ALEXANDER CALDER : Modern from the Start

The Museum of Modern Art ( New York ) ( March 14, – August 07, 2021 )

Alexander Calder reimagined sculpture as an experiment in space and motion, upending centuries-old notions that sculpture should be static, grounded, and dense by making artworks that often move freely and interact with their surroundings. “One of Calder’s objects is like the sea,” wrote the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, “always beginning over again, always new.” Bringing together early wire and wood figures, works on paper, jewelry, mobiles in motion, and monumental abstract sculptures, the exhibition takes a deep dive into the full breadth of Calder’s career and inventiveness.
Calder’s ever-changing artworks invite a viewer’s sustained attention; and The Museum of Modern Art has provided a setting for this productive exchange ever since his work was first exhibited here in 1930, just months after the Museum opened its doors. This exhibition looks at Calder’s work through the lens of this connection. Throughout MoMA’s formative years, Calder, in his unofficial role as “house artist,” was called upon to produce several commissioned works—including Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, a multicolored mobile that hangs in the same stairwell for which it was made in 1939. His works have been a mainstay of the Museum’s galleries and Sculpture Garden ever since.
Drawn from MoMA’s collection and augmented with key loans from the Calder Foundation, the exhibition celebrates one of the most beloved artists of the 20th century and presents rarely seen works, including the large-scale Man-Eater with Pennants, which will be on view in the Sculpture Garden for the first time in more than 50 years after new conservation.

OLAFUR ELIASSON - In Real Life

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao ( February 14 - June 21, 2020 )

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) puts the experience of viewers at the center of his art. Olafur Eliasson: In real life brings to our attention some of today’s most urgent issues through around 30 artworks created by the artista between 1990 and today: sculptures, photographs, paintings, and installations that play with reflections and shifting colors and challenge the way we navigate and perceive our environment. Through materials such as moss, water, glacial ice, fog, light, or reflective metals, Eliasson encourages viewers to reflect upon their understanding and perception of the physical world that surrounds them.

Eliasson’s art grows from an interest in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. Central to his artistic practice are his concern with nature, inspired by time spent in Iceland; his research into geometry; and his ongoing investigations into how we perceive, feel about, and shape the world around us. Studio Olafur Eliasson, his Berlin-based studio, is a space for work, but also for encounters and dialogues, that brings together a diverse team of skilled craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, programmers, art historians, and specialized technicians.

His practice extends beyond making artworks, exhibitions, and public interventions to include architectural projects. Convinced that art can have a strong impact on the world outside the museum, Eliasson has created solar lamps for off-grid communities, conceived artistic workshops for asylum seekers and refugees, created art installations to raise awareness of the climate emergency, and in September 2019, he was named Goodwill Ambassador for the UNDP. “Art,” Eliasson says, “is not the object but what the object does to the world.”

MIGUEL ÁNGEL CAMPANO - D’après

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía ( November 6, 2019 - April 20, 2020 )

The Museo Reina Sofía stages a retrospective survey of the work of artist Miguel Ángel Campano (Madrid, 1948 – Cercedilla, Madrid, 2018) by way of a selection in excess of one hundred works made from 1972 onwards. The show, the last exhibition project in which the artist directly took part, parades the problems, processes, and resources Campano focused on. Not ever channeling them into the ditch of any single style, Campano’s long cycles of painting succeeded; and so narrating Campano’s oeuvre – and its many forms – always requires enunciating an “and then,” an après. Sticking to Campano’s succeeding interests, the exhibition also renders an account of the constants in a career traversed by emotional impetus and an analytical, learned approach to painting.

Campano’s work was also referential: when observing and painting the art of the past, he often painted d’après Eugène Delacroix or Nicolas Poussin, becoming heir to the languages that the history of art had made available. Yet Campano’s canvases d’après are never merely works “according to” the painter he was studying, but rather “following from,” and hence releasing a flight from the canon. His works from life – d’après nature – depart from their own objective referents, too. All in all, as concerns the d’après which feeds Campano’s work, to predicate an “according to” is only possible for Campano's painting proper. The exhibition thus can be summed up as a digest of painting according to the artist, a museum of paintings d’après Campano.