calendario eventi  :: 

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1/10/2012

Two exhibitions

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972
October 7, 2012–January 28, 2013
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor

NEW YORK, August 16, 2012—The Museum of Modern Art presents Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972, the first large-scale survey of the artist’s work in the United States, from October 7, 2012 through January 28, 2013. The exhibition brings together over 100 works including sculpture, drawings, photography, and archival and documentary material, drawing on loans from private and public collections, including major institutions in Poland. The exhibition is organized by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972, is curated by Elena Filipovic and Joanna Mytkowska. MoMA’s presentation is organized by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings.

A sculptor who began working during the postwar period in a classical figurative style, Alina Szapocznikow (Polish, 1926-1973) radically reconceptualized sculpture as an imprint not only of memory but also of her own body. Though her career effectively spanned less than two decades (cut short by the artist’s premature death in 1973 at age 47), Szapocznikow explored a wide range of sculptural approaches and left behind a legacy of provocative objects that evoke Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop art. The radical innovation of her practice and the way her work continues to speak with urgency merits art historical reexamination.

Born to a Jewish family in Poland, and having survived the concentration camps of World War II as a teenager, Szapocznikow studied sculpture in Czechoslovakia and eventually Paris. While working in Warsaw in 1951, her work in bronze and stone developed from Social Realist sculptures to more emotionally-charged, adventurous, and Expressionist works, explored in tandem with loosening political and cultural restrictions.

Beginning in 1962 and continuing after her move to Paris in 1963, Szapocznikow began exploring experimental material, such as polyurethane foam (an expandable material resembling lava that can be poured to create liquid forms), and casting parts of her body, incorporating the forms into her sculpture. Her tinted polyester resin casts of body parts, often transformed into everyday objects like ashtrays or lamps, such as Lampe-bouche (Illuminated lips), c. 1966; her poured polyurethane forms such as Stèle (Stele), 1968; and her elaborately constructed sculptures, which at times incorporated photographs, clothing, or car parts, such as Untitled (Fétiche VII) (Fetish VII), 1971 and Goldfinger, 1965, are examples of the artist’s increasing experimentation with the fragmented body. All remain as idiosyncratic and culturally resonant today as they did during her lifetime.

Her Tumors series, with its clustered orbs, recalls the body turned against itself by cancer (Szapocznikow was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1969). In Tumeurs personnifiées (Tumors personified), 1971, casts of the artist’s disembodied face that morph into variously shaped lumps are scattered across the ground in a work that visually conjures cancerous growths and their invasion of the human body. Breaking from the conventions of display for traditional sculpture, Szapocnzikow intended these personalized forms to lie on gravel at floor level. They reveal a sense of humor and playfulness even when dealing with direct references to her declining health.

As with many of her works from this time, Souvenir I, 1971, features photographs embedded in waxy polyester resin. In this case, an image of the artist as a smiling young girl is juxtaposed with one of a concentration camp victim. This is the first direct reference in Szapocznikow’s work to the horrors of the Holocaust, a topic she seldom spoke about despite her first-hand experience as a camp survivor.

In Szapocznikow’s final body of work, the Herbier (Herbarium) sculptures, she moved radically back to a reworked figuration, merging the body with the form and material of her sculptures. She created images of herself and her son, as seen in Autoportrait – Herbier (Self- Portrait – Herbarium), 1971, that appear flattened like shed skin on wood panels. These works are perhaps some of her most literal and vulnerable artistic statements.

The years explored in this exhibition, 1955 to 1972, span the artist’s earlier career, when she produced work using traditional sculptural materials, through what is regarded as her experimental period, characterized by a pioneering use of non-traditional materials and forms. Szapocznikow experimented as much in two dimensions as in three, evidenced by the numerous prints, drawings and photographs she produced concurrently throughout her lifetime. This exhibition also showcases her works on paper, such as Untitled (From the series Paysage humain (Human Landscape), c. 1971–72, suggesting the roles these played in relation to her primary practice of object-making.

