Landmark Works, Emerging Artists Featured in Major Sculpture Exhibition
Kelly Richardson
AGO exhibition includes dance, video, juxtapositions of classic, contemporary works
(TORONTO – February 12, 2010) An extraordinary grouping of works by leading-edge contemporary artists will be on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario this spring in a major new exhibition titled Sculpture as Time: Major Works. New Acquisitions. Opening March 4 and continuing through August 1, the exhibition explores how artists since the 1960s have radically shifted traditional definitions and boundaries of the medium.
Works by some of the most controversial and influential artists of the past fifty years will be showcased in the exhibition, including Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, On Kawara, Wolfgang Laib, Simon Starling, Geoffrey Farmer, Tino Sehgal, Jonathan Monk, and Rachel Harrison, among others. The works are connected by their relation to the exhibition’s central theme – the representation time – whether as an explicit topic or as an experience for the viewer to negotiate.
“Sculpture as Time presents the work of a generation of artists who fearlessly probed the limits of a medium and challenged their viewers to experience sculpture in dynamic new ways,” says AGO Director and CEO Matthew Teitelbaum. “Today’s leading young artists have continued this conversation, and we are proud to showcase their important work alongside the established masters.”
“Since the 1960s, sculpture’s classic status as an unmoving object in space has been radically expanded,” explains David Moos, the AGO’s curator of contemporary art. “Sculpture can assume many forms, but what ties these works together is their relationship to time – past, present, future – framed in relation to historical and spiritual temporal dimensions.”
The exhibition features about 30 works and will be on display in the Vivian & David Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art (Level 5) and in Walker Court, where Tino Sehgal’s ephemeral Kiss (2002), a choreographed dance referencing sculptural kisses from art history, will be exhibited alongside two of the works that inspired it: Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss and Constantin Brâncu?i’s Kiss. The AGO was the first art museum in North America to both acquire and exhibit work by Sehgal, who is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Recently acquired video Twilight Avenger by Kelly Richardson will be featured in this exhibition.
source: AGO