calendario eventi  :: 

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21/5/2013

Two exhibitions

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

David Hockney U.S. premiere of The Jugglers,June 24th 2012 from May 23 through September 1, 2013 NEW YORK, NY, April 1, 2013
This spring, the Whitney presents the U.S. premiere of The Jugglers, June 24th 2012, David Hockney’s first video installation. Organized by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, the work will be shown in the Museum’s second-floor Kaufman Astoria Studios Film & Video Gallery, from May 23 through September 1, 2013.

A group of twelve figures, clad in black, juggle brightly colored objects in an equally bright room, creating a vibrant composition, the energy of which is echoed by the soundtrack of “Stars & Stripes Forever.” Filmed with eighteen fixed cameras, this lively tableau captures the performers as they move in a procession through the room. Throughout the nine-minute performance, each juggler is fully visible making his or her way across eighteen individual screens.

The Jugglers, June 24th 2012 examines how we look at works of art, as well as how we process our day- to-day visual environment. Hockney filmed the performers in his Yorkshire studio on a bright sunny day, creating a production that is nearly free of shadow, evoking the flat composition of ancient Chinese scrolls. The absence of a single perspective in such scrolls has long influenced Hockney’s thinking regarding composition. Echoing the artist’s earlier Polaroid photo-collages, as well as his extensive stage design for opera and ballet, in particular the L.A. Music Center Opera production of Tristan and Isolde (1987), movement and perspective are made dynamic framed against a flat, painterly layout. Hockney’s creation of a composite image from multiple perspectives places the choice of where to look with the viewer, demonstrating the artist’s ongoing interest in the influence of technology as it pertains to both looking at, and creating images.

Curator Iles comments, “In this new video installation David Hockney surprises us once again, exploring how multiple perspectives can transform our experience of the moving image. The vivid tones of ‘The Jugglers’ evoke the intense color of Technicolor Hollywood film, while the jugglers’ playful movements echo the simple actions of early silent movies. Hockney mines the histories of cinema and painting through the lens of technology, to create a new way of seeing.” Dissatisfied by the single point of view provided by modern photography and cinema, Hockney works against what the artist refers to as the “tyranny of the lens,” releasing the viewer from a restricting, narrow perspective. By producing a work that mimics more closely the view from the human eye rather than the single lens of a camera, Hockney explores the boundary between projection and what we would consider “real life.”

About the Artist

David Hockney was born on July 9, 1937, in Bradford, England. He graduated from the Bradford School of Art in 1957 and received the Gold Medal at the Royal College of Art in 1962. He was awarded the Order of the Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth in June 1997, and the Order of Merit in 2012. His 2001 publication, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, received critical acclaim and has been published in over twelve languages. He is widely recognized for his work in the fields of painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, and opera design and remains one of the most influential figures of his generation. His work was last shown at the Whitney in the 2004 Biennial.

Exhibition Support

Generous endowment support for Film and Video programs at the Whitney is provided by George S. Kaufman. About the Whitney The Whitney Museum of American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and contemporary art of the United States. Focusing particularly on works by living artists, the Whitney is celebrated for presenting important exhibitions and for its renowned collection, which comprises over 19,000 works by more than 2,900 artists. With a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and provoking intense debate, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum's signature exhibition, has become the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States. In addition to its landmark exhibitions, the Museum is known internationally for events and educational programs of exceptional significance and as a center for research, scholarship, and conservation.

Founded by sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930, the Whitney was first housed on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The Museum relocated in 1954 to West 54th Street and, in 1966, inaugurated its present home, designed by Marcel Breuer, at 945 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. While its vibrant program of exhibitions and events continues uptown, the Whitney is constructing a new building, designed by Renzo Piano, in downtown Manhattan. Located at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the Meatpacking District, at the southern entrance to the High Line, the new building, which has generated immense momentum and support, will enable the Whitney to vastly increase the size and scope of its exhibition and programming space. Ground was broken on the new building in May 2011, and it is projected to open to the public in 2015.

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Hopper Drawing
The First In-Depth Study of the Artist’s Working Process
from May 23 to October 6

NEW YORK, NY, FEBRUARY 21, 2013—This spring, the Whitney Museum celebrates Edward Hopper’s achievements as a draftsman in the first major museum exhibition to focus on the artist’s drawings and working process. Along with many of his most iconic paintings, the exhibition features more than 200 drawings, the most extensive presentation to date of Hopper’sachievement in this medium, pairing suites of preparatory studies and related works with such major oil paintings as New York Movie (1939), Office at Night (1940), Nighthawks (1942) and Morning in a City (1944). The show will be presented in the Museum’s third-floor Peter Norton Family Galleries from May 23 to October 6, before traveling to the Dallas Museum of Art from November 17, 2013 to February 6, 2014 and the Walker Art Center from March 15 to June 22, 2014.

