Merce Cunningham

Exhibition dedicated to 50 years of artistic creation by Merce Cunningham, one of North America’s most important choreographers and dancers from the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1919, Cunningham played a key role in the post-modernist aesthetic. Together with John Cage, he was invited in 1952 to lecture in the Black Mountain College - an “avant-garde” artistic school, where Robert Rauschenberg was also lecturing. In this manner, he began a professional relationship which lasted over 10 years. From 1986, he developed an increasingly intense relationship with the cinema, and subsequently with video. In the 1990s he discovered a computer-based logic with which he began to develop his works. The exhibition refers to five decades of Cunningham’s work, distributed across various spaces within the Museum, constituted by photographic documentation, models of patterns, and objects or models designed by artists such as Andy Warhol, Noguchi, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lancaster or Nauman, drawings of musical scores by Cage and Tudor and also drawings of choreographic works that Cunningham developed on the computer. This exhibition was a co-production between the Serralves Foundation, the Antoni Tápies Foundation (Barcelona) and the Castello di Rivoli (Itália).

Curator: Germano Celant

Merce Cunningham
Kurator: Germano Celant