“The New Museum is proud to present ‘Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,’ an exhibition originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) for the New Museum, and presented with curatorial support from advisors Naomi Beckwith, Massimiliano Gioni, Glenn Ligon, and Mark Nash. ‘Grief and Grievance’ is an intergenerational exhibition bringing together thirty-seven artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America. The exhibition further considers the intertwined phenomena of Black grief and a politically orchestrated white grievance, as each structures and defines contemporary American social and political life. Included in ‘Grief and Grievance’ are works encompassing video, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, sound, and performance made in the last decade, along with several key historical works and a series of new commissions created in response to the concept of the exhibition.” — New Museum
Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, New Museum, states: “‘Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America’ is a tribute to Okwui Enwezor’s courage, relentless focus, and fierce intelligence as a giant in our field and one of the most important curators of his generation. His presence remains vivid, as does his legacy to transform the history of art and exhibition-making. We are honored that Okwui embraced our invitation to present his exhibition at the New Museum, an exhibition that confronts the uncomfortable truths and ongoing pain of racial injustice in America. Okwui’s vision and the voices of the artists selected for this exhibition could not be more relevant.”
All images: “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” 2021. Exhibition views: New Museum, New York. Photos: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy New Museum.
The artists on view include: Terry Adkins, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kevin Beasley, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Garrett Bradley, Melvin Edwards, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Theaster Gates, Arthur Jafa, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adam Pendleton, Julia Phillips, Howardena Pindell, Cameron Rowland, Lorna Simpson, Sable Elyse Smith, Tyshawn Sorey, Diamond Stingily, Henry Taylor, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Carrie Mae Weems, and Jack Whitten.
“Noted radiologist and art collector Dr. H. Russell Albright (1934-2017) bequeathed his extensive and important photography collection to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), and left a fund to create an endowment in support of the museum’s Department of Photographs. Dr. Albright had a long and significant relationship with NOMA, filling many roles over the span of 30 years, ranging from Trustee to longtime Fellow.
With his bequest to NOMA, Albright gave almost 400 works to the museum, more than 350 of which were photographs. Of these, the majority are by acknowledged contemporary masters such as Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Nan Goldin, and Thomas Ruff, and the collection also includes a smaller group of excellent prints by earlier twentieth century artists such a Man Ray, Brassaï, and Doris Ulmann. Additionally, substantial and generous works were gifted to the modern and contemporary art department, the decorative arts department, and the African art department.” — New Orleans Museum of Art
“Russell Albright’s eye was incredibly discerning, a trait that is visible across his collection, be it in his selection of a rich modernist print from the 1930s or a powerful contemporary photograph” says Russell Lord, NOMA’s Freeman Family Curator of Photographs. “Albright never shied away from adventurous or even controversial images, amassing a collection that is as critical as it is beautiful.”
Bill Brandt (British, born Germany, 1904-1983). Parlourmaid and Under-Parlourmaid Ready to Serve Dinner, ca. 1934. Gelatin silver prin. Gift of H. Russell Albright, M.D.
Brassai (Gyula Halasz) (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984). Lovers, Rue Saint Denis, 1931. Gelatin silver print. Gift and bequest of H. Russell Albright, M.D.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002). And At Night It Moans, ca. 1945. Gelatin silver print. Gift and bequest of H. Russell Albright, M.D.
Sally Mann (American, born 1951). Deep South, Untitled (Stick), 1998. Gelatin silver print, toned with tea. Bequest of H. Russell Albright, M.D.
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989). New Orleans Interior, 1982. Gelatin silver print. Bequest of H. Russell Albright, M.D.
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976). Nude Portrait of Nusch Eluard from Facile, 1935. Gelatin silver print. Gift and bequest of H. Russell Albright, M.D.
Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954). Untitled #225, 1990. Chromogenic print. Gift and bequest of H. Russell Albright, M. M.D.
“No Ocean Between Us: Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America & The Caribbean, 1945–Present features approximately 65 works of modern and contemporary art by Latin American and Caribbean artists of Asian descent. This exhibition highlights artists whose work reflects the global dialogues between their Asian heritages and their Latin American or Caribbean identities, as well as the major artistic movements of their times. Included in the exhibition are paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and mixed media works by artists from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, Mexico, Panama, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.