Culled from the Museum’s unparalleled collection of the artist’s work, and complemented by key loans, the show illuminates how the artist transformed ordinary subjects—an open road, a city street, an office space, a house, a bedroom—into extraordinary images. Carter E. Foster, the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing at the Whitney, organized the show based on his in- depth research into the more than 2,500 works on paper by Hopper in the Whitney’s collection. These pieces trace the artist’s process of observation, reflection, and invention that was central to the development of his poetic and famously uncanny paintings. The works on view will span the artist’s career, from early drawn exercises of his student days to Sun in an Empty Room (1963, private collection), one of the last paintings Hopper completed, and are concentrated on mid- century sheets related to his best-known oil paintings.

“By comparing related studies to paintings, we can see the evolution of specific ideas as the artist combined, through drawing, his observations of the world with his imagination,” says Mr. Foster. “In other instances, his drawings provide a crucial form of continuity among thematically related paintings, a kind of connective tissue that allowed Hopper to revisit and re-examine ideas over time.”

While exhibitions and scholarly publications have investigated many aspects of Hopper’s art— his prints, his illustrations, his influence on contemporary art, to name a few—this exhibition will, for the first time, illuminate the centrality of drawing to Hopper’s work and allow a fresh look at his landmark contributions to twentieth-century art. His drawings help to untangle the complex relationship between reality—what Hopper called “the fact”—and imagination or “improvisation” in his work. They ultimately demonstrate his sensitive and incisive responses to the world around him that led to the creation of paintings that continue to inspire and fascinate.Though the slowness and deliberation of Hopper’s creative process—and his relatively small output of oils—has long been noted, it is only through an examination of his drawings that we can understand the gestation of the artist’s ideas and the transformations they underwent from paper to canvas. However, the artist only occasionally exhibited or sold his drawings, retaining most of them for personal reference and using them throughout his career as he developed the lifelong themes and preoccupations of his major oil paintings.

Hopper’s education as an artist was fairly traditional, with intensive early training in drawing— particularly drawing the nude human figure. This included life drawing classes at the New York School of Art, where he studied from 1900 to 1906 with the celebrated exponent of modern American realism, Robert Henri. Early and formative travels to Paris and Europe between 1906 and 1910 produced an important body of work; the exhibition will include recently identified pages from his Paris sketchbooks, featuring lively and acute observations of street life and café culture. Later, in the 1920s, Hopper continued to hone his life drawing skills at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor to the Museum), near his Greenwich Village studio. These skills served Hopper throughout his career, especially after the early 1930s, when he shifted from painting directly from nature to improvised subjects, deepening his drawing practice as he imagined ideas for his oils.

The exhibition opens with an overview of Hopper’s drawing career. As a draftsman, Hopper favored black chalk and the rich and subtle tone he was able to achieve with it. This section includes a number of highly finished sheets executed from life, as well as illustrations, portraits, and preparatory studies.

The exhibition continues with seven sections combining paintings with their preparatory studies and related works. One of the most significant of these brings together two of Hopper’s most important canvases, the Whitney’s Early Sunday Morning (1930) and Nighthawks (1942), lent by the Art Institute of Chicago. Nighthawks will, for the first time, be shown with all nineteen of its known drawn studies, including a highly finished sheet recently acquired by the Whitney for itspermanent collection. These drawings show the development of every element of this iconic painting, from the massing of its oblique architectural space to the precise arrangements of figures around the nighttime coffee shop’s counter. Shown together, Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks will emphasize the artist’s interests in New York City’s shifting urban fabric, and the two pieces’ close conceptual relationship to one another as summations of his impressions of urban life. Groundbreaking archival research done in the course of the exhibition’s development has uncovered, for the first time, the precise building on Seventh Avenue on which Early Sunday Morning was based, as well as invaluable historic photographs of the Greenwich Village corners and architecture that inspired Nighthawks—questions that have puzzled historians of Hopper’s work for decades.

The exhibition also showcases Hopper’s magisterial 1939 painting New York Movie (lent by the Museum of Modern Art) and the group of fifty-two preparatory studies Hopper made for this work, the largest number of drawings that exist for any painting in his oeuvre. These sheets trace Hopper’s nearly two-month long process of working through the idea for this piece, from his exploratory sketching trips in several Broadway movie palaces to a long and nuanced series of compositional studies for the dark, ornate interior depicted in the work, which he based on the Palace Theatre in Times Square. As with Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks, photographic documentation of the actual sites that inspired the work will be included in the display.

