ART CITIES:Venice-Palazzo Fortuny
Coinciding with the 2017 Venice Biennale, the Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation and the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia present the exhibition “Intuition” that brings together Historic, Modern, and Contemporary works related to dreams, meditation, telepathy, creative power, and inspiration. Spanning diverse geographies and cultures, the exhibition explores how intuition has shaped our understanding of art for generations.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Palazzo Fortuny Archive
Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning: a feeling that guides a person to act in a certain way without fully understanding why. The exhibition “Intuition” aims to provoke questions about the origins of creation, which is constantly evolving. Some of the earliest works on display reveal the role of intuition in encouraging artists to connect the two worlds, first attempts by man to create an immediate link between the sky and the earth: from the erection of totems to shamanism and mystical ecstasy and, from religious iconography describing illuminations to classical works capturing the divine revelation of dreams. Modern works by Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Hilma af Klint among others highlight the intuitive experience and feeling that drives the creative process, and led to the rise of abstract art. The importance of the spatial and temporal research undertaken by the Gutai, Cobra, Zero, Spazialismo and Fluxus groups is illustrated with works by Kazuo Shiraga, Pierre Alechinsky, Günther Uecker, Lucio Fontana, Mario Deluigi and Joseph Beuys. The Surrealists interest in the unconscious alsois an important focus of the exhibition. Their fascination with dreams, automatic writing and drawing, collective creations and the state of alteration of the ego will be represented with the ‘dessins communiqués’ and ‘cadavres exquis’ of André Breton, André Masson, Paul Eluard, Remedios Varo, Victor Brauner amongst others, along with the experiments of camera-less photography of Raoul Ubac and Man Ray, and the works on paper by Henry Michaux, Oscar Dominguez and Joan Miró. This legacy is reflected in a number of works by Contemporary artists such as Robert Morris, William Anastasi, Isa Genzken, Renato Leotta and Susan Morris who, since the ‘60s, have revived, developed and modernised the Surrealists’ interest with automatism, leading to new formal and technical results. Other contemporary works by artists including Marina Abramović, Chung Chang-Sup, Ann Veronica Janssens and Anish Kapoor, are inspired by striking subjective experiences or states of mind, and the artists’ concern and preoccupation with the viewer. During the opening days visitors are invited to explore and experience the paranormal fantasy of artists through four performances related to dreams, telepathy, and hypnosis – of the mind and body –by young artists Marcos Lutyens, Yasmine Hugonnet, Angel Vergara and Matteo Nasini.
Info: Curators: Axel Vervoordt and Daniela Ferretti, Co-curators: Dario Dalla Lana, Davide Daninos and Anne-Sophie Dusselier, Palazzo Fortuny, San Marco 3780-San Beneto, Venice, Duration: 13/5-26/11/17, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, http://fortuny.visitmuve.it
