Artipedia - Arts News

Museum für Moderne Kunst

DAS KAPITAL
Blue Chips & Masterpieces
April 21th - August 26th 2007

Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main
Domstrasse 10, 60311 Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Tues.-Sun. 10am to 5 pm
Wed. 10 am to 8 pm, Mon.closed

Tel. +49 (0) 69 212 30447
Fax: +49 (0) 69 212 37882
mmk@stadt-frankfurt.de
http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de

“If I need the cathedral to be relocated, then Rolf will be the one to do it”, artist Richard Serra once quipped about Cologne-based gallery owner and collector Rolf Ricke. The MMK is now for the first time presenting a selection from the Rolf Ricke Collection along with other treasures from its own collection. The show is entitled Das Kapital – Blue Chips & Masterpieces, features works from the 1960s to the present and is fueled by the new, joint acquisition of the Rolf Ricke Collection – joint in that again for the first time ever in a three-way cross-border venture, Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz have joined forces to purchase the collection.

The backbone of the MMK Collection itself stems in part from an extensive private collection. In 1981, on the occasion of the foundation of its museum for modern and contemporary art, the City of Frankfurt am Main acquired outstanding works by European and American artists, in particular champions of Pop Art, from the former Karl Ströher Collection. The recent acquisition of the Ricke Collection means that the MMK’s holdings have been fundamentally expanded and its ranking in the international league tables secured in the long term.

The Ricke Collection is special in that it is not the result of a selection made retrospectively on the basis of art-historical considerations, but instead the product of Ricke’s own experience of the art and his active involvement in its genesis. Its focal points attest to an aesthetic that has spawned valid artistic approaches ever since the 1960s. The Ricke Collection includes pieces by such trailblazing artists as Richard Artschwager, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Richard Serra and Keith Sonnier, and offers an opportunity to rediscover fascinating artists, such as Joe Baer, Gary Kuehn, Barry Le Va and Lee Lozano. Equally, it presents a series of younger positions established in the 1990s, as exemplified by the works of Fabian Marcaccio and Cady Noland, Steven Parrino and David Reed.

At present, it is hard to separate art from commerce. The assessment of artists and their work moves between the twin extremes of the art market’s estimate of its “blue chips” and the standards museums set as regards quality and relevance to their collections. “Blue chips” and “masterpieces” are thus apt terms to describe the twin poles – at the one end the material value and, at the other, the intangible value. Whether an artistic “masterpiece” is likewise a “blue chip” often first emerges after years or decades. Many of the new acquisitions on show and works already in the MMK Collection demonstrate that an artwork need not, but can be both. The quality of the exhibits derives first and foremost from the utopian element in art, the opportunity it creates to think of the new, and its ability to shake us up specifically by not adhering to given forms and rules.

We have a joint effort by the City of Frankfurt, the Hesse Cultural Foundation and the private patrons in the “Stifterkreis zum Erwerb der Sammlung Ricke” to thank for the fact that the MMK can proudly open its doors to the Ricke Collection. As a museum for contemporary art that has a pivotal socio-political position between the art market and art producers, the MMK will permanently preserve the works acquired for posterity and ensure they are accessible to the public. The integration of this vast set of new works will not only change the profile of our Collection as the diversity and immense quality of the new items will offer any number of new angles for exhibitions. A constant focus on using the Collection means working with the capital it offers and in this way creating and accumulating surplus value.

For more information go to: http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de

la criée centre for contemporary art

Latifa Laâbissi
Habiter
Protocol 5 March – 3 June 2007

I Hear Voices
Installation by Nadia Lauro
Exhibition 20 April – 3 June 2007
Opening, Friday, 20 april, 6.30 p.m. at la criée

The choreographer Latifa Laâbissi will dance a solo in an everyday space, more specifically in the homes of residents of a city. She has set up a protocol. After scouting for locations and wandering through the city, she puts an ad in the local papers :

“Artist-choreographer looking for resident willing to host a dance project in his/her home. The proposition is free and will require 2 hours of your time. For more information, contact 06 .. .. .. ..”

After a preliminary conversation over the phone in which she describes her project and her way of working, Latifa Laâbissi goes to the home of the host of her dance. During this time, she observes the way in which her host opens his/her private space to a stranger, and makes a space available to welcome her. Without making any adjustments to its arrangement, she spends time in this space, occupying it. She lets her host decide whether of not he/she will attend the dance.

Latifa Laâbissi is accompanied by the video maker Sophie Laly and by the artist and graphic designer Jocelyn Cottencin. The films and photographs made at this time constitute the material for the second part of the project: viewing sessions at certain residents homes in order to watch the films together, that is to say an encounter between the team of artists, the residents and their guests, a discussion around this experience. The film is a single shot framing a space and its objects in which the choreographer enters for a 10 minute solo performance.

Her body movements, in interrupting the everyday use of these spaces and her status as a stranger, provoke singular narratives on the part of her hosts in which each participant reinvents him/herself and to which they bring their own idea of dance. The invitation may create slight states of shock or silences.

For Habiter in Rennes, Latifa Laâbissi has invited Nadia Lauro to imagine a space for la criée that contains a potential for fiction, a space to be inhabited by the public.

Nadia Lauro is a scenographer and visual artist who develops her work in various contexts: performance, landscape architecture, fashion. The different spaces she creates are scenographic devices, environments, visual installations, scripted spaces or living décors. She is a collaborator of the choreographers and performers Vera Mantero, Benoît Lachambre, Frans Poesltra, Jennifer Lacey and Barbara Kraus. Nadia Lauro is also at the origin of Squash Cake Bureau -scénographie et paysage, in collaboration with the landscape artist Laurence Crémel, for which she creates landscape installations and street furniture.