No Ocean Between Us provides context to understanding the complex and multifaceted nature of cultural diversity in modern Latin American and Caribbean societies. The exhibition allows the viewer to explore how an artist’s unique experience of migration shaped their work. Inspired by the permanent collection of the Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States, the exhibition features works by Brazilian artists Manabu Mabe, Tomie Ohtake, Yukata Toyota, Tikashi Fukushima, and Kazuo Wakabashi; Argentine artist Kasuya Sakai; Peruvian artists Venancio Shinki, Arturo Kubotta, Carlos Runcie Tanaka, and Eduardo Tokeshi; Trinidadian artist M.P. Alladin; Mexican artist Luis Nishizawa; Cuban artist Wifredo Lam; and Surinamese artist Soeki Irodikromo.” — San Antonio Museum of Art
“Cross-cultural exchanges and dialogues have had an incredible impact on the development of global art movements and continue to shape the creation of art today. No Ocean Between Us offers an opportunity to learn about the under-explored influences of Asian artists in Latin America and Caribbean, as well as the history and contemporary identities of the region. This is a growing area of study, and I am excited to share the incredible work of the featured artists with our audiences,” said Lucía Abramovich Sánchez, SAMA’s Associate Curator of Latin American Art. “This exhibition also establishes interesting connections with the Museum’s extensive Latin American and Asian art collections, expanding the narratives that we can tell across our permanent and special exhibition galleries.”
“Digital Mourning, curated by Roberta Tenconi, is the first major solo exhibition devoted to Neïl Beloufa in an Italian institution, and it stems from a reflection on the current times and on the concept of life in our digital world. Right from the title, the exhibition alludes to one of the most striking paradoxes of contemporary society, which is the existence in a technological world and its parallel disappearance. The association of the two words—’digital’ and ‘mourning’—comes about in the encounter between an artificial world and the absence of life, in a dimension in which life itself is simulated by means of models specially created to understand its true essence.
Playing on a combination and intermingling of genres, Digital Mourningis a complex new multimedia installation conceived specifically for the space of the Shed at Pirelli HangarBicocca, presenting, at the same time, a retrospective of Neïl Beloufa’s video works. The exhibition consists of a wide selection of films and video works that retrace the artist’s career from his debut (with Kempinski, 2007) through to his most recent productions, few of which are projected inside multimedia installations originally designed for them by the artist. Together, these form part of a computerised activation and re-editing system that abolishes any hierarchy between the different types of information.” — Pirelli HangarBicocca
“The exhibition The 165-metre Mermaid and Other Stories stems from a mediaeval Japanese legend and unfurls in the manner of an epic poem. It tells of the artist’s adventures and encounters as he goes with the flow, roving between his native Japan and Monaco via Brazil, Australia and many other lands. Freely combining performance, land art, music and cooking, Shimabuku’s poetic actions are forever spinning new tales. His texts, which form the narrative thread of the exhibition, interweave installations, films, sculptures and photographs executed over the past thirty years.
On a visit to Fukuoka he discovered the legend and relics of a mermaid whose body was 165 metres long and decided to expand it, buying a rope also 165 metres long. Taken around the world, this rope brings him closer to the fish-woman and becomes a vector linking fiction to reality, past to present and Japan to the different countries where the work is presented. Acquired by the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco in 2018, the installation I’m travelling with 165-metre Mermaid (1998–ongoing) forms the starting point for the exhibition and is enriched by the presence of artefacts produced in Monaco by different craftspeople invited in turn to make this story into a work of their own.” — Nouveau Musée National de Monaco
“Placing things upright. Placing the lying things upright. Placing the trees and stones that lie on the beach upright. With the collaboration of many people, we will place many things in an upright position. We will try to put our energy together to place huge trees as well in an upright position. This should make something that lies in our hearts stand up in an upright position.” — Shimabuku
“The New-York Historical Society celebrates the golden age of comedy with So Ready for Laughter: Bob Hope and World War II. The special exhibition highlights the legendary performer and his unique role during World War II entertaining troops overseas. Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Service Organizations (USO), the exhibition features artifacts, films, and rare photographs to illustrate how Hope helped lift spirits both abroad and on the home front with his USO and radio shows during a dark time in American history. A companion exhibition, The Gift of Laughter, delves into Hope’s varied career after World War II as a USO entertainer, television star, and Academy Award host demonstrating the many hats worn by comedians. His legacy will be brought to life with many items, including costumes from the Emmy Award-winning series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, as well as objects related to other comedians—real and imagined—influenced by Hope.” — New-York Historical Society
“Bob Hope achieved so much during his decades-long career, but his work entertaining and cheering up World War II-era troops holds a special place in American history,” said Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. “This captivating, nostalgic exhibition looks at how Hope’s legacy lives on nearly 80 years later, and we are proud to partner with The National WWII Museum and the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation to bring this showcase to New York, the city that welcomed Hope when he first arrived in the U.S. and where his legendary career later flourished.”
