Iaphet Elli  |
| Kurant_signature |
S C H E D U L E O F E X H I B I T I O N S
T H R O U G H 2 0 1 6The information below is subject to change. Please contact the press office to confirm exhibition dates prior
to publication.
Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting
October 9, 2015–January 6, 2016
This major retrospective exhibition—the first in the United States in nearly 40 years and the most
comprehensive ever mounted—will showcase the pioneering work of Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–
1995). Exploring the beauty and complexity of Burri’s oeuvre, the exhibition will position the artist as a
central and singular protagonist of post–World War II art. Burri is best known for his series of sacchi
(sacks), works with their angst-ridden surfaces of ripped and patched burlap, seams, and sutures. Far
less familiar to American audiences are his subsequent series, which will be represented in depth at the
Guggenheim: legni (scorched wood reliefs), ferri (welded irons), melted plastics, cretti (induced
craquelure), and cellotex (flayed fiberboards). Burri’s work both demolished and reconfigured the
Western pictorial tradition, while reconceptualizing modernist collage. As an originator of a materialsbased
art, he broke from the conventional paint, canvas, and mark making of American Abstract
Expressionism and European Art Informel. Burri’s unprecedented approaches to manipulating humble
substances—and his abject picture-objects—also profoundly influenced Arte Povera, Neo-Dada, and
Process art. Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting is organized by Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor,
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Guest Curator, Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, with support from Megan Fontanella, Associate Curator, Collections and
Provenance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the collaboration of Carol Stringari, Deputy
Director and Chief Conservator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting is made possible by Lavazza. Support is also provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts. The Leadership Committee for the exhibition, chaired by Pilar Crespi Robert and Stephen Robert, Trustee, is gratefully acknowledged for
its generosity, with special thanks to Leonard and Judy Lauder and Maurice Kanbar as well as to Luxembourg & Dayan, Richard Roth
Foundation, Alice and Thomas Tisch, Isabella Del Frate Rayburn, Sigifredo di Canossa, Dominique Lévy, Daniela Memmo d’Amelio,
ROBILANT+VOENA, Alberto and Stefania Sabbadini, Sperone Westwater, Samir Traboulsi, Alberto and Gioietta Vitale, Baroness Mariuccia
Zerilli-Marimo, and those who wish to remain anonymous. Additional funding is provided by Mapei Group, E. L. Wiegand Foundation,
Mondriaan Fund, the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, La FondazioneNY, and the New York State Council on the Arts. The Guggenheim
Museum is also grateful for the collaboration of the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri.
Photo-Poetics: An Anthology
November 20, 2015–March 23, 2016
This exhibition will occupy three levels of the museum’s Tower galleries, and will feature more than 70
works by ten artists: Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad
Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag, and Sara VanDerBeek. The exhibition and its
accompanying catalogue will examine an important new development in contemporary photography,
offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualize their
work within the history of art and visual culture. Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism, these artists
pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centers on the representation of
objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. The result is an image
imbued with poetic and evocative personal significance—a sort of displaced self-portraiture—that
resonates with larger cultural and historical meanings. Driven by a profound engagement with the
medium of photography, these artists investigate the nature, traditions, and magic of photography at a
moment characterized by rapid digital transformation. They attempt to rematerialize the photograph
through meticulous printing, using film and other disappearing photo technologies, and creating artist’s
books, installations, and photo-sculptures. While they are invested in exploring the processes, supports,
and techniques of photography, they are also deeply interested in how photographic images circulate.
Theirs is a sort of “photo poetics,” an art that self-consciously investigates the laws of photography and
the nature of photographic representation, reproduction, and the photographic object. This exhibition is
organized by Jennifer Blessing, Senior Curator, Photography, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum with
Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator.
This exhibition is supported in part by Affirmation Arts Fund and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Leadership Committee for
Photo-Poetics: An Anthology is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to Erica Gervais and Ted Pappendick and Chair
Rona Citrin as well as to Angelo K H Chan and Frederick Wertheim, Manuel de Santaren, Ann and Mel Schaffer, Patty and Howard
Silverstein, and Cristina von Bargen. Additional funding is also provided by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Photography Committee.
Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better
February–April 2016
For more than three decades, Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) collaborated to
create a unique oeuvre that brilliantly exploits humor, banality, and a keen rethinking of the readymade
to realign our view of the world. Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better will offer the most
thorough investigation of their joint production to date, revealing the ways they juxtaposed the
spectacular and the ordinary in order to celebrate the sheer triviality of everyday life, while creating an
open-ended interrogation of temporality, visual culture, and the nature of existence itself. The
retrospective will demonstrate the intricate interrelationships among Fischli and Weiss’s seemingly
discrete works in sculpture, photography, installation, and video, each of which they used to confront,
examine, and lampoon the seriousness of high art. In particular it will establish a sustained dialogue
between Fischli and Weiss’s work with the moving image and their sculptural practice, with signature
works like Suddenly This Overview (1981–2012), the hundreds of unfired clay sculptures that pillory
established truths and myths alike, and The Way Things Go (1987), the inane filmic study of causational
activity, appearing as leitmotifs throughout the space. The exhibition will feature nearly every body of
work within the artists’ oeuvre, including key objects from series such as the Sausage Series (1979),
Questions (1981–2002), Polyurethane Objects (1982–2013), Fever (1983), Grey Sculptures (1983–86),
Equilibres (Quiet Afternoon) (1984–87), Visible World (1986–2001/2014), Rubber Sculptures (1986–
2005), Airports (1987–2006), and Fotografías (2005), among others. To coincide with the exhibition,
Public Art Fund will present How to Work Better (1991), the artists’ text-based monument to labor, as a
mural in Lower Manhattan. Initially planned during David Weiss’s lifetime, Peter Fischli David Weiss:
How to Work Better is organized by Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman
Chief Curator, and Nat Trotman, Associate Curator, in close collaboration with Peter Fischli.
The Leadership Committee for Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks
to Glenstone. Funding is also provided by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, Phase 3 – Middle East and North Africa
Spring–Fall 2016
This spring, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present the third exhibition of the Guggenheim
UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, highlighting recently acquired contemporary art by artists working in
the Middle East and North Africa as well as among its transcultural diaspora. Curated by Sara Raza,
Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Middle East and North Africa, the as yet untitled exhibition will
explore the cultural practices of the region through a scientific and philosophical approach. This will
make reference to ideas that predate the geographical delineation of the Middle East and North Africa,
also addressing shifting conceptions of the artist’s studio. Academic symposia, artist workshops, and
intergenerational programming—incorporating multilingual, interactive online material—will accompany
the exhibition. After its presentation in New York, the exhibition will travel to a museum in the region.
The MAP Phase 3 exhibition will build upon the initiative’s legacy of supporting contemporary art,
artists, education, and professional exchange from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the
Middle East and North Africa. To date, the MAP initiative has brought more than ninety artworks into
the Guggenheim’s collection. The first two exhibitions of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art
Initiative have been critically acclaimed and will have been seen in four countries by the end of 2015. No
Country: Art for South and Southeast Asia, curated by June Yap, was on view at the Guggenheim in
New York, followed by presentations at Asia Society Hong Kong Center and the CCA—NTU Centre
for Contemporary Art, Singapore. Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, curated by Pablo
León de la Barra, premiered at the Guggenheim in New York and will be on view at Museo Jumex in
Mexico City from November 19, 2015 to February 7, 2016.
The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative is a cultural engagement of UBS.
Moholy-Nagy: Future Present
May–September 2016
The first comprehensive retrospective of the work of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) to appear in the
United States in nearly fifty years, this long overdue presentation will reveal a utopian artist who
believed that art could work hand-in-hand with technology for the betterment of humanity. The
exhibition will present an unparalleled opportunity to examine the career of this pioneering painter,
photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker as well as graphic, exhibition, and stage designer, who was also
an influential teacher at the Bauhaus, a prolific writer, and later the founder of Chicago’s Institute of
Design. Among his radical innovations were experimentation with cameraless photography; the use of
industrial materials in painting and sculpture; research with light, transparency, and movement; work at
the forefront of abstraction; and the fluidity with which he moved between the fine and applied arts. The
exhibition will include more than 250 collages, drawings, ephemera, films, paintings, photograms,
photographs, photomontages, and sculptures, including works from public and private collections across
Europe and the United States, some of which have never before been shown publicly in the U.S. Also
on display will be a large-scale installation entitled Der Raum der Gegenwart (The Room of the Present),
a contemporary construction of an exhibition space originally conceived by Moholy-Nagy in 1930. It will
include aspects of his exhibition and product design, including a replica of his iconic kinetic sculpture
Light Prop for an Electric Stage (conceived 1922–30). Though never realized during his lifetime, The
Room of the Present illustrates Moholy’s belief in the power of images and various means by which to
view them—a highly relevant paradigm in today’s constantly shifting and evolving technological world.
Moholy-Nagy: Future Present is co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, The Art
Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After its New York presentation, the
exhibition will travel to Chicago from October 2, 2016–January 3, 2017, and to Los Angeles from
February 12–June 18, 2017.
The New York presentation of Moholy-Nagy: Future Present is made possible by Lavazza. This exhibition is also supported in part by The
Hilla von Rebay Foundation and the Robert Lehman Foundation.