Well-known and highly influential in Poland throughout her career, Szapocznikow’s work has been less known internationally, and much of the attention it has received has been largely infused with biographical determinism, disproportionately focused on the trauma of her concentration-camp experiences, recurrent ill health, and premature death. Spanning one of the most rich and complex periods of the 20th century, Szapocznikow’s oeuvre responds to many of the ideological and artistic developments of her time through artwork that is at once fragmented and transformative, sensual and reflective, playfully realized and politically charged. At the center of her oeuvre is the body, most frequently her own—as Szapocznikow wrote in 1972, “I am convinced that of all the manifestations of the ephemeral the human body is the most vulnerable, the only source of all joy, all suffering and all truth . . .”

An examination of her body of work today places Szapocznikow alongside artists such as Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse and Paul Thek, who were working in the same period and whose exploration of new sculptural methods and materials helped reimagine sculpture as it was traditionally understood.

PUBLICATION:
Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972 is accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication that offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s oeuvre. Essays by Elena Filipovic, Joanna Mytkowska, Connie Butler, Allegra Pesenti, and Jola Gola, reflect new scholarship on Szapocznikow, touching on key aspects of her practice and historical reception and contextualizing the artist’s work for a wider audience. 9 x 10 1⁄2”, 216 pages, 326 illustrations. Flexibound, $45. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Mercatorfonds, Brussels. Available at the MoMA stores and online at MoMAStore.org. Available to the trade in the United States and Canada through ARTBOOK | D.A.P. and outside of the United States and Canada through Thames & Hudson.

PUBLIC PROGRAM:
Alina Szapocznikow: A Symposium
Friday, October 5, 2012, 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Theater 3 (The Celeste Bartos Theater), mezzanine, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, this symposium presents new scholarship on Alina Szapocznikow’s two-decade-long career. Long influential in Poland, Szapocznikow’s compelling body of work, which synthesizes postwar European sculptural modes—academic, Social Realist, Expressionist, biomorphic abstraction, found-object, Neorealist, and Pop—is ripe for art-historical reexamination. International curators, scholars, and artists discuss postwar Eastern European art and Szapocznikow’s position within it, her work viewed from a feminist perspective, her use of photography and works on paper in the context of her larger sculptural production, and her increasing influence on a younger generation of Eastern European artists.

Tickets ($12; $10 members and Corporate Members; $5 students, seniors and staff of other museums) can be purchased online or at the information desk, the Film desk after 4:00 p.m., or at the Education and Research Building reception desk on the day of the program.

To pick up tickets purchased online, proceed to the Education and Research Building reception desk at 4 West 54 Street beginning at noon on the day of the program.

SPONSORSHIP:
Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972, is organized by WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. The exhibition is curated by Elena Filipovic and Joanna Mytkowska. Organized at MoMA by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings

The exhibition is made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Modern Women’s Fund, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, The David Berg Foundation, and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

The accompanying symposium is supported in part by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
No. 36

Press Contact: Brien McDaniel, 212-708-9747 or brien_mcdaniel@moma.org
Margaret Doyle, 212-408-6400 or margaret_doyle@moma.org

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New Photography 2012: Michele Abeles, Birdhead, Anne Collier, Zoe Crosher, Shirana Shahbazi
October 3, 2012–February 4, 2013
The Robert and Joyce Menschel Photography Gallery, third floor

NEW YORK, August 23, 2012—The Museum of Modern Art presents the 27th annual New Photography exhibition, from October 3, 2012 through February 4, 2013, in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery. This year, the exhibition features the work of New York-based Michele Abeles, Shanghai-based collaborative Birdhead, New York-based Anne Collier, Los Angeles-based Zoe Crosher, and Zurich-based, Iranian-born Shirana Shahbazi, who each examine and expand the conventional definitions of photography. They challenge photography as a representational medium, explore the process of picture making, exploit the proliferation of images in a media- saturated world, and blur the lines between photography and other artistic disciplines. The exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography.

The five artists in New Photography 2012 have different working methods and pictorial modes, ranging from abstract to representational, but natural relationships among their separate bodies of work are revealed in the work shown here. Anne Collier and Zoe Crosher make pictures from other images in order to examine the ways that meaning and cultural values are embedded in photographs. The studio pictures of Michele Abeles and Shirana Shahbazi are the result of processes involving collection, assembly, and in-camera manipulation. Birdhead’s obsessive photographic chronicling resonates with Crosher’s re-consideration of an existing archive. These connections, among many others, reveal the artists’ common strategies and their individual approaches to related ideas.