Bob Hope surrounded by Oscars at the 13th Academy Awards, 1941. Courtesy of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation
Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences Honorary Oscar presented to Bob Hope for “his contribution to the laughter of the world” at the 25th Academy Awards ceremony, 1952. Courtesy of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation
Brigadier General Henry G. Thorne Jr placing a Viking helmet on Bob Hope, 1958. Courtesy of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation
Bob Hope greeting the audience at a USO show at Cu Chi Base Camp, Vietnam, 1970. Courtesy of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation
City of New York Mayor John V. Lindsay and Bob Hope, 1972. Courtesy of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation
Costume worn by Bob Hope on Bob Hope’s Bicentennial Star Spangled Spectacular, NBC, July 4, 1976. Courtesy of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation. Photo courtesy of Hollywood Museum
Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam “Midge” Maisel in Season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, 2019. Costume Designer: Donna Zakowska. Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Dress worn by Miriam “Midge” Maisel during a performance for the troops, 2019. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 3: Episode 1. Designed by Donna Zakowska. Costume maker: Eric Winterling, Inc. Dress: satin-faced silk chiffon. Red- drape: heavy-silk chiffon. Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Wanda Sykes as Moms Mabley in Season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, 2019. Costume Designer: Donna Zakowska. Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Costume worn by Moms Mabley at the Apollo, 2019. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 3: Episode 8. Designer: Donna Zakowska. Costume maker: Timberlake Studios, Inc. Milliner: Ann Morin. Dress: cotton. Hat: boiled wool. Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Alex Borstein as Susie Myerson and Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam “Midge” Maisel in Season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, 2018. Costume Designer: Donna Zakowska. Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
Dress worn by Miriam “Midge” Maisel for a telethon, 2018. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 2: Episode 9. Designer: Donna Zakowska. Costume maker: Eric Winterling, Inc. Dress: silk. Bubble dress: silk wool. Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video
“From the first time my father, Bob Hope, entertained the troops at California’s March Field in 1941, he knew he had discovered an audience of a lifetime,” said Linda Hope, chair and CEO of the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation. “He truly appreciated the men and women who were sacrificing to defend America. It was his honor, along with the entertainers who accompanied him on those arduous and often dangerous trips, to connect with our fighting men and women on the front lines and bring them a touch of home, and let them laugh—even if only for a brief moment. My father knew this was the ‘Greatest Generation’. In his memory, the Bob & Dolores Hope Foundation is thrilled to sponsor So Ready for Laughter, an exhibition which celebrates my Dad’s spirit and honors the courageous men and women who served our country during the perilous time of World War II.”
So Ready for Laughter: Bob Hope and World War II is organized by The National WWII Museum in New Orleans; curated by Kimberly Guise, assistant director for curatorial services. Cristian Petru Panaite, associate curator of exhibitions at New-York Historical, is coordinating curator of the New York presentation of So Ready for Laughter and curator of The Gift of Laughter.
