calendario eventi  :: 

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2/11/2012

Three exhibitions

SFMoMA, San Francisco

Jasper Johns

Seeing With The Mind's Eye

Throughout his career, contemporary American artist Jasper Johns, now 82, has found new ways to explore, as he once put it, "how we see and why we see the way we do." Continually reinventing his own work, he has driven key transformation in the art world for nearly 60 years. On view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from November 3, 2012, through February 3, 2013, Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind's Eye surveys the full scope of Johns's achievements and also reflects the very particular interest in his art in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This major exhibition, the first museum overview in San Francisco in 35 years, was organized in close cooperation between Jasper Johns and Gary Garrels, SFMOMA's Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, who has been a longtime advocate of Johns in the Bay Area. Ranging across Johns's entire career—from his breakthrough paintings of the 1950s, which paved the way for the subsequent development of Pop art and Minimalism, to his most recent work—the survey offers a rich overview of the visual and philosophical inquiries central to Johns's practice and illuminates his enormous impact on artistic developments following Abstract Expressionism.

The presentation also celebrates the significant holdings of Johns's work in the region, bringing together for the first time some 90 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from SFMOMA and other local and private collections as well as several key works lent by the artist himself, including a large recent canvas that will be on view to the public for the first time.

"In reviewing Johns's career, what becomes evident at every stage is the endless curiosity and discipline of the artist, and the astonishing level of ambition and quality of the work," says Garrels. "His art and thinking continually inspire other artists, as well as some of the field's most incisive critical writing. Johns has always been a prime instigator of change, and it makes sense that his art would strike a chord with collectors and museums over the past few decades in the Bay Area with its legacy of innovation."

Six Decades of Restless Invention

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and currently lives and works in New York City. He studied art at the University of South Carolina, but soon moved to New York where he met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, becoming a central force in the intensive reconsideration of contemporary arts unfolding at the time. In the 1950s, he developed a distinctive painting style that would help lead American art away from the then dominant movement of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike that energetic style, Johns's work was seemingly mute and serene, at once taciturn and vibrant, quixotic and matter-of-fact. Apart from occasional found objects or cryptic references to his own life, he painted mostly impersonal motifs early in his career, such as numbers, maps, and flags. The exact correspondence of figure and ground in his work also challenged the traditional distinction between an object and its depiction.

Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind's Eye will be installed roughly chronologically, beginning with a selection of Johns's first mature paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from the 1950s and 60s, focusing on one of his most iconic early subjects: numbers. For the artist, these were things "seen and not looked at, not examined" and therefore perfect vehicles for understanding the familiar in a new way. The exhibition then moves through canvases with dramatic brushstrokes and high-keyed colors that obscure clearly identifiable subjects.

The presentation continues with key examples from Johns's early sculptural and lead relief works based on common objects (Light Bulb II, 1958), for which he used Sculp-metal, a silver-gray material that echoes his gray paintings of the same time (Canvas, 1956). It also looks at Johns's play with language and his elaborate Duchamp-inspired puns between word and image (Wall Piece, 1968; Bread, 1969; The Critic Smiles, 1969); and explores the way Johns begins introducing more psychological, personal references to his canvases (Land's End; 1963; Periscope [Hart Crane], 1963; Souvenir 1964).

In the1970s, Johns initiated his Crosshatch series (Corpse and Mirror, 1978; Between the Clock and the Bed, 1981), abstract compositions of colored brushwork that recall his earlier work, but now individual strokes are distinct and gathered in parallel groupings arranged at angles. From this point on, Johns's work increasingly includes autobiographical references such as the artist's shadow, first seen in his Seasons series (Summer and Fall, 1987).

Johns began a new mode of investigation in the 1990s that would become known as his Catenary works (Bridge, 1997)—spare, muted gray canvases marked by a string that hangs across the field of the painting. Over the past ten years, Johns has also started a new series of works on paper and plastic that he calls Shrinky Dinks after the children's craft material utilized in their creation. And most recently he has developed a series of works based on a totemic black figure, represented in Bushbaby (2005), a monumental painting that will be on view for the first time with this exhibition.

A Contemporary Master's History with SFMOMA and the Bay Area

Johns first visited San Francisco in the spring of 1964 to attend performances of works by his friend the composer John Cage. Two major paintings of that year—Souvenir and Souvenir 2—are rooted in an experience Johns had at the concerts; Souvenir has been on long-term loan from the artist to the museum since it was included in an exhibition at SFMOMA in the late 1990s.

The key early event for SFMOMA's relationship to Johns was the gift to the museum from Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson in 1972 of one of the artist's most celebrated paintings, Land's End (1963), which remains a cornerstone of the museum's postwar collection. The Andersons have also been collecting Johns's prints for many years.

