Richard Artschwager!
February 20–May 11, 2014
Nouveau Musée National de Monaco
Villa Paloma
56, boulevard du Jardin Exotique
98000 Monaco
T +377 98 98 20 95
presse [at] nmnm.mc
www.nmnm.mc
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NMNM-Villa Paloma presents the most comprehensive retrospective to date of Richard Artschwager’s (1923–2013) work from February 20 until May 11.
The exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in association with the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and curated by Jennifer Gross, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for curatorial affairs at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The NMNM’s presentation is organized by Director Marie-Claude Beaud. Following the presentation of Richard Artschwager! at the Whitney Museum, New York, the exhibition travelled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Richard Artschwager! features over 135 works spanning six decades, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints. Often associated with Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, his work never fit neatly into any of these categories. His artistic practice consistently explored questions regarding his own visual and physical engagement with the world; his objects straddle the line between illusion and reality. The exhibition reveals the artist’s prescience in his career-long commitment to exploring the profound effect photography and technology have had in transforming our engagement with the world. His work has responded to and challenged how these media—and our experience of things as images rather than as things in themselves—have shifted human experience from being rooted in primary physical experience to a knowledge mediated by secondary sources such as newspapers, television, and the Internet.
The NMNM presents, in the seven exhibition spaces of Villa Paloma, a retrospective that articulates different series, ranging from the first experiments using Formica to the drawings, paintings on industrial materials and furniture pieces. The exhibition, in its last presentation, is the occasion to discover and better understand the work of this major pioneer of contemporary art. For more than fifty years, Richard Artschwager (1923–2013) remained steadily at the forefront of contemporary art. He began making art in the 1950s, had his first one-person exhibition at the age of forty-two at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1965, and made his first appearance in a Whitney Annual in 1966.
In conjunction with Richard Artschwager’s retrospective, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco presents #BLPMC, a citywide installation of the artist’s blps in the Principality. Artschwager first created his blps—a word coined by the artist and pronounced, “blips”—in the late 1960s. This installation consists of black lozenge-shaped marks meant to inspire focused looking and draw our attention to the places and things around us that often go unnoticed.
Sunday March 2, April 6 and May 11 at 3pm, the film Shut up and Look, directed by Maryte Kavaliauska, will be shown in full version in Villa Paloma’s video room. The film provides an intimate look at the artist as he abandoned a reclusive life style to allow the camera into his private world over the last eight years.
In the frame of the exhibition, Mountain Climber (1992) by John Baldessari from the UBS Art Collection will be on view in Villa Paloma’s educational space, La Table des Matières.
