observed Pop Art with the eyes of Vincent van Gogh, or mixed Minimal Art with aspects of the decorativism of the Viennese Secessionists. This might go to explain the unorthodox, but also the highly individual beauty of his work, which connects space and the two-dimensional with human narrations and various styles. Poul Gernes attracts great interest from young artists – hardly surprising as a broadbased use of media and stylistic breaks are part and parcel of contemporary art.

Public works include hospital in Herlev (1968-1976), Denmark; Carlsberg Brewery, Copenhagen (1977) and Palads Cinema, Copenhagen (1989). Exhibitions among others Danish Pavilion, Venice Biennial (1988); Horsens Kunstmuseum (1989); Kunstforeningen Gl Strand (2001), Copenhagen, and documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany.


Image: Anna Maria Maiolino, In-Out (Antropofagia), 1974. From the series Fotopoemação, 6 Black and white analogical photograph 25 x 38 x 5 cm (each). Private Collection, São Paulo

Public relations officer
Lena Leeb-Lundberg +46 40-34 12 94 lena.leeb@malmo.se

Press preview Thursday May 19 at 11 a.m
Welcome to the opening Friday May 20, 5-8 p.m. at Lunds konsthall and 5-9 p.m. at Malmö Konsthall. Directors Jacob Fabricius and Åsa Nacking introduce the exhibition together with Dirk Luckow, General Director, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Ulrikka Gernes at 7.30 p.m. at Malmö Konsthall.

Malmö Konsthall
S:t Johannesgatan 7 SE-200 10 Malmö Sweden
Opening hours:
Daily 11-17
Wednesdays 11-21
Closed: Midsummers eve, Midsummers day
Admission free

stampa

permanent link