Michael Bevilacqua

Louisiana is the first museum in the world to mount an exhibition of the work of the American painter Michael Bevilacqua, who was born in 1966, grew up in California and now lives in New York. The exhibition is curated by the museum’s director Poul Erik Tøjner, and has been organized in a co-operation between the artist and Louisiana. It will show 15 of Bevilacqua’s works – including one of the artist’s racing cars in full size. The exhibition offers a representative picture of Bevilacqua’s work as a painter over the past ten years.

The early works from the end of the nineties have a strong, immediate graphic appeal. This changes to some extent in his later paintings from the time after 2001, where his gaze is in the broader sense directed towards the history of art and Bevilacqua works with a colour scale and an array of painterly techniques that range over a wider spectrum and are less ‘clean’ in expression. Common to all his works is the personal, almost ‘diaristic’ reflection of the artist’s personal universe.

Bevilacqua is already represented in the Louisiana collection by the work Busy, Busy, Sunny Day, 2003, originally conceived as part of a triptych. In the exhibition, for which the other two parts of the triptych have been borrowed, this panorama can be seen in its full length of 18 metres. One of Bevilacqua’s racing cars in full size will also be part of the exhibition, positioned as a sculpture in the middle of the room. Its threedimensionality gives the world of the artist’s pictures a particular physical presence – the car is itself decorated with miniatures of works from the artist’s oeuvre, including some that can be seen in this very exhibition.

The artist Michael Bevilacqua can be seen as a kind of heir to the Pop Art tradition, one of the marked themes in the Louisiana collection – those who saw Louisiana’s exhibition of Per Kirkeby’s masonite hardboards from the sixties at the museum a couple of years ago will also be able to observe resemblances in the technique, where figures from (media) reality are contoured, carefully masked off and inserted as picture elements on the canvas. The references in the works to designer clothes, cult musicians like Kraftwerk, CAN, McSolaar and Air, the visual artist Matthew Barney’s video works, Japanese food products and Chinese characters re-mix the icons of modern culture. Michael Bevilacqua sets all these signs in motion in a kind of self-portraits or diary entries with allusions to his cultural preferences and his personal biography. Bevilacqua’s art is not without a sting in it tail, but it is certainly not without humour and warmth either. What we see here is loving satire, but also – indeed especially – formally aware painting. For the whole concoction of more or less familiar icons serves first and foremost to compose picture-spaces and juxtapose colours. The many patterns, stripes, grids, dots and other more or less abstract forms and figures hold the collages in a kind of tension and create a strange cosmopolitan fantasy landscape that can set off many different kinds of associations in the individual viewer.

Publications To accompany the exhibition a separate English catalogue is being published, designed by Michael Jensen in collaboration with Bevilacqua. The preface has been written by Poul Erik Tøjner and the catalogue also includes an interview of Bevilacqua by Poul Erik Tøjner and two essays, “Dear Diary: Michael Bevilacqua’s Pop Subjective”, by the American critic Meghan Dailey, and “Festina Lente – Quick but Slow” by curator Michael Juul Holm. In addition the most recent issue of Louisiana Magasin no. 17 features the article “Skynd dig langsomt” – a shorter Danish version of Michael Juul Holm’s catalogue essay.

Film production In connection with LOUISIANA CONTEMPORAY Louisiana has begun a collaboration with the film director Susanne Bier and the production company Zentropa with a view to producing small three-minute films introducing the work of each of the artists involved. At the end of the project the films will be collected and released on a DVD which will then be distributed internationally in 2008. Michael Bevilacqua is one of the artists portrayed.

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Michael Bevilacqua