I Hear Voices is a sort of fur landscape with a sound environment to be occupied throughout the exhibition. It is an immersive space, somewhere between a “mental garden” and a “warm-up room for the public”, that will be scripted in a specific manner in order to generate new ways of seeing and of being together.

This project by Nadia Lauro is part of a series of performance-installations that includes Tu montes? (Ménagerie de verre, Paris, 2002 – Kanagawa Art Center, Yokohama, 2003) As Atletas (Serralves Foundation, Porto, 2003 – Lausanne Jardin, 2004, and I Hear Voice (Kaaitheater, 2006, Brussels – la criée Center for Contemporary Art, 2007 – Spring wave, Seoul, 2007).

la criée centre for contemporary art
place Honoré Commeurec – halles centrales
35000 Rennes
France
tel.: (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 10
fax (+33) (0)2 23 62 25 19
la-criee@ville-rennes.fr
http://www.criee.org

Admission free
Tuesday to Friday from 12:00 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday from 2:00 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Closed on Mondays and public holidays

For more information go to: http://www.criee.org

Kunstmuseum Bern

Expressionism from the Mountains
Kirchner, Bauknecht, Wiegers and the Group “Rot-Blau”

April 27, 2007 – August 19, 2007
Opening on April 26, 2007, 6.30 pm
Press Conference on April 25, 2007, 10 am

Kunstmuseum Bern
Hodlerstrasse 8-12
3000 Bern 7
Switzerland
Phone +41 31 328 09 44
info@kunstmuseumbern.ch
http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch

With over 160 works – paintings, wood sculptures and works on paper - the exhibition Expressionism from the Mountains demonstrates the intense artistic and human exchange that took place between Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and a succession of younger artists during the 1920s. Approximately 55 works by Kirchner are juxtaposed with works by Philipp Bauknecht, Jan Wiegers, Albert Müller, Hermann Scherer and Paul Camenisch.

Kirchner, Bauknecht and Wiegers
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) came to Davos in 1917 for reasons of health and began to apply the expressionism he had developed in Dresden and Berlin to the depiction of the life and landscape of the Bündner mountains. In 1920, he made friends with the German Philipp Bauknecht (1884-1933), a tuberculosis patient who had been living in Davos since 1910 and who had found his way to an individual expressionistic style of painting using strong colours. In addition to their related styles, the artists were bound by a common desire to immortalise in monumental form the Alpine landscape and the life of the mountain farmers.

The Dutchman Jan Wiegers (1893-1959) also came to Davos from Groningen with a lung complaint in 1920 and became friends with Kirchner. He adapted the latter’s techniques and stylistic elements and after his return home in 1921, conveyed the basics of the Kirchner style of expressionism to his friends in the artist group “De Ploeg”. In several journeys to Davos in 1925 and 1926, Wiegers renewed the artistic dialogue with Kirchner and maintained friendly relations with him until Kirchner’s death.

Kirchner and the Group “Rot-Blau”
In June 1923, on the occasion of his exhibition in the Kunsthalle Basel, Kirchner met the young artists from Basel Hermann Scherer (1893-1927) and Albert Müller (1897-1926). They subsequently often came to see him in Davos for extended working visits. In the interchange with Kirchner’s art, Scherer and Müller found their way to their own congenial visual language. On New Year’s Eve in 1924-25, together with Paul Camenisch (1893-1970), they founded the artist group “Rot-Blau”, which, in its short but turbulent history, was to make the most important contribution to Swiss Expressionism. The collaboration of Kirchner with the young artists from Basel was fruitful for both parties. With Kirchner’s encouragement, for instance, Scherer, a stonemason by profession, created an impressive series of wood sculptures. Conversely, Kirchner felt stimulated by Scherer’s competition to increase his own sculptural activity. However, the early deaths of Müller and Scherer put an
untimely end to the friendship with Kirchner.

Mountain landscapes, Nudes and Portraits of Artists
By grouping the exhibits according to subject, the analogies and also the differences in the works of the six artists, who often worked side by side on the same motifs, are demonstrated. In addition to the landscape around Davos and the life of the mountain farmers, the nude was a central theme, particularly the depiction of nudes moving freely in the landscape of woods and streams around Kirchner’s house. The artists also portrayed themselves and each other in numerous self-portraits, single and group portraits that are still witness to their personal attachment. A further subject field is the landscape of the Mendrisiotto, where the “Rot-Blau” artists met regularly.

Catalogue:
Expressionismus aus den Bergen / Expressionism from the Mountains
Edited by Beat Stutzer, Han Steenbruggen, Samuel Vitali und Matthias Frehner. Texts by Kathleen bühler, Matthias frehner, Wolfgang Henze, Roland Scotti, Peter Suter, Beat Stutzer, Samuel Vitali and Georg Schmidt.

Curator: Samuel Vitali, samuel.vitali@kunstmuseumbern.ch, Phone +41 31 328 09 04

Press Relations Officer:
Ruth Gilgen, Tel. +41 31 328 09 19,
ruth.gilgen@kunstmuseumbern.ch

Images, Downloads:
Laura Frischknecht, Tel. Tel. +41 31 328 09 53,
laura.frischknecht@kunstmuseumbern.ch

Administration:
Rosmarie Joss, Tel. +41 31 328 09 18,
rosmarie.joss@kunstmuseumbern.ch

Media:
Brigit Bucher, Tel. +41 31 328 09 21,
brigit.bucher@kunstmuseumbern.ch

For more information go to: http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch