Georges Vantongerloo. Aspiring to Infinity Date: November 4, 2009 – February 22, 2010 This exhibition explores the work of sculptor, painter, architect and art theorist Georges Vantongerloo (Antwerp, 1886 – Paris, 1965). Despite Vantongerloo’s regard as one of the most important artists and thinkers in the twentieth century, few exhibitions to date have been dedicated to him. Curated by Guy Brett, the Museum’s exhibition on this artist aims at exploring the fundamentals of his oeuvre, in which his re-conceptualization of space in painting and sculpture influenced artistic tendencies in early twentieth-century abstract art. The exhibition also focuses on the final period of his work after World War II, in which the artist, through a succession of radical leaps, arrived at an original and intuitive visual encapsulation of the Universe’s energy. In this sense, the exhibition traces the artist’s evolution from his beginnings with Constructions in the Sphere(1917) to his years as a member of the De Stijl Group and Abstraction-Création (when he produced geometric paintings based on right angles), traversing the appearance of “curves” in his paintings in the late 1930s On the other hand, the exhibition brings together works conceived after World War II with his series created in plexiglas, and prismatic models and paintings that search for their likeness or equivalence to cosmic phenomena—radiation, radioactivity, electromagnetism, attraction/repulsion—a line of investigation he would pursue until his death. Both inscribed within historical avant-garde experience and influenced by the advent of abstraction—witnessing the movement flourish in masterworks by Mondrian, Malevitch and Kandinsky—Vantongerloo would sign the De Stijl Group manifesto in 1917, together with Mondrian and Van Doesburg. An important part of Vantongerloo’s research in the 1920s focused on color as a physical and perceptive phenomenon. Later he would conceive his works according to strict geometric rules, and then algebraic ones, to become the founder of mathematical thought in contemporary art. As a true pioneer of abstract sculpture, after 1945 the artist would continue to propose unique perspectives for his field, abandoning all references to constructed geometry while opening up subjective approaches to the universe’s cosmology. |