In 1978, SFMOMA was the only other American museum to host the large midcareer survey exhibition of Johns's work organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. At the close of the exhibition in San Francisco, Johns placed another key work, the monumental Wall Piece (1968), on extended loan to SFMOMA where it has remained ever since.

In 1991, in anticipation of SFMOMA's new Mario Botta–designed building, Johns made a gift to the museum of a lead Splash sculpture by Richard Serra, originally commissioned by Johns in 1968 for a building he owned in New York.

More recently, in 1999, SFMOMA organized Jasper Johns: New Paintings and Works on Paper, which marked the first public presentation from the artist's Catenary series and traveled nationally. Charles and Helen Schwab purchased the first painting in the series, Bridge (1997), as a promised gift to SFMOMA along with the related drawing. Following the close of that exhibition, Johns subsequently placed his much-storied gray painting Canvas (1956) on long-term loan to SFMOMA. Other private collectors and collections with deep and multifaceted ties to SFMOMA and Johns's work in particular include The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at SFMOMA and Carolyn and Preston Butcher.

In addition to the presentations at SFMOMA, many exhibitions in the region have included or focused solely on Johns's work over the last forty years, including his first solo show in the Bay Area, Jasper Johns: Prints at the John Berggruen Gallery (1970), and exhibitions of his graphic works at the University Art Gallery, California State University, San Jose (1973), the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley (1978), the San Jose Museum of Art (1979), and the Oakland Museum (1979). Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols, a major traveling exhibition, was hosted by the Legion of Honor (1990); and a solo exhibition of the artist's works on paper inaugurated the de Young Museum's Anderson Gallery of Graphic Art (2005).

CATALOGUE OFFERS FOCUSED LOOK AT SPECIFIC WORKS

A catalogue published by SFMOMA on the occasion of the exhibition features new thematic texts by veteran and recent Johns scholars alike. Essays range from historical to critical to poetic, and take an in-depth look at specific works of art and series from all periods of Johns's career. Authors include exhibition curator Gary Garrels; Roberta Bernstein, author and director of the Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and Sculpture of Jasper Johns; Brian M. Reed, professor of English at the University of Washington; James Rondeau, chair and Frances and Thomas Dittmer Curator of the Department of Contemporary Art at The Art Institute of Chicago; Mark Rosenthal, author of Jasper Johns: Work Since 1974; Nan Rosenthal, author of The Drawings of Jasper Johns; Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas, Austin; and John Yau, author of A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns. The book also features a new chronology that enumerates Johns's many exhibitions in the Bay Area.

Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind's Eye is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Presenting support is provided by the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund and the Evelyn D. Haas Exhibition Fund. Premier corporate support is generously provided by Bank of America. Major support is provided by Martha and Bruce Atwater and The James C. Hormel and Michael P. Nguyen Endowment Fund. Generous support is provided by Dr. Nancy Ascher and Dr. John Roberts, Christopher Bass, Gay-Lynn and Robert Blanding, Jean and James E. Douglas Jr., Patricia W. Fitzpatrick, Marissa Mayer and Zachary Bogue, Ann and Robert S. Fisher, and Thomas W. Weisel and Janet Barnes. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_exhibitions/releases/937#ixzz2AtSSTriJ
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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JAY DEFEO
A Retrospective
3 November 2012 – 3 February 2013

From November 3, 2012 through February 3, 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929–1989). Although best known for her landmark painting The Rose (1958–66)—a near two-thousand-pound masterpiece—DeFeo created an astoundingly diverse range of work. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the retrospective places The Rose in the context of her larger body of work, tracing DeFeo's visual concerns and motifs across more than four decades of art making. Following its premiere at SFMOMA, the exhibition will be shown at the Whitney from February 28 through June 2, 2013.

Comprising more than 130 works, Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective brings together the artist's paintings, drawings, photographs, collages, small sculptures, and jewelry designs—most of which have not been seen in decades or have never been exhibited before. The exhibition is curated by Dana Miller, curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum. The San Francisco presentation is overseen by Corey Keller, associate curator of photography at SFMOMA.

"DeFeo is well known for her magnum opus, The Rose, but her full and complex oeuvre has not yet been given the serious consideration that it merits. This exhibition will be a revelation. A nationally recognized artist, she was also a major figure in the Bay Area art community, and beloved by many here. It is an honor to present her work at SFMOMA," says Keller.

"DeFeo believed that, more than most other artists, her art was best understood when considered comprehensively. In presenting the entire career, this retrospective will demonstrate the captivating sweep of DeFeo's heterogeneous work and illuminate her groundbreaking experimentation and extraordinary vision," explains Miller.

The retrospective draws from more than 35 private and public collections, including those of the Whitney and SFMOMA, as well as the Jay DeFeo Trust, which provided unprecedented access to works and archives for the exhibition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated 320 page catalogue with new scholarship on all aspects of DeFeo's work and career, including essays by Dana Miller; Corey Keller; Michael Duncan, independent scholar; Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, associate director of conservation and research, Whitney Museum; and Greil Marcus, independent scholar. The most accurate biographical chronology of DeFeo to date will round out this volume.