“The Brooklyn Museum is the first New York institution to present a sweeping survey of KAWS’s career, from his roots as a graffiti artist to a dominating force in the contemporary art world, tracing common themes in the Brooklyn-based artist’s practice. Renowned for his paintings and sculptures of pop culture–inspired characters, as well as his playful use of abstraction and his meticulous execution, KAWS bridges the worlds of art, popular culture, and commerce while investigating our connection to objects and toone another. With a practice formed outside of orthodox art-world channels and rooted in graffiti art, drawing, and animation, KAWS has expanded access to his art by allowing the general public to purchase editions of his work and to interact with it digitally. KAWS: WHAT PARTY highlights a range of works from the artist’s diverse career, including drawings, paintings, bronze sculptures, smaller objects, furniture, and monumental wooden sculptures of the beloved COMPANION character, as well as a selection of new and existing works that have never been publicly displayed. Throughout the exhibition, visitors will be invited to directly engage with KAWS’s work through Acute Art, an augmented reality app the artist has partnered with. In conjunction with KAWS: WHAT PARTY, a towering new sculpture by the artist will also be installed at Rockefeller Center’s historic plaza in summer 2021.” — Brooklyn Museum
“The Brooklyn Museum and KAWS have been working together since 2015, and we’re excited to further that relationship by presenting his first mid-career survey in the U.S.,” says Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, and curator of KAWS: WHAT PARTY. “While participating in a cultural environment shaped by image and consumption, KAWS simultaneously emphasizes the constant presence of universal emotions in his work, such as love, friendship, loneliness, and alienation—an emphasis that is now more important and relevant than ever before.”
“KAWS’s new works speak powerfully to the isolation, fears, and grief of our times,” says Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum. “It reminds us that there’s a universality to our suffering.”
“The International Center of Photography (ICP) presents its winter/spring 2021 exhibition: But Still, It Turns: Recent Photography from the World, guest curated by photographer Paul Graham. The exhibition comes on the heels of ICP’s reopening of its galleries on October 1 following a six-month closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic and arrives just as ICP celebrates its first anniversary at its new home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
In But Still, It Turns, nine contemporary photographers present images made in the 21st-century United States that reflect a movement towards a lyrical documentary practice. Extending the tradition of Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Diane Arbus, this work fits a notion of ‘photography from the world’—photography that resists both narrative arcs and the drama of photojournalism or staged photography, grappling instead with the world as it is, in all its ambiguity and wonder.” — ICP
Curran Hatleberg’s gatherings of humankind in Lost Coast’s intimate portraits and episodic narratives that reconstruct a sense of place and community through a shifting cast of characters and scenery.
Piergiorgio Casotti and Emanuele Brutti’s collaborative Index G examines the city of Saint Louis through its streets, homes, and people, demonstrating how inequality is revealed through profound differences in local businesses or living conditions, as well as seemingly arbitrary details within urban surroundings.
Kristine Potter’s Manifest, which combines the genres of landscape and portrait photography to re-examine the canon of traditional western landscape photography, and in so doing uncovers a world far more formidable and disorienting than previously detailed.
RaMell Ross’s South County, AL (a Hale County), which presents images that center on the rhythms and flow of Black lives, embracing quiet spaces and quotidian moments where people are pictured away from the burden of representation, granting them dignity of selfhood. The exhibition also includes screenings of his Academy Award–nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018).
Richard Choi’s What Remains, which pairs video and still photographs to offer a meditation on the stream of life and its expression as a single image, between film and photography, between life and our memory of it.
Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa’s All My Gone Life, which braids contemporary images made by the artist across the United States with archival negatives; together they ask how the image, and the imagination, might play into the elaboration of a future in which vision and delusion so frequently overlap.
Vanessa Winship’s peripatetic vision in she dances on Jackson, which presents a conversation between landscape and portrait, exploring the vastness of the United States and the inextricable link between a territory and its inhabitants.
Gregory Halpern takes viewers on an enigmatic journey westward, across the desert and through the city of Los Angeles, ending at the Pacific Ocean in ZZYZX, where everything unfolds into a kind of rapture—simultaneously psychedelic, self-destructive, and sublime.
“We opened our new space at Essex Crossing six weeks before the pandemic shut us down,” said Mark Lubell, ICP Executive Director. “It’s been a tumultuous time for us all, but the work in this show aims to offer space for visitors to reflect on the components that make up our individual experiences and the empathy to be found for others. I hope it is a breath of relief and contemplation for our visitors.”
Images courtesy International Center of Photography.
“The Frist Art Museum presents Liliana Porter: Man with Axe and Other Stories, a large-scale installation that is shown with additional works by the Argentina-born artist. Porter (b. 1941) is renowned for arranging discarded everyday objects to create theatrical vignettes that are philosophically provocative and slyly humorous.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, Man with Axe and Other Stories (2017), on loan from the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, offers a bird’s-eye view of a civilization being reduced to rubble. The sprawling work features a small plastic figure of an axe-wielding man who appears to have demolished an array of items, from dollhouse furniture to vases, clocks, and a full-size piano. ‘The tableau illustrates that, like time itself, a tiny thing—a virus, a dangerous ideology, or a lone person—can bring down a kingdom or a world,’ writes Frist Art Museum chief curator Mark Scala. ‘Rich with melancholy and humor and despair and hope, the installation shows the man with the axe as a sociopathic embodiment of time itself, forever frozen in a single moment, forever unfolding in a pattern of violence and renewal.’
The installation should read as scary and apocalyptic, but Porter does not wish to cause undue anxiety or limit the viewer to a pessimistic opinion of the human dilemma. Instead, she embraces multiple responses. ‘To one person it can seem fun, to another tragic, to another pretty, another a horror. And I think they’re all true,’ says Porter. Always fascinated with paradox, Porter says about Man with Axe that ‘even though it is destruction, it’s not sinister. . . . It’s like a luminous destruction, we could say. I like that contradiction’.” — Frist Art Museum
Liliana Porter. Man with Axe and Other Stories, 2017. Figurines, objects, and wooden base. Dimensions variable. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez, 2017.Liliana Porter. Man with Axe and Other Stories, 2017. Figurines, objects, and wooden base. Dimensions variable. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez, 2017.Liliana Porter. Man with Axe and Other Stories, 2017. Figurines, objects, and wooden base. Dimensions variable. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez, 2017.
Liliana Porter. Untitled at Sea with Gardener, 2016. Acrylic and assemblage on canvas, 36 x 80 x 3 1/2 in. (91.4 x 203.2 x 8.9 cm). Collection of David Packard and M. Bernadette Castor.
Liliana Porter. To Do It: Red Sand III, 2020. Colored sand and figurine on white wooden base, 36 x 40 x 40 in. (91.4 x 101.6 x 101.6 cm) approximately. Courtesy of the artist.
Liliana Porter. To Fix It: Man with Blue Overall, 2020. Broken table clock and figurine, 5 1/2 x 5 x 4 in. (14 x 12.7 x 10.2 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibition was organized by the Frist Art Museum.
Images courtesy Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee.
For the sixth exhibition in the series “Matters of Concern | Matières à panser”, curator Guillaume Désanges presents “Forgiven by Nature”, a solo exhibition by Italian artist and architect Gianni Pettena, to be held at La Verrière – the Brussels art space of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès – and Institut Supérieur pour l’Etude du Langage Plastique (ISELP).
“With his roots in the Florentine scene, Gianni Pettena is a leading member of the Radical Architecture movement (including groups such as Archizoom, Superstudio and UFO), founded in Italy in 1965 to rethink the foundational principles of architecture, and to critique their normalisation and dominance in practice. The movement sought to challenge the ‘imperative to build’, and to replace it with conceptual, artistic alternatives: free-thinking, imaginative new ways to live in the world. For Gianni Pettena, especially, this re-visioning of the principles of his discipline was expressed as a quest for the ‘primal roots’ of architecture, based on open and mindful observation of nature, both wild and tamed. At the beginning of the 1970s, his journeys through the deserts of the American south-west defined the bedrock of a personal output that was both concrete and reflective, material and ideal. This awareness of the ‘natural’ architectural potential of ecosystems untouched by Western industrialised culture gave rise to numerous solo and group projects, installations, actions, performances and designs, together with sculptures, films and texts, both theory-based and intuitive, some of which were realised, others not: the key elements of his uncategorisable, highly original work. As an architect who does not build, an artist who makes nothing, Pettena’s diverse practices are nonetheless underpinned by a coherent matrix of forms and concerns.” — From the text by Guillaume Désanges
“This exhibition of new projects showcases over 30 international artists who have created works in glass in collaboration with the master glass artisans at Berengo Studio on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon. Glasstress Boca Raton 2021 is a sequel to the acclaimed 2016 Glasstress exhibition at Boca Raton Museum of Art and includes new major works created since that time. A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
Some of the world’s leading contemporary artists were invited to breathe new life into centuries-old glassmaking in Venice ― maestros of glassblowing from the legendary Berengo Studio residency help artists manifest their visions” ― Boca Raton Museum of Art
“There is every reason this year to have a world view,” says Irvin Lippman, the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s Executive Director, as South Florida boldly ushers in the New Year with the national premiere of Glasstress 2021 Boca Raton. “Three years in the making, with 2020 being such a challenging year to coordinate an international exhibition of this size and scope, the effort serves as an important reassurance that art is an essential and enduring part of humanity. This is also a tribute to the resilience of Venice’s surviving the floods and continuing to make art through the pandemic.”
