calendario eventi  :: 

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20/5/2007

Two exhibitions

Metropolitan Museum of Art - MET, New York

Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch at the Met presents six new paintings made specifically for this exhibition by the artist Neo Rauch (b. 1960, Leipzig, Germany), one of the most widely acclaimed painters of his generation. The exhibition - on view from May 22 through September 23, 2007 -is the third in the Museum's series dedicated to artists at mid-career, following exhibitions featuring Tony Oursler in 2005 and Kara Walker in 2006.

Shaped by the experience of growing up in East Germany, Rauch's paintings teeter between Surrealism and Social Realism, defying easy interpretation. Viewers are drawn into scenes replete with strange beings and ambiguous landscapes. Full of activity yet mysteriously static in feeling, Rauch's paintings are fantasy painted as fact, and many of his large-format works are populated by figures that are connected spatially, yet remain alienated and unaware of each other. With a distinctive palette of bright acidic colors contrasting with deep shadows, the artist's paintings conjure up an atmosphere of confused nostalgia and failed utopias.

Trained at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Rauch continues to live and work in the city of his birth, and has inspired a younger generation of painters in Leipzig's thriving artistic community. Rauch's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2006); Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal, Canada (2006); Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2004); Saint Louis Art Museum (2002); and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany (2001), among other museums. Neo Rauch at the Met is organized by Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.

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Hidden in Plain Sight: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection

Hidden in Plain Sight: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection, on view from May 15 through September 3, 2007, features the work of artists who use the camera to call our attention to the poetic richness latent in ordinary things. Often deliberately understated, these photographs are filled with everyday epiphanies, inviting us to look more closely at the world around us. The exhibition will feature approximately 35 works by American and international artists, including Walker Evans, Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Patrick Faigenbaum, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Daniel Faust, Mitch Epstein, Lewis Koch, Bertien van Manen, Carrie Mae Weems, Rachel Harrison, and Shomei Tomatsu.

The photographs featured in Hidden in Plain Sight encourage a heightened awareness of the fleeting beauty to be found in simple objects and chance occurrences. In his photographs of empty tree planters, Damián Ortega (b. 1967, Mexico) finds geometric patterns and entropy in the pavement cracks and sprouting weeds that appear on barren patches of Mexico City sidewalks. The slightly melancholy photographs of Jean-Marc Bustamante (French, b. 1952) evoke magical moments in commonplace settings. In an untitled 1998 photograph from his series Something Is Missing, Bustamante records a "found sculpture" he discovered on the street: an orderly newspaper stand with stacks of papers fluttering at the corners.

A 1992 photograph by Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953), taken in Sea Island, Georgia, depicts a mattress spring mysteriously hanging from a tree - a purposeful intervention by residents of the local Gullah community, who believe it will ensnare evil spirits. Rachel Harrison (American, b. 1966), in her Perth Amboy series, photographed the window of an ordinary-looking house in New Jersey where it was believed that the face of the Virgin Mary had appeared. The pictures focus on the accumulated fingerprints left by the faithful as they touched the pane of glass.

A particular focus of the show will be the work of Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Mexico), whose Cemetery (2002), captures an unassuming yet surprising landscape that the artist encountered on one of his travels: dozens of round terracotta pots, used as grave markers and receptacles for offerings, lay scattered across on the desert sand of Timbuktu. Since the 1980s, this peripatetic artist has used photography as a form of visual note-taking, as well as to document ephemeral sculptures he makes on his local walks and world travels.

Opening may 21, 2007

Metropolitan Museum
1000 Fifth Avenue 82nd Street - New York

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