Spring Preview
Sunday, March 9, 2014, noon–6pm
Patti Smith commemorates Christoph Schlingensief: 4pm, VW Dome
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, New York 11101
Please join us on Sunday, March 9, for our Spring Preview, including a special performance in which Patti Smith commemorates Christoph Schlingensief.
Christoph Schlingensief
March 9–August 31
Second and third floors, MoMA PS1
Throughout his life, Christoph Schlingensief (Oberhausen, 1960–Berlin, 2010) transgressed artistic and institutional boundaries in his oeuvre, which spans film, theater, opera, performance and installation. His works comment on and react to their social contexts, touching on topics such as fascism, German history, religion, the institution of the family and media representations of current events. His radical, challenging demands for reaction and dedication from his collaborators secure Schlingensief’s exceptional position in contemporary art discourse.
Not beholden to any one medium, Schlingensief moved between genres and disciplines dealing with political extremism and social discontentment, German history and the present, combining these issues with universal questions relating to faith and superstition, truth and deception, and life and death. Whether creating films, critiquing German society, establishing his own political party, or building a reproduction of his childhood chapel, Schlingensief engaged deeply with his cultural and artistic milieu. He directed plays by Shakespeare and operas by Wagner, and was profoundly influenced by Joseph Beuys, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the Viennese Actionists. Christoph Schlingensief is the first solo exhibition in an American museum dedicated to his work.
Sponsorship
Christoph Schlingensief is organized at MoMA PS1 in collaboration with KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
The exhibition is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director, MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator-at-Large, The Museum of Modern Art; Anna-Catharina Gebbers, independent curator; and Susanne Pfeffer, Artistic Director at the Fridericianum, Kassel; in collaboration with Filmgalerie 451, Berlin.
Artistic advisor: Aino Laberenz/Estate of Christoph Schlingensief
The exhibition is made possible by a partnership with Volkswagen of America.
Additional funding is provided by Harald Falckenberg.
Special thanks to Bumat Turntables, Germany.
Maria Lassnig
March 9–May 25
First floor, MoMA PS1
MoMA PS1 presents the most comprehensive survey of painter Maria Lassnig (b. 1919, Austria) organized in the United States. The presentation includes over seventy major works spanning almost seven decades, most of which are being exhibited for the first time in the U.S. Organized by Peter Eleey, Maria Lassnig includes 55 paintings, 14 works on paper, and four filmic works, and will be on view at MoMA PS1 through May 25.
Lassnig is one of the most important contemporary painters living today, and is a pioneer in many areas of art. Emphatically refusing to make “pictures,” she has long focused on ways of representing her internal world. Using the term “body awareness,” Lassnig has regularly tried to paint the way her body feels to her from the inside, rather than attempting to depict it from without. Throughout a remarkable career that has spanned more than 70 years, Lassnig has continued to create work that vulnerably explores the way she comes into contact with the world, often placing particular emphasis upon the disjunctions between her own self-image and the way she is seen by others—as a woman, as a painter, as a thinker, and as a person living through the dramatic technological and cultural developments that have marked the century of her lifetime. Bravely exposing personal traumas, fantasies and nightmares, Lassnig’s art offers instruction for courageous living in a time of increasingly spectacularized social interaction.
Sponsorship
Maria Lassnig is organized by Peter Eleey, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions and Programs; with Jocelyn Miller, Curatorial Assistant; in collaboration with the Neue Galerie Graz – Universalmuseum Joanneum.
The exhibition is made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.
Additional funding is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art and by Carole Server and Oliver Frankel.
Patti Smith commemorates Christoph Schlingensief
March 9, 4pm
VW Dome
On the occasion of the opening of the first U.S. retrospective of Christoph Schlingensief, Patti Smith commemorates Schlingensief’s art and friendship.