Michele Abeles (American, b. 1977)
Michele Abeles’s studio constructions combine common objects—wine bottles, terra-cotta pots, newspapers, and printed fabrics—with nude males, to create images that renegotiate the creative process of studio photography. Attempting to strip her objects from symbolic or narrative associations, Abeles’s uses props that are familiar, generic, and even bland. Her male models are positioned like mannequins, often posed so their bodies are truncated by the frame. Titles such as Red, Rock, Cigarettes, Newspaper, Body, Wood, Lycra, Bottle (2011), which inventories the items in the photograph, are used to further emphasize their generic quality.

In Abeles’s pictures, space appears flattened, often with a confusing scale and spatial relationships. Much of this trickery occurs in the studio and in camera—the artist places colored gels over Plexiglas in front of her lens to produce geometric and fragmented layers that mimic digital post-production manipulation. In 2012, responding to the consumption of images in our media-saturated era, Abeles began making photographs employing digital tools. These works refer to how we view images today, often on a computer screen—a flattened space cluttered with layered windows. One example, #4 (2012) recalls the swipe mechanism on an iPad or iPhone, with a cropped image on the left suggesting a picture in mid-swipe or an image outside of the photographic frame. Symptomatic of the endless recirculation of images today, Abeles uses elements from her older photographs to make new work, as in Progressive Substitution Drills (2012), where a rock, printed fabric, and newspaper a scrap of newspaper from earlier photographs appear, binding the two works together.

Birdhead (Ji Weiyu, Chinese, b. 1980; and Song Tao, Chinese, b. 1979)
Ji Weiyu and Song Tao work together under the collective name Birdhead, making photographs of their hometown of Shanghai. Like the metropolis itself, their photographs are teeming with energy—within the large grid of pictures, no image or narrative is given preference. Birdhead's snapshot-like photographs chronicle the social fabric of the city and capture seemingly unremarkable encounters in daily life, including the natural environment found among the urban landscape. Potted plants, a bonsai, overgrown bushes, and a knotted tree trunk are presented alongside images of newly constructed bridges, detritus lapping at the shore of the Huangpu River, traditional dwellings dwarfed by new apartment towers, and the distinctive landmark of the Oriental Pearl Radio & TV Tower. Included are images of friends and strangers they encounter in their wanderings around the city. At the center of the grid is a self-portrait of Birdhead, emphasizing how their view of Shanghai is rooted in personal and shared experiences of the city. In many of their installations, Birdhead include classic Chinese poems by photographing Chinese characters found on the streets and locations around Shanghai. Presented in traditional mahogany frames and reminiscent of scrolls in their vertical format, photographs of eight characters constitute a verse from a poem (translated as And so, with joy in my heart, I hum this song) written in 207 CE by Han Dynasty warlord and poet Cao Cao, linking China’s past to the present.

Birdhead’s compulsive picture making mirrors contemporary culture’s saturation of images and fascination with self-documentation via social networking sites and mobile applications. However, Birdhead eschews digital technology in favor of analog cameras.

Anne Collier (American, b. 1970)
Anne Collier juxtaposes an almost conventional approach to still-life photography with techniques of appropriation to create her meticulously arranged compositions. Photographed against flat, plain surfaces in her studio, Collier’s found objects—record covers, magazine pages, appointment calendars, and postcards—reveal her interest mass media and pop culture materials from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Informed as much by West Coast Conceptual art as by commercial product photography and advertising, her deadpan pictures (which are often humorous and subtly self-reflexive) present a set of formal and psychological associations that frame recurrent tensions of power and gender.

The works in this display investigate the culture of photography, the conventions of the genre of nude photography, and the act of seeing. Woman with Cameras #1, featuring a two-page spread from a 1970s trade publication, illustrates the often-gendered nature of photographic culture during that era, when objectified female subjects were used to sell photography products to a predominately male audience.

Collier’s still lifes highlight the materiality of photographic reproduction and the deployment of images within print culture, now increasingly rendered obsolete by digital technologies. Deeply invested in the history of photography as a medium of art and intellectual inquiry, Collier’s work questions and recontextualizes the often clichéd language of popular imagery, alternately suggesting biographical history and a more widespread nostalgic attraction to found material.