Ai Wei Wei. Blossom Chandelier, 2017 157 x 98.4 inches. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Monir al Qadiri. Amorphous solid ghost, 2017. 7 elements, dimensions variable. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Fiona Banner. Work 2, 2013. 133 x 70.8 x 120.4 inches. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Renate Bertlmann. Divorce, 2019-2020. Two Black Roses + Tranquilizer. 63 x 63 x 86.6 inches. Photo: Francesco AllegrettoMonica Bonvicini. Bonded, 2017. 33 x 18.5 x 18.5 inchesJimmie Durham. Strikes Twice, 2020. 8 elements, approximately 4 feet high each. Photo: Francesco AllegrettoAbdulnasser Gharem. The Stamp (Moujaz), 2017. 35 x 35 x 47 inches. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Prune Nourry. River Woman, 2019. 76.7 x 29.5 x 8 inches. Photo: Bertrand Huet
Laure Prouvost. Cooling System 1, (For Global Warming), 2017. 93 x 20 inches. Watercolor: 20 x 16 inches. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Wael Shawky. Cabaret Crusades, 2019. 53.5 x 45 x 1 inches. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Tim Tate. The Pandemic Oculus, 2020. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Dustin Yellin. Sisyphus, 2017. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Yin Xiuzhen. The Container of Thinking, 2015. Dimensions variable. Photo: Francesco Allegretto
Most of these works in glass have never been seen elsewhere, and were handpicked by Kathleen Goncharov, the Museum’s Senior Curator who traveled to Italy in 2019.
Ai Weiwei, Fred Wilson, Joyce J. Scott, Jimmie Durham, Ugo Rondinone, Fiona Banner, Vik Muniz, Monica Bonvicini, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Laure Prouvost, Renate Bertlmann, Thomas Schütte, Loris Gréaud, and Erwin Wurm are among the 34 artists in the exhibition. Most of these artists have represented their countries at the Venice Biennale.
“The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Bilbao and Painting, an exhibition that brings together a selection of paintings created by artists working in Bilbao in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who traveled to Paris and incorporated the ideas of modernism from French Impressionism and the Avant-gardes. At the turn of the century, Bilbao became one of the most prosperous cities in Spain, thanks to its naval, and iron and steel industries, and its commercial, banking, and cultural activity. There is, at this period, among the citizens of Bilbao a craving and an earnest wish to succeed and steadily advance towards a better future for all, a sort of empathy that unfortunately will be shattered with advent of the Civil War of 1936.
The exhibition represents and conceptualizes different moments in the history of Bilbao through large-scale paintings that portray, among other scenes, the commercial ships in the river and the terraces given to leisure, the life of the bourgeoisie and the village folk, the rowers, the struggle and death at sea, sporting heroes, the daily tasks in a fishing port or the festivities in a Biscayan anteiglesia (village district).” — Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Adolfo Guiard. The River at Axpe (La ría en Axpe), 1886. Oil on canvas, 115 x 295 cm. Colección Sociedad BilbainaAdolfo Guiard. On the Terrace (En la terraza), 1886. Oil on canvas, 110 x 470 cm. Colección Sociedad BilbainaAdolfo Guiard. Hunters at North Station (Cazadores en la Estación del Norte), 1887. Oil on canvas, 116 x 310 cm. Colección Sociedad Bilbaina
Adolfo Guiard. Harvest (La siega), ca. 1892. Oil on canvas, 220,7 x 158,5 cm. Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. On loan from a private collection
