12 November – 19 December 2020
New York, 69th Street
Artists included in ‘To Form a More Perfect Union’ are Rita Ackermann, Louise Bourgeois, George Condo, Marlene Dumas, Charles Gaines, Robert Gober, Philip Guston, David Hammons, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Rashid Johnson, Mike Kelley, Takesada Matsutani, Paul McCarthy, Marisa Merz, Carol Rama, and Lorna Simpson.
Beginning 12 November, Hauser & Wirth will debut ‘To Form a More Perfect Union,’ a special presentation juxtaposing significant works of postwar modern and contemporary art to explore unexpected affinities and suggest fresh art historical narratives revealed by the context of our troubled times.
Organized by Koji Inoue, International Senior Director for Post-war and Contemporary Art, ‘To Form a More Perfect Union’ responds to the collective experience of intense fracturing and dislocation that have characterized this year of 2020 — the social distancing that has separated us physically, the social justice movement that has laid bare deep ravines of separation in our society.
On view are paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and video installation made by 17 artists over the past fifty years. By long predating our current time of trauma, these objects suggest that the search for integration of the corporeal and the emotional is fundamental and universal, and that the struggle for a resolved sense of connection to one another is an ongoing effort without end.
‘To Form a More Perfect Union’ is open for timed viewing appointments. To book a timed viewing appointment, please make a reservation here. Viewing appointments will be released on a weekly basis. Please review viewing guidelines prior to your visit.
The opposing impulses of creation and destruction mark the touchstone of the Hungarian-born, New York-based artist Rita Ackermann’s practice, which continues to evolve and manifest itself in the shift from representation to abstraction.
Born in France in 1911, and working in America from 1938 until her death in 2010, Louise Bourgeois is recognized as one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th Century. For over seven decades, Bourgeois’s creative process was fueled by an introspective reality, often rooted in cathartic re-visitations of early childhood trauma and frank examinations of female sexuality. Articulated by recurrent motifs (including body parts, houses and spiders), personal symbolism and psychological release, the conceptual and stylistic complexity of Bourgeois’s oeuvre—employing a variety of genres, media and materials—plays upon the powers of association, memory, fantasy, and fear.
Born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957, George Condo lives and works in New York City. He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he became particularly inspired by a course on Baroque and Rococo painting. He moved to Boston and played in a punk band, ‘The Girls;’ relocated to New York, where he worked as a printer for Andy Warhol; and spent a year studying Old Master glazing techniques in Los Angeles. During his first trip to Europe in 1983, Condo connected with the anarchic Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne which included painters Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn.
A pivotal figure in the field of Conceptual Art, Charles Gaines’ body of work engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and the subjective realms. Using a generative approach to create series of works in a variety of mediums, he has built a bridge between the early conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent generations of artists pushing the limits of conceptualism today.
Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual and installation artist whose work deploys text in public spaces across an array of media, including electronic signs, carved stone, paintings, billboards, and printed materials. Holzer’s oeuvre provokes public debate and illuminates social and political justice. Celebrated for her inimitable use of language and projects in the public sphere, Holzer creates a powerful tension between the realms of feeling and knowledge, with a practice that encompasses both individual and collective experiences of power and violence, vulnerability and tenderness.
Roni Horn’s work consistently generates uncertainty to thwart closure in her work. Important across her oeuvre is her longstanding interest to the protean nature of identity, meaning, and perception, as well as the notion of doubling; issues which continue to propel Horn’s practice.
Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history. After studying in the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago, Johnson's practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media—including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation—yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism and personal history.
Mike Kelley is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Originally from a suburb outside of Detroit, Kelley attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Southern California in 1976 to study at California Institute of the Arts from which he received an MFA in 1978. The city of Los Angeles became his adopted home and the site of his prolific art practice. In much of his work, Kelley drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, and was known to scour flea markets for America’s cast-offs and leftovers. Mining the banal objects of everyday life, Kelley elevated these materials to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture.
From the early 1960s until the 1970s Matsutani was a key member of the ‘second generation’ of the influential post war Japanese art collective, the Gutai Art Association. Over five decades Matsutani has developed a unique visual language of form and materials. As part of the Gutai group, Matsutani experimented with vinyl glue, using fans and his own breath to manipulate the substance, creating bulbous and sensuous forms reminiscent of human curves and features.
To Form a More Perfect Union
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‘To Form a More Perfect Union‘ is on view now through 19 December 2020 at Hauser & Wirth New York 69th Street.
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