ART CITIES:Stockholm-Sculpture After Sculpture
The Moderna Museet of Stockholm with the exhibition, “Sculpture After Sculpture”, brings together the work of three of today’s most esteemed artists, Katharina Fritsch, Jeff Koons, and Charles Ray. The exhibition at the Moderna Museet seeks to highlight the potential of sculpture today and is the first in which these groundbreaking artists can be seen together in appreciable depth. When these far-flung artists came of age, in the early 1980s, the work they are known for today—pointedly figural, quotidian in reference, resolutely sculptural—was all but unrecognizable as the shape of serious art to come.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
The history of sculpture in the modern period had witnessed the rise of abstraction, the assault of the readymade, the turn to Minimalism, and the “Post-Medium” environmental and social experiments that followed – a sequence that could be understood as a gradual undoing of the traditional art forms as we had known them. Reconsidering these developments, by this time avant-garde orthodoxy, Katharina Fritsch, Jeff Koons, and Charles Ray not only located their practices within sculpture’s traditional conventions, they reengaged representation generally and the representation of the figure in particular. A focused examination of thirteen masterworks, Sculpture After Sculpture begins with iconic works from the late 1980s and early ’90s that highlight the artists’ early relationships to the commodity and the readymade. The exhibition unfolds in a series of startling juxtapositions that trace the development of their practices from the found to the made, from the performed to the embodied. Fritsch, Koons, and Ray share a bold approach to new fabrication technologies, an obsessive attention to the nuances of craft, and a commitment to the power of the singular object or image.
Info: Sculpture After Sculpture, Moderna Museet, Slupskjulsvägen 7, Stockholm, Duration: 11/11/14-18/1/15, Days & Hours: Wed, Thu, Sat, Sun: 10:00-18:00, Tue, Fri: 10:00-20:00, www.modernamuseet.se/sv/Stockholm
