DE
EN
artists & participants
Shafic Abboud,
Affandi,
Fateh Al-Moudarres,
Carl Andre,
Karel Appel,
Rasheed Araeen,
Wifredo Arcay,
Siah Armajani,
Tanaka Atsuko,
Frank Auerbach,
Francis Bacon,
Enrico Baj,
Georg Baselitz,
Thomas Bayrle,
Romare Bearden,
Mieczyslaw Berman,
Antonio Berni,
Joseph Beuys,
John Biggers,
Max Bill,
Alexander Boghossian,
Lee Bontecou,
Derek Boshier,
Vladimir Boudnik,
Frank Bowling,
Alberto Burri,
Anthony Caro,
Aluisio Carvao,
Enrico Castellani,
John Chamberlain,
Avinash Chandra,
Saloua Raouda Choucair,
Chua Mia Tee,
Lygia Clark,
Bruce Conner,
Waldemar Cordeiro,
Magda Cordell,
Sandu Darie,
Willem De Kooning,
Pedro de Oraa,
Niki de Saint Phalle,
Guy Debord,
Beauford Delaney,
Alen Divis,
Jean Dubuffet,
Charles & Ray Eames,
Melvin Edwards,
Inji Efflatoun,
Uzo Egonu,
Ibrahim El-Salahi,
Erhabor Emokpae,
Ben Enwonwu,
Erol,
Öyvind Fahlström,
Wojciech Fangor,
Ismail Fattah,
Jean Fautrier,
Leon Ferrari,
Lucio Fontana,
Helen Frankenthaler,
Pinot Gallizio,
Gego,
Alberto Giacometti,
Mathias Goeritz,
Leon Golub,
Karl Otto Götz,
Philip Guston,
Renato Guttuso,
Hans Haacke,
Raymond Hains,
Richard Hamilton,
Weaver Hawkins,
Carmen Herrera,
Lynn Hershman Leeson,
Eva Hesse,
Maqbool Fida Husain,
Robert Indiana,
Jess,
Jikken Kobo,
Takamatsu Jiro,
Jasper Johns,
Daniel Larue Johnson,
Asger Jorn,
Ilya Kabakov,
Tadeusz Kantor,
On Kawara,
Ellsworth Kelly,
Krishen Khanna,
Julije Knifer,
Geliy Korzhev,
Gyula Kosice,
Ivan Kozaric,
Kim Kulim,
Wifredo Lam,
Maria Lassnig,
John Latham,
Jacob Lawrence,
Seung-Taek Lee,
Norman Lewis,
Roy Lichtenstein,
Morris Louis,
Tomas Maldonado,
Ernest Mancoba,
Piero Manzoni,
Mawalan Marika,
Iri Maruki,
Toshi Maruki,
MARWAN,
Almir Mavignier,
David Medalla,
Mohammed Melehi,
Gustav Metzger,
Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko,
Marta Minujin,
Joan Mitchell,
Henry Moore,
Francois Morellet,
Robert Morris,
Sadamasa Motonaga,
Movimento Arte Nucleare,
Ernst Wilhelm Nay,
Alice Neel,
Albert Newall,
Barnett Newman,
Malangatana Valente Ngwenya,
Luis Felipe Noe,
Isamu Noguchi,
Iba N´Diaye,
Helio Oiticica,
Uche Okeke,
Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai,
Yoko Ono,
Alfonso Ossorio,
Hamed Owais,
Nam June Paik,
Eduardo Paolozzi,
Lygia Pape,
A.R. Penck,
Ivan Picelj,
Sigmar Polke,
Jackson Pollock,
Julio Pomar,
Viktor Popkov,
Carol Rama,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Ad Reinhardt,
Gerhard Richter,
Larry Rivers,
Joaquim Rodrigo,
Dieter Roth,
Rhod Rothfuss,
Gerhard Rühm,
Ed Ruscha,
Sadequain,
Mira Schendel,
Ruth Schloss,
Gerard Sekoto,
Jewad Selim,
Ismail Shammout,
Anwar Shemza,
Anwar Jalal Shemza,
Ahmed Shibrain,
Fyodor Shurpin,
Yohanan Simon,
Mitchell Siporin,
David Alfaro Siqueiros,
Gazbia Sirry,
Lucas Sithole,
Willi Sitte,
David Smith,
Lolo Soldevilla,
Jesus Rafael Soto,
Francis Newton Souza,
Aleksandar Srnec,
Frank Stella,
Sindoedarsono Sudjojono,
Alina Szapocznikow,
Rufino Tamayo,
Atsuko Tanaka,
Antoni Tapies,
Boris Taslitzky,
Herve Telemaque,
Tetsumi Kudo,
Mark Toben,
Mark Tobey,
Tony Tuckson,
Igael Tumarkin,
Twins Seven Seven,
Günther Uecker,
Stan Vanderbeek,
Emilio Vedova,
Jacques Villegle,
Wolf Vostell,
Andy Warhol,
Susanne Wenger,
Jack Whitten,
Wols,
Andrzej Jan Wroblewski,
Andrew Wyeth,
Li Xiushi,
Vasiliy Yakovlev,
Yosuke Yamahata,
Jia Youfu,
Ramses Younane,
Yosef Zaritsky,
Fahrelnissa Zeid,
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi,
Yuri Zlotnikov
curators
press release
Haus der Kunst is proud to present "Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965", a major exhibition that explores the complex histories of art of the postwar era. For the first time in recent exhibition history, the exhibition examines the vibrant and turbulent postwar period as a global phenomenon in which artistic perspectives were intertwined with social, political, cultural, and technological interests.
