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Kiefer and Mao
che mille fiori fioriscano16 February - 06 April 08 Location: Triennale Bovisa Via R. Lambruschini, 31 – Milano admission : 8 € - 6 € - 5 € cure / by: Germano Celant Setting up: Studio Cerri & Associati |
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Triennale Bovisa presents the “Kiefer and Mao. Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom” exhibition curated by Germano Celant. With 35 works, including paintings and artist’s books, the event offers the public in Italy an original interpretation of Anselm Kiefer’s interest in Mao Zedong’s political and cultural influence on Western history,. Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany, in 1945. After studying Law, Languages and Romance Literature, Kiefer decided to devote himself entirely to painting, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Fribourg-en-Brisgau and then in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys. With his monumental style of work, he has used a number of means of expression – including painting, photography, books, installations, sculpture and architecture – to interpret the great political and cultural issues that are at the heart of modern European consciousness. Numerous solo exhibitions have been devoted to his work, including those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1987), the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1991), the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (1999), the National Gallery, London (2000), the Royal Academy, London (2001), the Villa Medici, Rome (2005), the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2006), the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington (2006), the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Bilbao (2007), and at the Grand Palais, Paris (2007). In 1999 he was presented with the Imperial Award in Tokyo, and he has recently been invited to design a permanent installation for the Louvre. Anselm Kiefer’s painting forms a solidification of historical memory, in which various materials, ranging from sand to lead, sunflowers and photographs, are combined with the iconography of landscapes and people, warships and architecture, making reference to the density of time and to the figures of Central European culture. His large-format paintings are permeated by the myths and legends of literature and by ancient ideas, and they are filled with the names, faces and bodies of an energetic and spiritual process that ranges from the medieval German world through to the present day. This process, which started in 1969, includes the series of large canvases devoted to the historical and cultural figure of Mao Zedong, which he started painting in 1998 with the title Lasst tausend Blumen blümen [Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom] . 28 paintings and 7 artist’s books are being shown for the first time in Italy. Forming the core of the exhibition, they come both from private owners and from the artist’s collection,. On the canvases, Mao is shown in the foreground, or waving, as a young philosopher of the revolution or as a mature leader of the army, smiling or thoughtful, taking up the forms of representation that were typical of official political propaganda at the time. His figure stands out against a landscape often decked in flowers, alluding to the famous phrase he pronounced in 1956: “Let a hundred flowers bloom”. The German artist modifies the phrase, replacing the word “hundred” with “thousand” (“tausend” in German), creating a critical and visual rift between the enthusiasm with which Mao originally launched the cultural reform and the conservative epilogue his policy had in the People’s Republic of China. Alongside these large works (ranging from about 200 x 200 cm to about 300 x 700 cm), so full of Kiefer’s symbolism, in which the image of the Chinese president is placed over a landscape created from a visual inspiration based on photographs the artist took during a trip to China in 1993, we find his artist’s books. These consist of large pages (the sizes vary, but are about 104 x 80 x 11 cm), on which a black-and-white photograph modified by sand is printed. Sometimes the picture of Mao is clearly recognisable, while at others we see deserts crossed by a tornado or sections of fortified walls that metaphorically allude to the feats of the Chinese people, from the Great Wall to the Long March. Through the powerful emotional impact of his painting, with its study of the iconography of Mao inevitably modified by the stratification of events that have taken place over the past thirty years, Anselm Kiefer highlights the consequences of the personality cult and the historical and political responsibility of being a legend. Kiefer and Mao Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom 16 February – 6 April 2008 Triennale Bovisa, Via R. Lambruschini, 31 -Milano curated by Germano Celant Display design: Studio Cerri & Associati Catalogue: Skira Editore Opening hours: from 11 a.m. to midnight, closed Mondays. Admission: 8/6/5 euro Images and texts can be downloaded from the www.triennale.it/press page |