Dancing with Myself / Albert Oehlen: Cows by the Water

Albert Oehlen 
Cows by the Water
April 8, 2018–January 6, 2019
Palazzo Grassi, Venice
Curated by Caroline Bourgeois

Palazzo Grassi presents the exhibition Cows by the Water, dedicated to Albert Oehlen and curated by Caroline Bourgeois. It is the artist’s largest monographic show in Italy to date with a selection of over 80 works created between the 1980s and 2017.

Though refusing to be determined by a specific artistic movement, Albert Oehlen (1954, Krefeld, Germany) reveals himself to be a major figure of contemporary painting thanks to his artistic research in constant evolution, dedicated to experiments and to overcoming formal limits rather than to the subject represented.

Conceived in collaboration with the artist specifically for the spaces of Palazzo Grassi, the unique exhibition path is not chronological but rather suggests a syncopated rhythm between various genres and periods, thereby underlining the central role played by music in the artist’s practice. Music emerges as a real metaphor of his work method, where contamination and rhythm, improvisation and repetition, density and harmony of sounds become pictorial gestures.

The works brought together come from the Pinault Collection as well as from other major private collections and international museums.

Dancing with Myself
April 8–December 16, 2018
Punta della Dogana, Venice
Curated by Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner

From Sunday, April 8, 2018, to Sunday, December 16, 2018, Punta della Dogana presents the collective exhibition Dancing with Myself curated by Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner. The show stems from the collaboration between the Pinault Collection and Museum Folkwang in Essen. Presented in a first version in 2016 in Essen, the exhibition includes 140 works and proposes a revisited path with over 50 works not featured in the German museum.

Dancing with Myself  faces the primordial importance of the artist’s role as actor and material of his/her own creations, from the 1970s to today. It revolves around four themes—Melancholia, Identity Games, Political Autobiographies, Raw Material. The exhibition brings together a wide range of artistic practices and languages (photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation…), cultures, geographic origins, generations and experiences, to establish a tension between extremely different artistic approaches.

The large format of the self-portraits of Rudolf Stingel, the iconic works of Gilbert & George, the sculptures of Alighiero Boetti, Urs Fischer, Robert Gober and Maurizio Cattelan, the photographs by Cindy Sherman characterised by a postmodern representation of traditional roles and the political and social critique in the works by artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier, Paulo Nazareth, Adel Abdessemed and Lili Reynaud-Dewar give rise to an intense dialogue that reflects on self-perception in the art of the 20th and early 21st century, and brings the visitor at the heart of contemporary debates.

The artists of the exhibition are Adel Abdessemed, Marcel Bascoulard, Alighiero Boetti, Marcel Broodthaers, Claude Cahun, Maurizio Cattelan, John Coplans, Urs Fischer, Ruby LaToya Frazier, Lee Friedlander, Gilbert & George, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Hammons, Damien Hirst, Roni Horn, Martin Kippenberger, Kurt Kranz, Lüthi Urs, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, Paulo Nazareth, Giulio Paolini, Arnulf Rainer, Charles Ray, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ulrike Rosenbach, Allan Sekula, Cindy Sherman, Rudolf Stingel and Alina Szapocznikow.

General information
Single ticket valid for both exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana.

Hours
Wednesday-Monday
10am-7pm, last entry at 6pm