Vincenzo De Bellis – författare

How performance has transformed the status of the art object, in works by Félix González-Torres, Oskar Schlemmer, Robert Morris and morePresenting works from the early 20th century to today, The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance examines the notion of stillness as both a performative and visual gesture, featuring practitioners who have constructed static or near-static experiments that hover somewhere between action and representation as they are experienced in the gallery space. The exhibition investigates performance from the perspective of the object rather than the body, examining how performance has reinterpreted traditional artistic mediums.Stillness and permanence are qualities typically seen as inherent to painting and sculpture—consider the frozen gestures of a historical tableau or the unyielding solidity of a bronze figure. The Paradox of Stillness, however, expands the artwork’s quality of stillness to accommodate uncertain temporalities and physical states, investigating works that merge objects with human bodies suspended in motion. Featuring artists whose works include performative elements but also embrace acts, objects and gestures that refer more to the inert qualities of painting or sculpture than to true staged action, The Paradox of Stillness rethinks the history of performance through its aesthetic investigations into the interplay of the fixed image and the live body.Artists include: Marina Abramovic, Merce Cunningham, Giorgio de Chirico, VALIE EXPORT, Gilbert and George, Félix González-Torres, Maria Hassabi, Jannis Kounellis, Kasimir Malevich, Piero Manzoni, Robert Morris, Senga Nengudi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Oskar Schlemmer, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Cindy Sherman, Mario Garcia Torres and Franz West.

Six decades of sculptural innovation from the Arte Povera pioneer and alchemist of the everydayOver the course of more than five decades, Jannis Kounellis developed a singular practice across painting, works on paper, sculpture, installation and hybrid works combining objects with live performance. Playing a central role in the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, Kounellis created wide-ranging and innovative works exploring theater, migration, history, politics and other themes, which continue to influence subsequent generations of artists.Published by the Walker Art Center for the first US Kounellis survey in over 35 years, Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts offers the most comprehensive assessment of his career to date. The richly illustrated catalog, assembled with the full cooperation of the artist’s estate and archive, presents a first-of-its-kind collection of visual materials and Kounellis’ writings, including image-based exhibition and performance chronologies. The volume also features essays by Vincenzo de Bellis, Claire Gilman, Kit Hammonds and Ara H. Merjian.Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017) was born in Piraeus, Greece. In 1956, he moved to Rome and by 1960 was an active member of the Arte Povera movement. In 1969 he created one of his best-known works: the installation of 12 live horses in the gallery L’Attico in Rome. Kounellis’ first New York solo show was in 1972. Recent exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece (2012) and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2007), among others.

Major works from the Walker Art Center’s collection, seen in the context of two watershed moments in American historyThis diverse survey of American art from the collection of the Walker Art Center uses two of the nation’s most significant events as its chronological boundaries: the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 that escalated the Vietnam War and the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC. Within the timeframe of these two landmark calamities, the United States saw the emergence of some of its most noteworthy artists.The publication examines the many themes and techniques developed during those 40 years within the greater context of American history and culture, from modernist abstraction to mass production. These generations of artists probed the very notion of what art is and what it can do using paint, performance, installation, video and photography. This paperback volume features work by artists such as Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barbara Kruger, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Nauman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol from the Walker Art Center’s acclaimed collection.