Close-Up - Reykjavik Arts Festival

On Saturday, 15 May, the exhibition ‘Close-Up – Contemporary American Art in the Astrup Fearnley Collection’, at Iceland’s National Gallery in Reykjavik, opens to the public. The exhibition is organized by Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo and is one of the main attractions of the Reykjavik Arts Festival. The Arts Festival will be opened on Friday, 14 May in the exhibition area.

In addition to Jeff Koons paintings and sculptures, the exhibition will be showing works by Andy Warhol, Duane Hanson, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Robert Gober, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Bruce Naumann and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ’Close-Up’ aims at highlighting the figurative, object-based art that evolved in the American modern art environment over the past thirty years, work that hinges on a postmodern aesthetic characterised by the appropriation and recycling of pre-existing conceptions, motives and cultural and social conventions. Simultaneously, this work echoes our own everyday mythologies in an accessible and spectacular manner, often with a strong vein of social critique.

Appropriation artists, frequently defined as neo- conceptual, typically recycle mass produced consumables, objects and images. But although object-based art connects back to Duchamp’s “ready-mades”, it is a form of production that has less to do with conceptions of art, and more with the symbolic dimensions of familiar objects and images. It is the objects and images that initiate the narratives through their connotations and associations, narratives that often bear out or expose our fragmentary hold on reality.

We cast our gaze, then, in this exhibition on work which, in many different ways, can be conceived as a ”transfiguration of the commonplace”, derived from pop art’s determination to reset art and aesthetics to a ground zero. Reset aesthetics is now defined as aesthetics, not created or revoked, but appropriated by, in most cases, prevailing popular visions we recognise and confront everyday in the media. On entering the exhibition area, visitors are enveloped in an everyday aesthetic, not of the pure and sublime formalistic type, but an aesthetic with powerful bonds to a content, with references to time, memory, commercialism, consumerism and, not least, social reality. Pressetext

Close-Up - Contemporary American Art in the Astrup Fearnley Collection
Ausstellung im Rahmen von Reykjavik Arts Festival

mit Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Duane Hanson, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Robert Gober, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Bruce Nauman, Felix Gonzales-Torres, u.a.
Organisation: Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo