Listings Alert: On View at the Guggenheim Museum This Fall

Pop Objects and Icons from the Guggenheim Collection
September 30, 2011–February 8, 2012

The explosion of Pop art in America in the early 1960s signaled the return of representational images that the Abstract Expressionists of the preceding decades had mostly banished in favor of large gestural canvases and expressive colors. Pioneered in Europe in the late 1950s, the American Pop art movement took off after support from critics, including Guggenheim curator Lawrence Alloway. Buoyed by the economic vitality and consumerist culture of post–World War II America, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol explored the images of popular culture and took inspiration from advertisements, pulp magazines, billboards, movies, television, and comic strips. The cool detachment and harsh, impersonal look of Pop art signaled a direct assault on the hallowed traditions of “high art” as well as the personal gesture, so strongly championed by the previous generation. These artists turned to everyday objects, rather than the epic, for their subject matter. The Guggenheim’s holdings on view include works by key transitional figures such as Robert Rauschenberg and paintings by early practitioners who continue to work in this vein today.

This exhibition is curated by Megan Fontanella, Assistant Curator, Collections and Provenance, and Lauren Hinkson, Assistant Curator, Collections, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.


Kandinsky’s Painting with White Border
October 21, 2011–January 15, 2012

Vasily Kandinsky’s canvas Painting with White Border (Bild mit weissem Rand) was inspired by a trip to Moscow in fall 1912. Upon his return to Munich in December, Kandinsky searched for a way to visually record the “extremely powerful impressions” of his native homeland that lingered in his memory. Over a period of five months, he explored various motifs and compositions in study after study, moving freely between pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, and oil. After he produced at least sixteen studies, Kandinsky finally arrived at the pictorial solution to the painting: the white border. This focused exhibition, coorganized with the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., will bring the Guggenheim’s final version of the painting together with more than twelve preparatory drawings and watercolors and one major oil sketch, and will feature the results of an extensive conservation study of the Phillips and Guggenheim paintings. A rare glimpse into Kandinsky’s creative process, this presentation reveals the gradual and deliberate way the artist sought to translate his ideas into a bold new language of abstraction.

Kandinsky’s work is a cornerstone of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s collection. The museum’s founder, industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim, began acquiring Kandinsky’s paintings as early as 1929, and today, the Guggenheim’s holdings of his work are among the most extensive in the world. In 2009, as part of its 50th anniversary celebration, the museum mounted the major retrospective Kandinsky.

Kandinsky’s Painting with White Border is curated by Tracey Bashkoff, Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Elsa Smithgall, Curator, the Phillips Collection. The exhibition is on view at the Phillips Collection until September 4, 2011.

This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Foundation. The conservation study, research, and treatment of Painting with White Border have been made possible through the generous support of Friends of Heritage Preservation.


Intervals: Nicola López
October 11–25, 2011

As part of the Guggenheim’s ongoing Intervals series, New York-based artist Nicola López will create the site-specific work Landscape X, a sculptural collage environment in the rotunda. Intervals is designed to reflect the spirit of today’s most innovative practices. Conceived to take place in the interstices of the museum’s exhibition spaces, in individual galleries, or beyond the physical confines of the building, the program invites a diverse range of practitioners to create new work. López will utilize three levels of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda between the exhibitions Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity and Maurizio Cattelan: All. Taking the construction site as a point of departure, López appropriates elements of urban infrastructure from chain-link fencing to orange mesh barriers to lane markers for her graphic intervention in the space. In Landscape X, the exterior floods the interior, the grid invades the spiral, and order is distorted. Using various printing, painting, and collage methods, the vocabulary of forms will periodically appear on available surfaces along the scrim, floor, wall, and ceiling. The work heightens the viewer’s awareness of the existing architecture and the sense of immanent activity on the other side of scrim.

Intervals: Nicola López is organized by Helen Hsu, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The Leadership Committee for Intervals series is gratefully acknowledged.


Maurizio Cattelan: All
November 4, 2011–January 22, 2012

This retrospective survey will provide an overview of the Italian-born artist’s career, now nearly twenty years long but still vital and productive. Hailed simultaneously as a provocateur, prankster, and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan has created some of the most unforgettable images in recent contemporary art. His source materials range widely, from popular culture, history, and organized religion to a meditation on the self that is at once humorous and profound. Working in a vein that can be described as hyperrealist, Cattelan creates unsettlingly veristic sculptures and installations that reveal contradictions at the core of modern-day society. While bold and irreverent, the work is also deadly serious in its scathing cultural critique.

