Sculpture After Sculpture
11 Oct 2014 - 18 Jan 2015
SCULPTURE AFTER SCULPTURE
Fritsch, Koons, Ray
11 October 2014 - 18 January 2015
Sculpture After Sculpture brings together the work of Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956), Jeff Koons (b. 1955), and Charles Ray (b. 1953) in a far-reaching examination of three innovators whose parallel endeavors have reinvented the traditions of their art form.
When these far-flung artists came of age, in the early 1980s, the work they are known for today—pointedly figural, quotidian in reference, resolutely sculptural—was all but unrecognizable as the shape of serious art to come. The history of sculpture in the modern period had witnessed the rise of abstraction, the assault of the readymade, the turn to Minimalism, and the “post-medium” environmental and social experiments that followed—a sequence that could be understood as a gradual undoing of the traditional art forms as we had known them. Reconsidering these developments, by this time avant-garde orthodoxy, Fritsch, Koons, and Ray not only located their practices within sculpture’s traditional conventions, they reengaged representation generally and the representation of the figure in particular. The art on view in Sculpture After Sculpture, then, may come after sculpture’s supposed demise, but it also comes after in another sense, being made after—in the image of—the art form it would reinvent. The way these sculptors have folded the experiments of the twentieth century into the complex statuary of the twenty-first is the story this exhibition sets out to tell.
Fritsch, Koons, Ray
11 October 2014 - 18 January 2015
Sculpture After Sculpture brings together the work of Katharina Fritsch (b. 1956), Jeff Koons (b. 1955), and Charles Ray (b. 1953) in a far-reaching examination of three innovators whose parallel endeavors have reinvented the traditions of their art form.
When these far-flung artists came of age, in the early 1980s, the work they are known for today—pointedly figural, quotidian in reference, resolutely sculptural—was all but unrecognizable as the shape of serious art to come. The history of sculpture in the modern period had witnessed the rise of abstraction, the assault of the readymade, the turn to Minimalism, and the “post-medium” environmental and social experiments that followed—a sequence that could be understood as a gradual undoing of the traditional art forms as we had known them. Reconsidering these developments, by this time avant-garde orthodoxy, Fritsch, Koons, and Ray not only located their practices within sculpture’s traditional conventions, they reengaged representation generally and the representation of the figure in particular. The art on view in Sculpture After Sculpture, then, may come after sculpture’s supposed demise, but it also comes after in another sense, being made after—in the image of—the art form it would reinvent. The way these sculptors have folded the experiments of the twentieth century into the complex statuary of the twenty-first is the story this exhibition sets out to tell.