About Jay DeFeo

Born in 1929 in Hanover, New Hampshire, Jay DeFeo was one of the few women of her generation to rise to artistic prominence but one who has still not been given her due. Her unconventional approach to materials and intensive, physical process make DeFeo a unique figure in postwar American art and she defies easy categorization.

DeFeo made her first mature body of work while traveling through Europe on a fellowship, shortly after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951. Not long after her return in 1953, she settled among the San Francisco community of artists, poets, and musicians later labeled the Beat generation. Her larger circle of friends and peers included Wallace Berman, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Sonia Gechtoff, Ed Kienholz, and the artist Wally Hedrick, whom she married in 1954. The legendary curator Walter Hopps was an early champion and he placed DeFeo's work in several gallery and museum exhibitions in the 1950s and 60s, among them the inaugural show of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957, which was followed by several other group shows and a solo presentation there in 1960. Dorothy Miller included DeFeo's work in the seminal 1959 Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibition Sixteen Americans, alongside Frank Stella's black striped paintings and Jasper Johns's flags. At that moment DeFeo was among the most prominent women artists of her generation.

From 1958 to 1966, DeFeo worked almost exclusively on The Rose, and when she finished, the work consisted of so many layers of paint that it weighed close to one ton. Exhausted, both physically and mentally, DeFeo then took a three-year hiatus from making art and largely faded from the public's consciousness. It was only after The Rose was finally given a museum exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum, which then traveled to SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art) the same year, that she began painting again.

During the 1970s, DeFeo lived in Larkspur, California, and taught at several Bay Area schools and, for a time, at SFMOMA. She resumed making art and worked prolifically, exploring photography in depth and incorporating it into her practice in innovative ways. A 1973 National Endowment for the Arts grant allowed her to further pursue her photographic experiments and she created a highly inventive body of hybrid works on paper. Although DeFeo worked spontaneously, her paintings, drawings, and photo-collages evolved through a slow technique of building up an image and then reworking it, or erasing it and starting all over again. This open-ended process, which the artist described as a "cliff-hanging experience," allowed for highly expressionistic forms and an astonishing range of surface modulation. Yet DeFeo's intuitive and expansive method of working was tempered by her sense of compositional order and an often restrained grisaille palette. It is this state of balance, between carefully composed images and lush surfaces, expressive forms and subtle coloring, that intensifies her unique and utterly compelling body of work. In 1978 she had a one-person exhibition in the MATRIX program at the Berkeley Art Museum, organized by then Director of SFMOMA Henry Hopkins.

In 1981 DeFeo moved to Oakland and joined the faculty of Mills College, where she was awarded tenure in 1986. She continued to produce art and was the subject of several significant shows including a 1984 solo presentation at the San Francisco Art Institute as the recipient of the Adaline Kent Award and a 1989 exhibition, Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper, at the Berkeley Art Museum. DeFeo taught at Mills until her death from lung cancer on November 11, 1989, and had a profound impact on a generation of students who passed through the school.

DeFeo's work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and SFMOMA, as well in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archives, Oakland Museum of California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, Houston, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. For more on Jay DeFeo, visit SFMOMA's interactive feature online.

About The Rose (1958–66)

Massive in scale, layered with nearly two thousand pounds of paint, the monumental painting was already legendary before its first exhibitions in Pasadena and San Francisco in 1969. Following the SFMOMA presentation, The Rose was installed in the newly built McMillan conference room at the San Francisco Art Institute. The painting was in need of conservation, and a protective coating was placed on the surface in 1974 as a temporary measure. The subsequent stages of planned conservation were never completed and the work remained obscured from sight for the next 21 years (in 1979 a false wall was even built in front of the painting). In 1995, The Rose reemerged when a historic and extensive conservation plan led by the Jay DeFeo Trust and the Whitney Museum restored the work to exhibitable condition; the restored painting debuted as the centerpiece of the Whitney's 1995 exhibition Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965. The Rose was acquired at that time by the Whitney with support from the Judith Rothschild Foundation and now resides in its permanent collection.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruce Conner's 1967 film documenting the removal of The Rose from DeFeo's Fillmore Street studio, The White Rose, will be shown in SFMOMA's Koret Visitor Education Center through the run of the exhibition.

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Major support for this exhibition is provided by the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by Louise Stude Sarofim, Susan Weeks and David Coulter, Francis H. Williams, M. Bernadette Castor and David R. Packard, the Clinton Hill/Allen Tran Foundation, Sarah Peter, and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust.

The San Francisco presentation of this exhibition is made possible by leadership support from the Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Traveling Exhibitions.

