[artinfo] Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s - 1970s
e-flux
info at mailer.e-flux.com
Fri Aug 3 11:39:43 CEST 2018
The Other Trans-Atlantic:
Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s - 1970s
August 9-October 28, 2018
www.sescsp.org.br
Sesc Sao Paulo, in keeping with its aim of
raising public awareness and constructing a
critical and democratic platform for the
dissemination of the visual arts, is bringing to
Brazil another exhibition focused on a critical
and historical review of 20th-century art,
shedding light on chapters left out of the
official history already established along the
axis between North America and Western Europe.
This is the project of the exhibition The Other
Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern
Europe and Latin America 1950s - 1970s.
Now in its third version, the show is being held
in the exhibition spaces of Sesc Pinheiros,
spotlighting a vast experimental production that
flourished during the postwar period in countries
at the fringe of the hegemonic centers of
culture, especially in South America and Eastern
Europe, with a special focus on the repertoire of
kinetic art and op art. Conceived by the Museum
of Modern Art of Warsaw, where the exhibition was
initially held, then realized in a second version
at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow,
the exhibition is now being held by Sesc São
Paulo in partnership with Instituto Adam
Mickiewicz and Casa Sanguszko de Cultura
Polonesa, in a new version featuring artists and
artworks not in its previous two stagings.
Curated by Marta Dziewaska, Dieter Roelstraete
and Abigail Winograd, the overall exhibition
design involves more than 40 artists and artist
collectives, with more than 100 artworks of the
most diverse natures and media, including kinetic
sculptures, paintings, drawings, films and
installations, besides a vast archival material.
For the Brazilian context, the curators have
relied on the collaboration of researcher Ana
Avelar, who enlarged the participation of local
artists with artworks that clearly reveal their
pertinence to the exhibition's thematic scope.
This underscores the seminal importance of the
local initiatives of concretism and
neoconcretism, which resignified the legacy of
the historical constructive avant-gardes with
their painstaking investigation of vision and
movement, integrating the artwork with the
surroundings and including the spectator as an
integral element of the artwork's meaning.
As pointed out by the curatorship, these
productions that arose from constructive and
abstract origins aimed to symbolize a new
subjectivity, different from the abstract
expressionism, informal art and lyrical
abstraction then in vogue, by incorporating
scientific progress and industrial development
within a utopian social agenda of art. They thus
constituted a specific programmatic agenda which
in aesthetic and political terms ran counter to
the critical approach and formal vision of art's
hegemonic axis then in place.
Another international geopolitical circuit of art
was thus spontaneously established, among artists
from Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Bucharest and
Moscow, in Eastern Europe, and Buenos Aires,
Caracas, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in South
America. Moreover, all of these locations were in
a certain way immersed in relatively analogous
socioeconomic and political realities, thus
allowing for the rise of artistic strategies with
similar programs and intentions.
To convey an idea of these approximations, the
curatorship proposed thematic axes that mix
artists from the two regions: Ways of Seeing,
Ways of Participating; the Dynamics of Artworks
Versus the Dynamics of Surrounding Reality;
Utopias South and East, and Collective Endeavors.
Therefore, in a wider critical perspective, the
production of these artists and of many others
raised public engagement and participation to
another qualitative level, transforming the ways
that art is exhibited, intensifying the sensory
experience, and promoting a direct association
between artwork and spectator, an indispensable
dyad for the definition of an art of this nature.
These interpretive keys are the reason why the
selected artworks are being presented to the
Brazilian public.
Servico Social do Comercio - Sesc
Sesc SP | Visual Arts and Technology Department
991 Álvaro Ramos Avenue
Sao Paulo-03331-000
Brazil
Hours: Monday-Friday 10am-8pm
T +55 11 2607 8024
F +55 11 2607 8024
<MAILTO:exposicoes at sescsp.org.br>exposicoes at sescsp.org.br
More information about the Artinfo
mailing list