GIACOMETTI-NAUMAN, exhibition view
© Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2016
Photo: Norbert Miguletz
GIACOMETTI-NAUMAN, exhibition view
© Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2016
Photo: Norbert Miguletz
‘Giacometti – Nauman’ at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting a major exhibition of works by Alberto Giacometti and Bruce Nauman from October 28, 2016 until January 22, 2017.]]>
Source: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
The show brings together two artists from different generations with totally different backgrounds. Giacometti (1901–1966) is regarded as one of the most important classical modern European sculptors. Nauman (*1941) and his multifaceted oeuvre represent the radical upheavals in contemporary art since 1960 and a concept of sculpture liberated from traditional concepts. Featuring some 70 works in all, this is the first exhibition ever devoted to both, Giacometti and Nauman. Sculptures and paintings by the Swiss artist engage in a fascinating dialogue with videos, sculptures, drawings, photographs, and spatial installations by the US multimedia artist. Giacometti is represented by works from nearly all of his important creative phases, Nauman primarily by his early oeuvre from the 1960s and early 1970s, which followed immediately on the heels of Giacometti’s works.
Although the two artists never met and never referred explicitly to each other, they have a great deal in common. Both revolutionized the concepts and traditions of sculpture from the perspective of their respective times—Giacometti during the first half of the twentieth century, and Nauman from the 1960s to the present. Both are regarded as individualists who worked consistently from a position of selfimposed isolation and loneliness that has left an indelible imprint on their uncompromising art. Both represent utterly radical artistic standpoints, and both have created works of shocking immediacy that pose lasting challenges for viewers. Giacometti and Nauman have ventured with their oeuvres into uncharted regions of art and perception. Their search for artistic truth is a quest, the outcome of which is often manifested in the creative process itself rather than in finished works. The two artists have elevated failure, the absurd, the fragmentary, and the unheroic to the status of essential elements of their art.
The art of both Giacometti and Nauman revolves around the human being. Giacometti was concerned consistently and almost exclusively with the human figure in his sculptures and paintings, and he developed an original human image of his own with his unmistakable style of figuration, especially during the years after 1945. Bruce Nauman’s work during the 1960s and 1970s was focused above all on the human body (primarily his own), which he took as the point of departure for an investigation into fundamental questions about human nature and the conditions governing human existence.
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