This presentation marks the first time that the entirety of Cattelan’s oeuvre will be assembled into a coherent exhibition narrative, with more than 130 works on view, borrowed from private and public collections around the world and ranging from the late 1980s to the present. Long interested in the display of his work as part of his overall conceptual practice, Cattelan has a history of responding to the various contexts in which his art is encountered. His survey exhibition at the Guggenheim will follow suit by providing a platform for him to create a site-specific installation designed to encapsulate his complete production to date. The exhibition will fill the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda in an unorthodox and dramatic installation designed by the artist.

Maurizio Cattelan: All is organized by Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The retrospective is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring a critical overview of Cattelan’s work by Spector and detailed entries about the works on view.

The Leadership Committee for Maurizio Cattelan: All is gratefully acknowledged.


Surface, Support, Process: The 1960s Monochrome in the Guggenheim Collection
November 19, 2011–February 8, 2012

The monochrome has a rich, contentious history in twentieth-century art. While often understood as the epitome of modernism at its most austere, since the late 1910s artworks that explore the aesthetic potential of a single color or narrow spectrum of tones have emerged from a diverse range of artistic practices. This survey of monochrome works from the 1960s reveals how this apparently simple formal device served for many artists as the point of departure for a complex re-evaluation of painting and sculpture. From Robert Ryman’s sustained interrogation of the fundamental materials and processes of painting to the ethereal interplay of light and space in Mary Corse’s work, to the pristine “paintingobjects” of Ellsworth Kelly’s freestanding folded sculptures, the monochrome affords a nuanced lens through which to understand the art of this decade.

This exhibition is curated by Megan Fontanella, Assistant Curator, Collections and Provenance, and Lauren Hinkson, Assistant Curator, Collections, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.


OFF-SITE

BMW Guggenheim Lab
Through October 16, 2011
First Park | Houston Street at 2nd Avenue
A New York City Parks Property

Located in a temporary mobile structure in First Park at Houston Street at 2nd Avenue, a New York City Parks property, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is a public space programmed to explore the challenges and opportunities of today’s cities through an interactive installation, daily site-specific events, workshops, discussions, performances, and informal gatherings. Designed by Atelier Bow-Wow, the first BMW Guggenheim Lab brings together an urban activist, an inventor, a journalist, and two architects to develop innovative concepts and designs relating to the theme of “confronting comfort.” Over six years, there will be three distinct themes and mobile structures, each traveling to three cities around the world. After opening in New York, the BMW Guggenheim Lab will travel to Berlin (spring 2012) and Asia (winter 2012–13). The first cycle will culminate with an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York displaying the results and findings of the Lab’s travels. Open Wednesdays– Sundays, August 3–October 16, 2011.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is curated by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies, and Maria Nicanor, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. First Park is a New York City Parks property.

BMW Guggenheim Lab is a collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and BMW.


stillspotting nyc: manhattan
To a Great City by Arvo Pärt and Snøhetta
September 15–18 and 22-25, 2011

For the second edition of stillspotting nyc, composer Arvo Pärt and architecture firm Snøhetta collaborate on a tour of Lower Manhattan that explores the special relationship between space and silence. Visitors will experience this confluence of music and architecture at five separate locations downtown that quietly celebrate the city, ten years after the September 11 attacks. Traveling through sites along the periphery of Ground Zero, participants may encounter a green labyrinth created by The Battery Conservancy, reflect in an underground chamber at Governors Island National Monument, and enter otherwise inaccessible spaces in landmark skyscrapers. Stillspotting nyc, a two-year multidisciplinary project that combines urban experiences, public education programs, and means of escape, takes the Guggenheim’s architecture and urban studies programming into New York’s five boroughs. Every few months “stillspots” are identified, created, or transformed by architects, artists, designers, composers, and philosophers into public tours, events, and installations. The first edition of stillspotting nyc, Sanatorium, was created by Pedro Reyes in Brooklyn.

For stillspotting nyc the Guggenheim Museum is collaborating with two academic institutions. Students from Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation are creating a working blueprint of the specific stillspotting areas around the city that pinpoints stress flow, population density, agitation, noise, and calm. Students in the MFA program in the Photography, Video, and Related Media Department at the School of Visual Arts are creating video studies of the visual, aural, and sociological ecology of the urban landscape.

Stillspotting nyc is organized by David van der Leer, Assistant Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies, with Sarah Malaika, Stillspotting Project Associate, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Support for stillspotting nyc is provided by the Rockefeller Foundation NYC Opportunities Fund and a MetLife Foundation Museum and Community Connections grant. The second edition of stillspotting nyc is supported in part by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York. The Leadership Committee for stillspotting nyc is gratefully acknowledged.


CURRENTLY ON VIEW

THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010: Hans-Peter Feldmann
Through November 2, 2011

Hans-Peter Feldmann, winner of the HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010, is the eighth artist to win this prestigious biennial award, established in 1996 by HUGO BOSS and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. Feldmann has spent over four decades conducting a profound investigation into the influence of the visual environment on our subjective reality. Composing images and objects into serial archives, uncanny combinations, and other illuminating new contexts, his work unearths the latent associations and sentiments contained within the landscape of daily life. As the 2010 prizewinner, Feldmann received an honorarium of $100,000, and for his solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, he has chosen to pin this exact amount in overlapping one-dollar bills to the gallery walls.

The installation, which uses money that has previously been in circulation, extends the artist’s lifelong obsession with collecting familiar material into simple groupings that reveal a nuanced play of similarity and difference. Feldmann has a history of resisting the art world’s commercial structures, issuing his work in unsigned, unlimited editions and retiring from art making altogether for nearly a decade in the 1980s, at which point he gave away or destroyed the work remaining in his possession. Bank notes, like artworks, are objects that have no inherent worth beyond what society agrees to invest them with, and in using them as his medium, Feldmann raises questions about notions of value in art. But his primary interest in the serial display of currency lies less in its status as a symbol of capitalist excess than in its ubiquity as a mass-produced image and a material with which we come into contact every day. At its core, this formal experiment presents an opportunity to experience an abstract concept—a numerical figure and the economic possibilities it entails—as a visual object and an immersive physical environment.

THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010: Hans-Peter Feldmann is organized by Katherine Brinson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue.

This exhibition is made possible by HUGO BOSS.


Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity
Through September 28, 2011

Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity presents the first North American retrospective of artist-philosopher Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Korea). The exhibition presents some ninety works from the 1960s to the present including sculpture, paintings, works on paper, and site-specific installations. In the late 1960s, Lee emerged as the leading theorist and practitioner of Mono-ha (literally “School of Things”), a Japanese movement that arose amid the collapse of colonial world orders, antiauthoritarian protests, and the rise of critiques of modernity. Lee’s sculptures, presenting dispersed arrangements of stones together with industrial materials like steel plates, rubber sheets, and glass panes, recast the object as a network of relations based on parity among the viewer, materials, and site. Lee was also a pivotal figure in the Korean tansaekhwa (monochrome painting) school, which offered a fresh approach to minimalist abstraction by presenting repetitive, gestural marks as bodily records of time’s perpetual passage. Lee has coupled his artistic practice with a prodigious body of critical and philosophical writings, which provide the quotations that appear throughout this exhibition.

Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art, and Nancy Lim, former Asian Art Curatorial Fellow, provided curatorial support. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue featuring a scholarly essay by Munroe that positions Lee in the context of global Post-Minimalism; a meditation on Lee’s poetics by Tatehata Akira, poet, critic, and President, Kyoto City University of the Arts; and a narrative chronology of the artist’s life and work compiled by Tokyo-based scholar Mika Yoshitake.

This exhibition is made possible with lead sponsorship from Samsung.

Major support is provided by the Korea Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by The Japan Foundation. Additional support is provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. We recognize the Leadership Committee for the exhibition, including founding support from Timothy Blum; the Dedalus Foundation, Inc.; HyungTeh Do; Arne Glimcher; Marc Glimcher; Elvira González; Tina Kim; HyunSook Lee; Nicholas Logsdail; Isabel Mignoni; the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation; Jeff Poe; Thaddaeus Ropac; Rosemarie Schwarzwälder; Masami Shiraishi; Sadao Shirota; and Jill Silverman.


VISITOR INFORMATION

Admission: Adults $18, students/seniors (65+) $15, members and children under 12 free. Admission includes an audio tour of the current exhibition available in English, and of highlights of the Guggenheim’s permanent collection, available in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

Museum Hours: Sun–Wed, 10 am–5:45 pm; Fri, 10 am–5:45 pm; Sat, 10 am–7:45 pm; closed Thurs. On Saturdays, beginning at 5:45 pm, the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information visit guggenheim.org.