(Frankfurt, Germany)
On one hand, the European North-American canon from the 1940s through the 1980s. On the other, Latin American experimental art of the same period. The two visual arts traditions meet in “A Tale of Two Worlds”, one of the largest exhibitions to ever take hold of the MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, produced in partnership with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. On view until this Sunday, April 15th (on the day before, April 14th, there’s a guided tour at 4 pm), the exhibition showcases over 500 artworks by 100 artists and collectives. Among them, Brazilian artists Lenora de Barros and Cildo Meireles, Lygia Clark, alongside many others.
The show is structured as a stream of conversations, whereby topics relevant to the history of experimental art practices in Latin America are presented in dialogue with artworks from the MMK Collection. The project has been conceptualized and curated over the past year and a half between two cities – Buenos Aires and Frankfurt – and has a strong Southern perspective. Indeed, it marks the first time a European Museum collection has allowed itself to be re-examined by curators of Latin American art. The project is an answer to the call by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) on major museums in Germany to endow their collections with a more global perspective.
Although emerging from divergent political, economic and historical contexts, the art on view will reveal parallel trajectories, crossover points and contradictions. While the MMK collection from the 1960s and 1970s focuses on European and North American art, the period of Latin American art addressed in this exhibition is somewhat longer: it starts in 1944, the year of the first exhibition of the new Concrete Art movements in Argentina, and continues until the end of the military dictatorships in the late 1980s. Through the example of avant-garde artists from Latin America, the USA and Europe, the exhibition attempts to locate the precise tipping point in the transition from modern to contemporary art. It thus foregrounds various forces of change in order to illustrate this moment of transition, while focusing on moments of empathy, shared concerns and intellectual bonds between artists from different parts of the world, notwithstanding tensions between different historical experiences.
One of the artworks on view at the exhibition is Francis Bacon’s “Nude”, painted in 1960
“A Tale of Two Worlds – Experimental Latin American Art in Dialogue with the MMK Collection 1940s-1980s”, group show featuring Paul Almásy, Carmelo Arden Quin, Arman, Francis Bacon, Artur Barrio, Lothar Baumgarten, Thomas Bayrle, Juan Andrés Bello, Adolfo Bernal, Joseph Beuys, Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Martín Blaszko, Alighiero Boetti, Oscar Bony, Marcel Broodthaers, Teresa Burga, Kenneth C. Noland, Luis Camnitzer, Rafael Canogar, Antonio Caro, Ricardo Carreira, Ulises Carrión, John Chamberlain, Lygia Clark, Geraldo de Barros, Lenora de Barros, Augusto de Campos, Flávio de Carvalho, Willys de Castro, Walter de Maria, Juan del Prete, Juan Downey, Marcel Duchamp, Escuela de Valparaíso, León Ferrari, Lucio Fontana, Nicolás García Uriburu, Gego, Eduardo Gil, Hermann Goepfert, Mathias Goeritz, Beatriz González, Karl Otto Götz, Alberto Greco, Otto Greis, Victor Grippo, Alberto Heredia, Jasper Johns, On Kawara, Kenneth Kemble, Yves Klein, Gyula Kosice, Heinz Kreutz, David Lamelas, Barry Le Va, Roy Lichtenstein, Raúl Lozza, Anna Maria Maiolino, Tomás Maldonado, Leopoldo Maler, Piero Manzoni, Liliana Maresca, Cildo Meireles, Juan N. Melé, Ana Mendieta, Manolo Millares, Marta Minujín, Franz Mon, Bruce Nauman, Luis Felipe Noé, Hélio Oiticica, Claes Oldenburg, Margarita Paksa, Blinky Palermo, Lygia Pape, Luis Pazos, Liliana Porter, Charlotte Posenenske, Alejandro Puente, Gerhard Richter, Albert Georg Riethausen, Peter Roehr, Lotty Rosenfeld, Rhod Rothfuss, Jesús Ruiz Durand, Ed Ruscha, Fred Sandback, Rubén Santantonín, Mira Schendel, Grete Stern, Pablo Suárez, Abisag Tüllmann, Cy Twombly, Ben Vautier, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Franz Erhard Walther, Andy Warhol, Hildegard Weber and Yente
On view from November 25th through April 15th, 2018
MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main
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