Sprengel Museum
Hannover
Kurt Schwitters Platz
+49 (0)511 16843875 FAX +49 (0)511 16845093
WEB
The Birth of the Nanas & Nice and Easy
dal 23/8/2003 al 2/11/2003
+49 511168 - 43875 FAX +49 511168 - 45093
WEB
Segnalato da

Quasthoff, Michael



 
calendario eventi  :: 




23/8/2003

The Birth of the Nanas & Nice and Easy

Sprengel Museum, Hannover

Niki de Saint Phalle's Works from the 1960s & Anna Jermolaewa, Chantal Michel, Pipilotti Rist, Lara Schnitger, Lily van der Stokker


comunicato stampa

The Birth of the Nanas
Niki de Saint Phalle's Works from the 1960s

Niki de Saint Phalle is a unique artist. In the decades after the Second World War she not only extended and influenced the formal language and modes of expression in art, but she also became in the best sense popular - surpassed only, perhaps, by Picasso. The exhibition shows how the artist evolved from the "Diana of Montparnasse", who literally shot up pictures and taboos, into the creator of the famous Nanas.

A few years after the self-taught artist had started drawing and painting in the wake of Rousseau, Ernst, Picasso and Dubuffet, she joined the group known as the "Nouveaux Réalistes". Her oscillation between private iconography and radical political statement struck a chord with her contemporaries. It was above all her shootings - happenings and pictures - when she, "dressed in white like a vestal virgin", gunned down female nightmares and male rationality, that caught the public eye. She shot at clichés, conventions, priests, generals and philosophers. In 1962 she shot at Kennedy and Khrushchev. And like Clint Eastwood who at the same time rode through Sergio Leone's sombre late Western "For a Few Dollars More" in the role of a nameless harbinger of death, Niki de St. Phalle not only hit the genre, i.e. the art world, but her bullets also peppered the foundations of post-war apathy. With her reliefs, assemblages and sculptures, which she called "witches", "whores" and "brides", and finally with her famous Nana figures, Niki de St. Phalle paved the way for the incipient women's movement in the mid-Sixties. As a result of the powerful and multi-layered aura of her objects, she transcended feminism in arriving at a holistic conception of life and art.

We are documenting Niki de St. Phalle's career through the Swinging Sixties with 120 works from Niki de St. Phalle's donation - with paintings, collages, assemblages, sculptures and models. These are supplemented by drawings and large-format lithographs, including such famous series as "Nana Power", "The Tree" and "My Love".

Curator Prof. Ulrich Krempel

Nice and Easy
Anna Jermolaewa, Chantal Michel, Pipilotti Rist, Lara Schnitger, Lily van der Stokker

"Nice and Easy" consists of works by Anna Yermolaeva from Russia, Lily van der Stokker and Lara Schnitger from the Netherlands, and Chantal Michel and Pipilotti Rist from Switzerland. "Nice and Easy" encompasses five interpretations by young international women artists of a life's work that can be seen immediately adjacently under the title of "The Birth of the Nanas. Nike de St. Phalle's art in the Sixties". "Nice and Easy" shows wall paintings, sculptures, performances and video art. "Nice and Easy" is both an experiment and a homage.

The exhibition title refers to a work by Lily van der Stokker and alludes both to the ironically light-hearted and to the critically confrontational aspects of the exhibition. With works in some cases specially produced for the location, the quintet discusses the extent to which their artistic language, choice of media and the image of women today relates to the positions adopted by Niki de St. Phalle in the early Sixties.

Characteristic of the selected works is not only the artists' reflection on their own creative processes in relation to early milestones in women's emancipation but also the treatment of their current lives. It becomes obvious that the dismantling of obsolete male clichés of femininity has been long superseded by a discerning questioning of role and gender identities and by playful lifestyle alternatives to the realities projected in the mass media. Since the Nineties there has even been something akin to "post-feminist" art that undidactically and humorously sets itself apart from the vociferous and militant protest art of the previous generation of women.

Curator: Patricia Drück

Information:
Tel. 0511 168 - 4 39 24
Fax. 0511 168 - 4 50 93

IN ARCHIVIO [32]
Ilya Kabakov
dal 28/1/2012 al 28/4/2012

Attiva la tua LINEA DIRETTA con questa sede