SCHEDULE OF EXHIBITIONS: 2011-2012 The information below is subject to change.
The Hugo Boss Prize 2010: Hans-Peter Feldmann
May 20-November 2, 2011
Hans-Peter Feldmann, winner of the HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010, is the eighth artist to win this prestigious biennial award, established in 1996 by HUGO BOSS and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. Feldmann has spent over four decades conducting a profound investigation into the influence of the visual environment on our subjective reality. Composing images and objects into serial archives, uncanny combinations, and other illuminating new contexts, his work unearths the latent associations and sentiments contained within the landscape of daily life. As the 2010 prizewinner, Feldmann received an honorarium of $100,000, and for his solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, he has chosen to pin this exact amount in overlapping one-dollar bills to the gallery walls.
The installation, which uses money that has previously been in circulation, extends the artist's lifelong obsession with collecting familiar material into simple groupings that reveal a nuanced play of similarity and difference. Feldmann has a history of resisting the art world's commercial structures, issuing his work in unsigned, unlimited editions and retiring from art making altogether for nearly a decade in the 1980s, at which point he gave away or destroyed the work remaining in his possession. Bank notes, like artworks, are objects that have no inherent worth beyond what society agrees to invest them with, and in using them as his medium, Feldmann raises questions about notions of value in art. But his primary interest in the serial display of currency lies less in its status as a symbol of capitalist excess than in its ubiquity as a mass-produced image and a material with which we come into contact every day. At its core, this formal experiment presents an opportunity to experience an abstract concept-a numerical figure and the economic possibilities it entails-as a visual object and an immersive physical environment.
THE HUGO BOSS PRIZE 2010: Hans-Peter Feldmann is organized by Katherine Brinson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue.
This exhibition is made possible by HUGO BOSS.
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity
June 24-September 28, 2011
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity presents the first North American retrospective of artist-philosopher Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Korea). The exhibition presents some ninety works from the 1960s to the present including sculpture, paintings, works on paper, and site-specific installations. In the late 1960s, Lee emerged as the leading theorist and practitioner of Mono-ha (literally "School of Things"), a Japanese movement that arose amid the collapse of colonial world orders, antiauthoritarian protests, and the rise of critiques of modernity. Lee's sculptures, presenting dispersed arrangements of stones together with industrial materials like steel plates, rubber sheets, and glass panes, recast the object as a network of relations based on parity among the viewer, materials, and site. Lee was also a pivotal figure in the Korean tansaekhwa (monochrome painting) school, which offered a fresh approach to minimalist abstraction by presenting repetitive, gestural marks as bodily records of time's perpetual passage. Lee has coupled his artistic practice with a prodigious body of critical and philosophical writings, which provide the quotations that appear throughout this exhibition.
Lee Ufan: Marking Infinity is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Sandhini Poddar, Assistant Curator of Asian Art, and Nancy Lim, former Asian Art Curatorial Fellow, provided curatorial support. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue featuring a scholarly essay by Munroe that positions Lee in the context of global Post-Minimalism; a meditation on Lee's poetics by Tatehata Akira, poet, critic, and President, Kyoto City University of the Arts; and a narrative chronology of the artist's life and work compiled by Tokyo-based scholar Mika Yoshitake.
This exhibition is made possible with lead sponsorship from Samsung.
Major support is provided by the Korea Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by The Japan Foundation. Additional support is provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. We recognize the Leadership Committee for the exhibition, including founding support from Timothy Blum; the Dedalus Foundation, Inc.; HyungTeh Do; Arne Glimcher; Marc Glimcher; Elvira González; Tina Kim; HyunSook Lee; Nicholas Logsdail; Isabel Mignoni; the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum Foundation; Jeff Poe; Thaddaeus Ropac; Rosemarie Schwarzwälder; Masami Shiraishi; Sadao Shirota; and Jill Silverman.
