Guggenheim Museum - Exhibitions




			Louise Bourgeois June 27–September 28, 2008 Louise Bourgeois is a full-career retrospective of one of the most important artists of our time. This exhibition, which will fill the entire Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda and one adjacent gallery, will be the most comprehensive examination to date of Bourgeois’s long and distinguished career. Born almost a century ago, Louise Bourgeois has remained steadfastly at the vanguard of the development of contemporary art for more than 70 years, and continues to create new bodies of work with characteristic energy and restless innovation. Throughout a career that has intersected with many of the leading avant-garde movements of the 20th century, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Post-Minimalism, she has remained resolutely committed to a singular creative vision. Although her oeuvre includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and performance, Bourgeois is best known for her sculptures, which range in scale from the intimate to the monumental, and across a diverse array of mediums including wood, bronze, latex, marble, and fabric. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, she has developed a richly symbolic visual idiom that encompasses totemic forms, ambiguously gendered anatomical fragments, and towering spiders, as well as the assemblages of found objects that are encased in her environmental-scale installations. These images powerfully articulate the psychological imperatives that drive her artistic process, based in large part on memories of a troubled childhood in France and her subsequent struggle to find personal equilibrium throughout her adult life. Louise Bourgeois presents a nuanced exploration of the artist’s distinctive iconography and major themes, in an installation that evokes both an intensely individualized process of introspection, and the universal complexities of the human experience. This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Defiance (Le Défi), 1991. Painted wood, glass, and electrical light, 67 1/2 x 58 x 26 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 91.3903. © Louise Bourgeois/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

			Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting July 11–September 14, 2008 IMAGELESS: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting documents a comprehensive research project in the field of conservation. In 2001 an important but irreparably damaged painting by Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting (1960–66), was donated by AXA Art Insurance to the Guggenheim Museum as part of a conservation research study and collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art. Over the next five years, conservators, scientists, curators, and artists carried out a complete physical examination and scientific analyses of the work. The exhibition invites visitors to enter the world of the conservator as forensic scientist, to uncover the mystery hidden beneath the monochromatic black painting. This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Conservation Department in collaboration with the Sackler Center for Arts Education. Made possible by a generous grant from AXA Art Insurance Corporation. Ad Reinhardt in his studio. Photo: John Loengard/TimePix

			Catherine Opie: American Photographer September 26, 2008–January 5, 2009 Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work, adopting such diverse genres as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of transgender people and performance artists to her expansive urban landscapes of cities like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and New York, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects. Though Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, no single exhibition has yet offered an overview of her diverse artistic project. Catherine Opie: American Photographer serves to fill this void. It features important examples from Opie’s major series, including Portraits (1993–97); Self-Portraits (1993–2004); Freeways (1994); Houses (1995–96); Domestic (1995–99); American Cities (1997–present); Icehouses (2001); and Surfers (2003). As such, this exhibition provides audiences with a valuable opportunity to examine firsthand the interconnections between Opie’s various styles and subjects. Catherine Opie, Mitch, 1994. Chromogenic print, Edition of 8, 2 APs, 20 x 16 inches. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

			theanyspacewhatever October 24, 2008–January 5, 2009 During the 1990s a number of artists claimed the exhibition as their medium. Working independently or in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the individual object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding its physical and temporal parameters. Using the museum as a springboard for work that reaches beyond the visual arts, their work often commingles with other disciplines such as architecture, design, and theater, engaging directly with the vicissitudes of everyday life to offer subtle moments of transformation. This loose affiliation of artists, each of whom now boasts strong, independent careers, periodically and randomly joins forces to create a variety of projects. The Guggenheim Museum has extended an invitation to a core group of these artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—to collectively formulate a scenario for an exhibition, one that will reflect and articulate the unique nature of their practices. Organized by the museum’s Chief Curator, Nancy Spector, in close collaboration with the artists, the exhibition will present a genealogy of their shared history through site-specific installations of new, often self-reflexive works created on the occasion of this project.