Nancy Graves Project & Special Guests
October 13, 2013–February 16, 2014
Opening: Sunday, October 13, noon
Ludwig Forum Aachen
Jülicher Straße 97-109
52070 Aachen, Germany
Joseph Beuys, Trisha Brown, Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Eva Hesse, Nikolaus Lang, Babette Mangolte, Robert Morris, Eadweard Muybridge, Judy Pfaff, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Smith, Robert Smithson, Paul Thek, Hannah Wilke
Nancy Graves (1939–1995) is among the most important artists of the 20th century. After graduating from Yale University in 1964 she lived in Paris and in Florence, returning to the United States and establishing a studio in New York in 1966. In 1969, she was the first female artist under 35 to have a solo show in the Whitney Museum. The German collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig took an early interest in Graves and her art, both purchasing key works and providing opportunities for the artist to work in Europe. The Ludwig’s interest in contemporary American art and their longstanding relationship to Nancy Graves assisted in establishing the artist outside the US. Since the early 1970s, Nancy Graves made remarkable contributions to Concept Art, Land Art, Neo-Realism and later to post-modern sculpture as well as artistic documentary and research-based art—the latter being a field that Graves helped to establish with her interest in natural and social sciences such as paleontology, anthropology and the exploration of the Earth and space in general.
Today Nancy Graves’ works are in the collections of the most important museums in North America, and in the Ludwig museums in Aachen, Cologne, Vienna, Budapest and Beijing. Among her most popular works are the camels in the collection in Aachen. Three related camels are in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. In spite of this popularity, the importance of Graves’ work for the history of art is often overlooked. The exhibition Nancy Graves Project tries to correct this perspective. This retrospective will comprise about 70 works by Graves and a selection of works by “special guests”—artists that Graves would have known or whose work she would have influenced. Altogether the exhibition assembles more than 100 artworks. Drawings, paintings, films, installations and sculptures, shall give a comprehensive overview of Graves’ work. Corresponding positions that discuss aspects of the relationship between art and natural sciences make Nancy Graves’ work comparable to that of her contemporaries and earlier and later generations of artists.
The project has been realized in co-operation with the Nancy Graves Foundation in New York and is funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Terra Foundation of American Art, Kunststiftung NRW and Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung.
Curated by Dr. Brigitte Franzen and Dr. Annette Lagler.
An extensive catalogue with texts by Walter Grasskamp, Joan Simon, Annette Lagler, Brigitte Franzen, Christina Hunter, Petra Lange-Berndt and interviews with Chuck Close and Yvonne Rainer will be published by Hatje Cantz, german/english, ca. 304 p.., ca. 400 images., 8 x10,5 inches, linen, ISBN978-3-7757-3695-4, 2013