In May 2014 Haus der Kunst launched its long-term research project in Munich with a four day international conference. Presenting research drawn from different regions of the world, the deliberations brought together leading and emerging scholars, historians, artists, curators, theorists, and students in order to examine the artistic forces and cultural legacies that have shaped the production of art since 1945.
The term "Postwar" describes the historical period following the end of World War II in 1945. These years delineate the decisive defeat of Germany in Europe and of Japan in Asia, marking a turning point in global history. In the field of art, the postwar period marks a particular historical and cultural turning point, too, for it brought about the waning dominance of Western European art capitals and the rise of the international presence and hegemony of contemporary American art, popular culture, and mass media. The state of the arts also revealed a distinct ideological fault line: Behind the terms "socialist realism" and "abstraction" the simplifying binary between communism and capitalist democracy, socialism and liberal democracy was cast against the backdrop of the Cold War, which often obscured more complex motivations for artistic production.
On a global scale, however, several factors complicated this binary — decolonization struggles, independence movements, and anti-colonial resistance in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East — even as the Cold War powers courted and sought control of the new nations. These increasingly independent actors suggested quite different orientations and alliances — including pan-Africanism and the Non-Aligned Movement — in the wake of imperialism and the end of the war.
Reflecting on the varied trajectories of thinking of this period "Postwar: art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965" maps the itineraries of art and politics that interlocked the world into a single entity. The question was asked everywhere: what would global modernity look like? If we are to refigure the cartographies of postwar modernism, what sort of methodologies might we deploy? To what extent did the political exert pressure on the aesthetic, or the cultural on the artistic? In turn, how did artists, critics, and intellectuals negotiate, resist, or even subvert political ideologies or cultural nationalism?
Probing differing concepts of artistic modernity — such as abstraction, realism, figuration, and representation — the exhibition explores how individual receptions and formulations of modernism informed the variant manifestations of modern art. By following these divergent and convergent vectors of influence, the exhibition invites reflection on the development of art that straddles continents, political structures, economic patterns, and institutional frameworks.
Yet in another sense, "Postwar: art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965" is entirely unprecedented, in that for the first time it examines art of the postwar era from multiple perspectives — East and West, North and South, colonizer and colonized, Pacific and Atlantic. Organized in eight thematic sections, "Postwar" illuminates these epochal social changes – "Aftermath: Zero Hour and the Atomic Era"; "Form Matters"; "New Images of Man"; "Realisms"; "Concrete Visions"; "Cosmopolitan Modernisms"; "Nations Seeking Form"; "Networks, Media, and Communication".
As an in-depth, global study, the curators have conceived the exhibition across the practices of painting, sculpture, installation, collage, performance, film, artist books, documents, photography with more than 350 works by 218 artists from 65 countries.
The exhibition is curated by Okwui Enwezor (Director, Haus der Kunst), Ulrich Wilmes (Chief Curator, Haus der Kunst) and Katy Siegel (Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art and Professor of Art History of Stony Brook University).
The exhibition is presented under the patronage of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany. We thank our shareholders the Free State of Bavaria and Friends of Haus der Kunst, and our major supporter Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung for their annual funding support of the programs of Haus der Kunst.
"Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965" is generously supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and Goethe-Institut. Additional support is provided by the Friends of Haus der Kunst, and Ford Foundation, New York.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive fully illustrated catalogue published by Prestel Publishing and edited by Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel and Ulrich Wilmes; with thirty six newcontributions. ca. 65 Euros, ca. 800 pages; ISBN 978-3-7913-5584-9 (English edition), ISBN 978-3-7913-5583-2 (German edition).
A ca. 300 page illustrated short guide supplements the catalogue with concise texts on works in the exhibition and costs 10 Euros