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18/9/2009

Lissitzky +

Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

curated by John Milner

In September the Van Abbemuseum is launching the large-scale, three-year Lissitzky+ project, in which the museum will be casting new light on its renowned Lissitzky collection. This takes the form of a triptych of exhibitions, each exploring a particular theme, continuing through 2012. The first part, Lissitzky+, Victory over the Sun, opens on 19 September 2009. It is the first time the museum has staged such a presentation of Lissitzky’s wide-ranging oeuvre, for which a whole floor of the Van Abbemuseum’s new building has been specially rearranged. The museum holds the largest collection of Lissitzky’s work outside Russia.

A rich collection and unique loans El (Lazar Markovich) Lissitzky (1890-1941) was an architect, painter, graphic artist, a designer of furniture, books and posters, a writer, theatre producer and photographer. He was also an indefatigable traveller, the official cultural ambassador for the new Soviet Russia, and the prototype of the networking, ubiquitously active artist. In the 1920s and ’30s he collaborated closely with many major artists, such as Kasimir Malevich, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy and Theo van Doesburg.

The Van Abbemuseum has invited a leading authority on the Russian avant-garde Professor John Milner of the Courtauld Institute, London to curate Lissitzky+ . The first project takes the futurist opera, Victory over the Sun, as its starting point. After the second staging of this opera in 1920, Lissitzky hatched plans to mechanize the work and produced drawings and prints of his proposals that are held in the museum’s collection.

The Victory over the Sun exhibition draws extensively on the Van Abbemuseum’s collection and includes major works from other museums, such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. These institutions and others are loaning work by contemporaries such as Marc Chagall, Kasimir Malevich and Lyubov Popova. Several paintings by Malevich have not been exhibited for many years and some of his drawings are to be shown in the Netherlands for the first time. The entire exhibition includes 81 works by Lissitzky and 25 works by his contemporaries, of which 31 works are on loan.

Lissitzky in three dimensions
The Van Abbemuseum is the first institution ever to have rendered important designs by Lissitzky as a large-scale, three-dimensional figures, wholly in keeping with Lissitzky’s ideological legacy. Many of Lissitzky’s designs and drawings were regarded as utopian fantasies. However, Milner discovered that many of these designs were indeed intended for actual realisation, and with this exhibition that is being fulfilled for the very first time. Milner about this: ‘At one point, Lissitzky writes “I am not going to do this. You can do this.” I started looking at his work and thinking: ‘What is he suggesting? What is the potential of these things?’ When you look at a little lithograph for instance you begin to see that it is essentially city planning or architecture, so this gave us the chance to make some models to see what they would look like. We are not making ‘fake Lissitzkys’; but trying to convey the idea that there is a proposition here, that you can change the world and this is how you can do it. We’re just taking it forward a step.’

Publication
The exhibitions are accompanied by a publication written by John Milner, providing instructive and novel insights into Lissitzky’s oeuvre. Milner places Lissitzky’s work, ideology and vision in an historical and art- historical context, setting it alongside the work of contemporaries such as Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Mart Stam and Gerrit Rietveld.

Looking ahead
The second exhibition (September 2010 to September 2011) in the Lissitzky+ project presents Lissitzky’s work alongside work by several radical female artists with whom he collaborated. The third part (September 2011 to September 2012) focuses on the dynamic human figure.

Curator
The project’s guest curator is John Milner; the project manager at the Van Abbemuseum is Willem Jan Renders.

Sponsors
The models of the figures from Victory over the Sun have been realised with support of Rotary Club Eindhoven Soeterbeek. The Gravediggers statue has been realised with support of MCB Nederland.

Marketing, Communications & Press
Ilse Cornelis +31 (0)40 2381019, +31 (0)6 12995794
pressoffice@vanabbemuseum.nl
Opening: Saturday, 19 September 2009 h 15

Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10 - 5611 NH Eindhoven Netherlands
Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 17:00.
The museum is closed on Monday, with the exception of public holidays.
The Van Abbemuseum is open until 21:00 on Thursday evenings, admission to the museum is free from 17:00 on those nights.
Also the museum cafe is open until 21:00 on Thursday evenings.

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