Dalí Dalí featuring
Francesco Vezzoli
19 September 2009 – 17 January 2010
Stockholm
“I am a supreme swine. The symbol of perfection is a pig. Charles V himself adopted it to replace all other symbols of perfection. The pig makes his way with Jesuit cunning, but never balks in the middle of the crap in our era. I feed my crap to the Daliists. Everybody’s satisfied. And everything is just hunky-dory.”Salvador Dalí, 1969
“Fashion is unashamedly part of the entertainment industry, unlike art, which is embarrassed by it. I can’t stand that – there are all these people that belong to the art world who are embarrassed by their ambitions for visibility. It makes their intellectual attitude so crippled, and in the end their work suffers.”
Francesco Vezzoli, 2008
In his desire to merge art with the person, Salvador Dalí was a forerunner for today’s close connection between artists and the media industry; a prototype for the celebrity artist. In Francesco Vezzoli’s work – a unique blend of hype and melancholy, queer culture and politics, glamour and tears – the presence of dalinian influences is a matter of course.
Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli – on view at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm autumn 2009 – examines the role of the artist in today’s celebrity-obsessed society, and of these two artists’ disingenuous relationship with mass media and power.
Salvador Dalí – the missing link between Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp – exploited his artistic persona, adopting every commercial tool in this endeavour, from designing jewellery to working the mass media as a stage for performance. Francesco Vezzoli not only appropriates the device, but takes it to its 21st century extreme, modelling his work on full blown mass cultural formats such as the Hollywood biopic. Vezzoli is the ideal and palpable co-star in an exhibition which views Dalí’s oeuvre from a contemporary angle, and challenges the concept of a historical exhibition.
Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli pays tribute to art but questions the system in which it operates.
Grand opening Thursday September 17, 2009, 7 – 10 pm.
Curator: John Peter Nilsson
Project curator Francesco Vezzoli: Caroline Corbetta
Catalogue essays by David Lomas, Chrissie Iles, Hal Foster, Matilda Olof-Ors and the curators.
Dalí Dalí featuring Francesco Vezzoli is sponsored by Eurocard.
Founded 1958 in Stockholm, Sweden, Moderna Museet is one of Europe’s leading museums for modern and contemporary art, soon opening a new venue in Malmö.
For information and high resolution images please see www.modernamuseet.se/press or email the press department, pressavdelningen@modernamuseet.se