Agnes Martin
October 2016–January 2017
Filling the Guggenheim rotunda, this exhibition will trace Agnes Martin’s (1912–2004) career from her
early experiments of the 1950s through her mature oeuvre and final paintings, making it the first
comprehensive survey of the artist’s work since her death in 2004. One of the preeminent American
painters of the twentieth century, Martin created subtle and evocative canvases that had a significant
influence on artists of her time and subsequent generations. For more than four decades, she explored
limited compositional motifs yet discovered endless nuance and variation. By 1960, she had developed
her signature grid-pattern works—radical presentations of interlocking horizontal and vertical lines in
pencil on large square canvases that at first seem to appear blank. Martin’s geometry, however, is never
mechanical. Her hand-drawn arrangements of coordinates, lines, and stripes shift in scale and rhythm
between works. Often associated with and considered an important figure of Minimalism, Martin’s work
stands apart. Influenced by Asian belief systems including Taoism and Zen Buddhism and the natural
surroundings of her home in New Mexico, her restrained style was underpinned by a personal
conviction in the emotive and expressive power of art. The Guggenheim presentation of Agnes Martin
is cocurated by Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions and Tiffany Bell, Guest
Curator. The exhibition is organized by Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with Kunstsammlung
Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Solomon R
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Global Exhibitions
Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative
Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today
November 19, 2015–February 7, 2016
Museo Jumex, Mexico City
In fall 2015, Museo Jumex in Mexico City will host Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today,
the second of three exhibitions of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Organized by
Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, the exhibition reconsiders the
state of contemporary art in Latin America, investigating the creative responses of artists to complex,
shared realities that have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments,
economic crises, and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth,
development, and progress. The presentation of Under the Same Sun in Mexico City will be tailored to
local audiences and will feature contemporary works by artists from more than a dozen Latin American
countries, including several from Mexico. In addition, Jumex and Guggenheim curatorial and
educational teams will work together to develop customized public programs and materials, both at the
museum and online. The exhibition was first presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in
New York from June 13 through October 1, 2014. The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative is
an unprecedented and multi-year collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and
Foundation and UBS that supports contemporary art and artists in three dynamic regions of the world –
South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa – through four key
components: curatorial residencies, acquisitions, educational programs and professional exchange, and
exhibitions. To date, the MAP initiative has already brought more than 90 artworks into the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum’s permanent collection under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP
Purchase Fund.
The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative is a cultural engagement of UBS.
Current Exhibitions
Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim
Through September 9, 2015
Featuring nearly one hundred works from the Guggenheim’s contemporary collection, this full-rotunda
exhibition examines the diverse ways in which artists today engage with storytelling through installation,
painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance. Opening with examples from the mid-1990s
by Matthew Barney, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Catherine Opie, the core of the presentation focuses
on work made since 2005 that expands and transforms the narrative strategies established in these
foundational works. Moving beyond plot, character, and mise-en-scène, the artists featured in this
exhibition engage the histories and cultural associations embedded in bodies, materials, and found
objects. Through research, appropriation, and careful attention to techniques of display and process,
they create images, objects, and performative situations intended to be read in space as well as in time.
As a means of foregrounding this dynamic, the curators have invited a number of authors and poets to
contribute short reflections on selected works in the exhibition. Presented in addition to standard
exhibition didactics, the resulting polyphony of voices signals the subjective interpretive potential that
lies within each object on display. Artists in the exhibition include Paweł Althamer, Kevin Beasley, Carol
Bove, Trisha Donnelly, Simon Fujiwara, Rachel Harrison, Camille Henrot, Rashid Johnson, Matt
Keegan, Mark Manders, Josephine Meckseper, R. H. Quaytman, Alexandre Singh, Agathe Snow, Danh
Vo, and Haegue Yang, among others. The exhibition is organized by Katherine Brinson, Curator,
Contemporary Art; Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator;
Nat Trotman, Associate Curator; and Joan Young, Director, Curatorial Affairs; with support from
Carmen Hermo, Curatorial Assistant, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim is supported in part by Culture.pl and the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. The
Leadership Committee for the exhibition is gratefully acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann and
Chair Roberta Amon as well as to Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Katherine Farley and Jerry I. Speyer, Gladstone Gallery, Greene Naftali
Gallery, Michael S. Lee, Nancy and Woody Ostrow, Sarah Arison, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Denise LeFrak Calicchio and John Calicchio,
Linda and Gregory Fischbach, Courtney and Scott Taylor, and the International Director’s Council. Additional funding is provided by the New
York State Council on the Arts and The Polish Cultural Institute New York.