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_exhibitions/releases/936#ixzz2AtT5TNQ1
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER
Frequency and Volume

On view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from November 3, 2012, through February 3, 2013, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Frequency and Volume invites visitors to tune in and listen to different radio frequencies by using their own bodies in an interactive video and sound installation.

One of the most important international media artists to emerge in the 1990s, Mexican-born, Montreal-based artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer explores the intersection of architecture, media, and performance. Inspired by 1920s radio poetry experiments by the Mexican estridentista artists who championed action and social reform in their art, Frequency and Volume: Relational Architecture 9 (2003) was originally developed in response to the Mexican government shutting down informal or "pirate" radio stations in indigenous communities in the states of Chiapas and Guerrero. The piece raises questions about who has access to public space and who controls public communication. The installation is part of the artist's series Relational Architecture (ongoing since 1997) and will mark the U.S. premiere of the work at SFMOMA. Organized by Curator of Media Arts Rudolf Frieling, the presentation is designed to visibly communicate the museum's role as both a receiver and producer of frequencies in a larger network of Bay Area culture.

In the piece, a computerized tracking system detects visitors' shadows, which are projected on a wall. The position and outline of the projected shadow determines the frequency scanned, and the size of each shadow controls the volume. The public and private radio waves become visualized as a data space. The installation can tune into any frequency between 150 kHz and 1.5 GHz, allowing visitors to hear not only to FM and AM, but air traffic control, short wave, cellular, satellite, wireless telecommunication systems, and radio navigation. Up to 48 frequencies can be tuned simultaneously, and the resulting sound environment forms a composition controlled by participants' movements. The technical equipment is displayed in the first gallery as a studio environment and in the fourth-floor Sculpture Terrace opposite the galleries as a sculptural antennae tower.

"Lozano-Hemmer's practice is as much related to innovative and participatory uses of new media as it is an engagement with the politics of public space," Frieling explains.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Frequency and Volume is a part of the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial, a dynamic network of more than 100 exhibitions, performances, public art projects, and events from Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and beyond that fosters and celebrates the creative fusion of contemporary art and technology, taking place from September 12 through December 8, 2012.

In addition to this exhibition, SFMOMA visitors will have the opportunity to see Lozano-Hemmer's responsive light installation in the exhibition Field Conditions, organized by Joseph Becker, SFMOMA assistant curator of architecture and design. Lozano-Hemmer's work was first exhibited at SFMOMA as part of the 2008 group exhibition The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now, which featured his participatory sound recording–based work Microphones (2008).

Artist Talk

In conjunction with the exhibition, SFMOMA will host a special conversation with Lozano-Hemmer on radio technology and other subjects on Thursday, November 1, 2012. For more information, see the event website.

About Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967 and is currently based in Montréal, Canada, where he received a BSc in physical chemistry from Concordia University in 1989. His work has been commissioned for events such as the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999); the Cultural Capital of Europe in Rotterdam (2001); the UN World Summit of Cities in Lyon (2003); the opening of the YCAM Center in Japan (2003); the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004); the memorial for the Tlatelolco Student Massacre in Mexico City (2008); the 50th Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2009); and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver (2010). In 2007 he was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition. He has also shown at art biennials in Sydney, Liverpool, Shanghai, Istanbul, Seville, Seoul, Havana, and New Orleans. His work is in private and public collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Jumex collection in Mexico, the Museum of 21st Century Art in Kanazawa, the Daros Foundation in Zürich, and the Tate in London. He has received two BAFTA British Academy Awards for Interactive Art in London; a Golden Nica at the Prix Ars Electronica in Austria; a distinction at the SFMOMA Webby Awards in San Francisco; an "Artist of the year" Rave Award from Wired Magazine, a Rockefeller fellowship; the Trophée des Lumières in Lyon; and an International Bauhaus Award in Dessau.

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_exhibitions/releases/934#ixzz2AtTR9I33
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Frequency and Volume, Relational Architecture 9 (2003)
installation view of Trackers exhibition at La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris, France, 2011
photo: Antimodular Research, courtesy Galería OMR and bitforms gallery

Media Contacts:
Robyn Wise, 415.357.4172, rwise@sfmoma.org
Christine Choi, 415.357.4177, cchoi@sfmoma.org
Peter Denny, 415.357.4170, pdenny@sfmoma.org

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Museum hours: Open daily (except Wednesdays): 11 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.; open late Thursdays, until 8:45 p.m. Summer hours (Memorial Day to Labor Day): Open at 10 a.m. Closed Wednesdays and the following public holidays: New Year's Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas. The Museum is open the Wednesday between Christmas and New Year's Day.
Admission prices: adults: $18; seniors: $13; students: $11; SFMOMA members and children 12 and under: free. Admission is free the first Tuesday of each month and half-price on Thursdays after 6 p.m.
This exhibition is temporarily closed October 29 - November 2, 2012.

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