The exhibition will provide similar insight into the creation of many of Hopper’s other celebrated paintings, such as Soir Bleu (1914, Whitney Museum), Manhattan Bridge Loop (1928, Addison Gallery of American Art) and From Williamsburg Bridge (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Office at Night (1940, Walker Art Center), Conference at Night (1949, Wichita Art Museum), Gas (1940, MoMA), Rooms for Tourists (1945, Yale University Art Gallery) and a number of others. These works will be paired and grouped to emphasize the artist’s interest in and revisiting of a relatively narrow set of themes and subjects over the course of his nearly seven-decade-long career.

Hopper at the Whitney

The work k of Edward d Hopper (18 882-1967) ha as been prese ented often b by the Whitn ney througho out the institu ution's history, beginnin ng with his fi irst-ever solo o exhibition, , held at the Whitney Stu udio Club in 1920. 1 Hoppe er was includ ded in the fir rst Biennial i in 1932, and d in numerou us Annual an nd Biennial exhibitions throughout his h lifetime. The Whitne ey organized d two major l lifetime ctives of Hop pper’s work in 1950 and d 1964. In 19 970, the Whi itney receive ed more than n retrospec 2,500 dra awings, alon ng with paint tings, waterc colors, and p prints that we ere bequeath hed by the ar rtist’s widow, Josephine. J Th his group of f works, which spans chi ildhood draw wings to major paintings s, is the found dation for research and understandin u ng of this sin ngularly impo ortant figure e in America an art and cultu ure. Since the en, the Muse eum has organized sever ral major exh hibitions of Hopper’s wo ork, including g Edward Ho opper: The Art A and the Artist A (1980- -81), Edward d Hopper an nd the Ameri ican Imaginat tion (1995), and, most re ecently, Mod dern Life: Ed dward Hopp per and His T Time (2010-11).

About th he Catalogu ue
Hopper Drawing D is accompanied a d by a richly illustrated, approximate ely 250-page e catalogue designed d by McCall Associates and a distribut ted by Yale U University P Press. This ca atalogue, the e first in-depth study of Hopper’s drawings, will be e an indispen nsable resour rce for schol lars and the public. It t will feature e a number of o drawings reproduced r f for the first t time, along w with photogr raphs and other r archival ma aterials that richly conte extualize the works. Orga anized, like the exhibitio on, into a ser ries of dossie ers examinin ng pairs or gr roups of rela ated painting gs and drawi ings, the catalogue e was written n primarily by b Carter E. Foster, inclu uding an ext tensive overv view of Hopper’s s achievemen nts as a draft ftsman. The catalogue c als so includes c contribution ns by Daniel S. Palmer, Nicholas N Robbins, Kimia a Shahi, and d Mark W. T Turner. Lougheed, Arlene an

About the Whitney
The Whitney Museum of American Art is the world’s leading museum of twentieth-century and contemporary art of the United States. Focusing particularly on works by living artists, the Whitney is celebrated for presenting important exhibitions and for its renowned collection, which comprises over 19,000 works by more than 2,900 artists. With a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and provoking intense debate, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum's signature exhibition, has become the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States. In addition to its landmark exhibitions, the Museum is known internationally for events and educational programs of exceptional significance and as a center for research, scholarship, and conservation.

Founded by sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930, the Whitney was first housed on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. The Museum relocated in 1954 to West 54th Street and, in 1966, inaugurated its present home, designed by Marcel Breuer, at 945 Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side. While its vibrant program of exhibitions and events continues uptown, the Whitney is constructing a new building, designed by Renzo Piano, in downtown Manhattan. Located at the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets in the Meatpacking District, at the southern entrance to the High Line, the new building, which has generated immense momentum and support, will enable the Whitney to vastly increase the size and scope of its exhibition and programming space. Ground was broken on the new building in May 2011, and it is projected to open to the public in 2015.

Press Office:
Stephen Soba (212) 570-3633, pressoffice@whitney.org

Press preview Wednesday, May 22, 2013 10 am–12 pm

The Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York City
Museum hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 am to 6 pm, Friday from 1 pm to 9 pm, closed Monday and Tuesday.
General admission: $18. Full-time students and visitors ages 19–25 and 65 & over: $14.
Visitors 18 & under and Whitney members: Free.

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