Doris Salcedo
Through October 12, 2015
This major retrospective surveys the searing, deeply poetic work of Doris Salcedo (b. 1958). Over the
past three decades, Salcedo has created a body of work that addresses the traumatic history of modernday
Colombia, as well as wider legacies of suffering stemming from colonialism, racism, and other forms
of social injustice. Originating in lengthy research processes during which the artist solicits testimonies
from the victims of violent oppression, her sculptures and installations eschew the direct representation
of atrocities in favor of open-ended confluences of forms that are fashioned from evocative materials
and intensely laborious techniques. Many of her works transmute intimate domestic objects into subtly
charged vessels freighted with memories and narratives, paradoxically conjuring that which is tragically
absent. The Guggenheim’s presentation of Doris Salcedo occupies four levels of the museum’s Tower
galleries. It features the artist’s most significant series from the late 1980s to the present, as well as a
video documenting her remarkable site-specific public projects and architectural interventions. Doris
Salcedo is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and co-curated by Pritzker
Director Madeleine Grynsztejn and Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm. The New York presentation is
curated by Katherine Brinson, Curator, Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Doris Salcedo is supported in part by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation. The Leadership Committee for Doris Salcedo is gratefully
acknowledged for its support, with special thanks to Chair Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian as well as to Peter Brandt, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson,
The Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation, Jill and Peter Kraus, Becky and Jimmy Mayer, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Anna Marie and Robert
F. Shapiro, Jerome and Ellen Stern, and the Walentas Family Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Embassy of Colombia.
The Kandinsky Gallery
Through Spring 2016
The Guggenheim presents an intimate selection of works drawn from the museum’s collection by Vasily
Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Siene, France) that trace his aesthetic evolution. The
exhibition, which is on view in the museum’s Kandinsky Gallery, includes paintings selected from the
artist’s early beginnings in Munich at the start of the century, the return to his native Moscow with the
outbreak of World War I, his interwar years in Germany as a teacher at the Bauhaus, and his final
chapter in Paris. A pioneer of abstract art and eminent aesthetic theorist, Kandinsky broke new ground
in painting during the first decades of the twentieth century. His seminal treatise Über das Geistige in
der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in Munich in December 1911, lays out his program for
establishing an art independent from observations of the external world. In this and other texts, as well
as his work, Kandinsky advanced abstraction’s potential to be free from nature. The development of a
new subject matter based solely on the artist’s “inner necessity” would occupy him for the rest of his life.
This exhibition is organized by Tracey Bashkoff, Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, and
Megan Fontanella, Associate Curator, Collections and Provenance.
A Long-Awaited Tribute: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian House and Pavilion
On October 22, 1953, the exhibition Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright
opened in New York on the site where the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum would be built.
Constructed specifically for the exhibition were two Frank Lloyd Wright–designed buildings: a
temporary pavilion made of glass, fiberboard, and pipe columns, and a 1,700-square-foot, fully furnished
two-bedroom Usonian exhibition house representing Wright’s organic solution for modest, middle-class
dwellings. This presentation, on view in the Sackler Center for Arts Education, pays homage to these
two structures, which, as Wright himself noted, represented a long-awaited tribute as the first Wright
buildings to be erected in New York City. This exhibition is organized by Francine Snyder, former
Director of Library and Archives, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
The Thannhauser Collection
Bequeathed to the museum by art dealer and collector Justin K. Thannhauser, the Thannhauser
Collection includes a selection of canvases, works on paper, and sculpture that represents the earliest
works in the museum’s collection. The Thannhauser holdings include significant works by Paul Cézanne,
Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, and
Vincent van Gogh. Thannhauser’s commitment to supporting the early careers of such artists as Vasily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Franz Marc, and to educating the public about modern art, paralleled the
vision of the Guggenheim Foundation’s originator, Solomon R. Guggenheim. Among the works
Thannhauser gave are such incomparable masterpieces as Van Gogh’s Mountains at Saint-Rémy
(Montagnes à Saint-Rémy, July 1889), Manet’s Before the Mirror (Devant la glace, 1876), and close to
thirty paintings and drawings by Picasso, including his seminal works Le Moulin de la Galette (autumn
1900) and Woman Ironing (La Repasseuse, spring 1904).
VISITOR INFORMATION
Admission: Adults $25, students/seniors (65+) $18, members and children under 12 free. Available with
admission or by download to personal devices, the Guggenheim’s free app offers an enhanced visitor
experience. The app features content on special exhibitions, access to more than 1,600 works in the
Guggenheim’s permanent collection, and information about the museum’s landmark building. Verbal
imaging guides for select exhibitions are also included for visitors who are blind or have low vision. The
Guggenheim app is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Museum Hours: Sun–Wed, 10 am–5:45 pm; Fri, 10 am–5:45 pm; Sat, 10 am–7:45 pm; closed Thurs.
On Saturdays, beginning at 5:45 pm, the museum hosts Pay What You Wish. For general information,
call 212 423 3500 or visit the museum online at: guggenheim.org
guggenheim.org/social