Hans Hofmann
The Gate, 1959–60
Oil on canvas
190.7 x 123.2 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 62.1620
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Guggenheim Bilbao: ‘Painterly Abstraction, 1949–1969’ Featuring works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Lucio Fontana and Helen Frankenthaler, among others; ‘Painterly Abstraction, 1949–1969: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections’ explores major trends in U.S. and European painting in the 1950s and 1960s.
From June 14, 2011, to January 8, 2012
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Source: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao / theartwolf.com
The exhibition investigates the major trends in American and European art during the Cold War. After the devastation of World War II, European painting “turned to hybridization and synthesis in contrast to earlier utopian and experimental values“, as it is said in the press note of the exhibition. In addition, for those artists living under authoritarian regimes(such as Spain and Eastern Europe), art was a form of liberation.
Simultaneously, a group of American painters -led by Jackson Pollock and his “Action Painting”- were developing an expressive, gesture-based style, called Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition explains that “there was great diversity to postwar American painting beyond the gestural canvases of Action Painters“, such as the “Color Field painters” like Helen Frankenthaler.
‘Painterly Abstraction, 1949–1969: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections’ includes nearly 80 works by over 60 artists, coming from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Highlights of the exhibition includes Jackson Pollock’s “Ocean Greyness” (1953), a monumental “Untitled” by Mark Rothko (1952–53), and Frank Stella’s colossal “Harran II” (1967).
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Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents the contemporary art collection of Dimitris Daskalopoulos (exhibition, 2011)
Chaos and Classicism: European Art, 1918–1936, at the Guggenheim Bilbao (exhibition, 2011)
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