Zoe Crosher (American, b. 1975)
In The Michelle duBois project, Zoe Crosher assembles a variety of tourist and other posed images that inhabit the space between fantasy and documentary. Drawn from an obsessively assembled collection of self-portraits by Michelle duBois, one of many aliases of an all-American girl from Oklahoma and occasional escort, Crosher has re-photographed, scanned, enlarged, altered, and re-edited duBois' amateur pictures from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to create complicated and alternate narratives that serve to frame her relationship with her subject and with photography at large.

A woman with a penchant for self-display, duBois photographed herself in a variety of guises and emulated classic tropes of femininity for the camera. In these images—some taken by friends and clients, some by strangers, others studio portraits—duBois presents herself alternately as the 1930s actress and sex symbol, Mae West; a sexy nurse in a starched white uniform; and a trench coat-clad femme fatale, mysteriously silhouetted in a doorway.

Throughout the duBois project, Crosher has manipulated the original images to emphasize the archive's tenuous physicality through an awareness of materials. The Mae Wested pictures have been crumpled, rephotographed, and printed on metallic paper, resulting in shimmering surfaces that evoke the silver screen. The fading in the multipart The Other Disappeared Nurse suggests the vanishing of identity, but also of analog photography. With this body of work, Crosher questions the possibilities of self-portraiture and representation, and the impossibility of knowing oneself even through an endless accumulation of images.

Shirana Shahbazi (German, b. Iran 1974)
Shirana Shahbazi makes photographs in classical art historical genres like portraiture, still life, and landscape, often translating and repeating her images in different media to question and expand the boundaries of photography. In the past, for instance, her photographic works have been transposed to hand-knotted carpets or painted as photorealistic billboards by artisans hired in her native Iran. More recently, Shahbazi has produced work that is architectural in scale to create installations comprising of multiple images hung on wallpaper, as seen in the site-specific installation at MoMA. This display features a repeated geometric pattern derived from one of her abstract photographs, printed as a lithograph and wrapped around the center wall of the gallery like wallpaper.

Alternating between abstraction and representation, Shahbazi’s vividly colored pictures are made in the crisp style of commercial studio photography and without the aid of digital tools. Her abstract compositions are achieved through photographing geometric volumes and pedestals, whose sides are painted various colors. Sometimes she makes multiple exposures of the same set of volumes, turning the blocks or volumes between exposures to create a dynamic interplay between surface and depth, resulting in a sumptuous field of geometric color and pattern. Shahbazi arranges her pictures in astonishing combinations to further probe the construction of photographic meaning. Shahbazi’s arrangements draw similarities between pictures from seemingly different genres, and point to the structural parallels between outside and inside, organic and manufactured, and the natural and constructed landscape. Her photographs, translated into different media and arranged in different groupings each time they are shown, play with the viewer’s perception with every new iteration.

New Photography
Since its inception in 1985, New Photography has introduced the work of 89 artists from 17 countries. The annual fall series continues to highlight the Museum’s commitment to the work of less familiar artists, and seeks to represent the diversity and vitality of contemporary photography today.

SPONSORSHIP:
The exhibition is made possible by Polaroid Eyewear (Safilo Group SpA).

LIVE STREAM TOUR:
A live-stream walkthrough of the exhibition will be guided by Eva Respini, Curator, Department of Photography, on October 16.

WEBSITE:
Accompanying New Photography 2012 is a dedicated website, MoMA.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/NewPhotography/, featuring an audio slideshow with artist commentary describing the works that appear in the exhibition.

AUDIO GUIDE:
An audio program accompanying New Photography 2012 features commentary by all artists in the exhibition. It is available at the Museum free of charge, courtesy of Bloomberg; on MoMA.org/wifi; and as a podcast on MoMA.org/audio or on iTunes. MoMA Audio is a collaboration between The Museum of Modern Art and Acoustiguide, Inc. Available in English only.
No. 38

Image: Birdhead. Image from The Song of Early Spring. 2012. Gelatin silver print. Image: 35 7/16 x 42 1/2″ (90 x 108 cm). Courtesy the artists and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai.

Press Contact:
Sarah Jarvis, (212) 708-9757, sarah_jarvis@moma.org
Brien McDaniel, (212) 708-9747, brien_mcdaniel@moma.org

Press Preview: Tuesday, October 2, 10:00 a.m. to Noon.

The Museum of Modern Art
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