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Indepth Arts News:
"Cai Guo-Qiang : Fallen Blossoms"
2009-12-11 until 2010-03-21
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Philadelphia, PA,
USA
The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum will present a multi-site exhibition of the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, one of the most prominent contemporary artists on the international art scene. Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms consists of a poetic meditation on the passing of time, memory, and memorializing. One of the artist’s signature “explosion events,” Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project, has been specifically commissioned for the exhibition and will take place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; a second explosion event will follow at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Inspired by the memory of Anne d'Harnoncourt (1943-2008), late director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and her long friendship with the founder and artistic director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Marion Boulton Stroud, Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms addresses themes of memory, loss and renewal on a personal and public level. It is Cai's first solo exhibition in Philadelphia and the first in the United States since his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in early 2008.
Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project is scheduled for Friday, December 11, 2009, starting at approximately 4:15 p.m. on the East Terrace of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and will be followed by an event featuring the creation of a gunpowder drawing at the Fabric Workshop and Museum at 6 p.m. Each occurrence will be momentary.
Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms includes four components, distributed between the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. In addition to the explosion event on December 11, a series of four gunpowder drawings and a sculptural installation will be on view inside the Museum in a presentation titled Light Passage. Two newly commissioned works, Time Flies Like a Weaving Shuttle and Time Scroll, will be on display on the seventh and eighth floor of the Fabric Workshop and Museum.
“The concept for this collaborative exhibition actually began in a conversation between Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kippy Stroud several years ago, and it has now become, in part, a memorial to Anne,” said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Museum. “We are grateful to Kippy Stroud for her commitment to realize the exhibition, both in appreciation of the Museum’s extraordinary late director and as a reflection on universal themes.”
“Anne d’Harnoncourt and I were friends for more than 40 years,” said Ms. Stroud. “Among the things we had in common were a shared commitment to public service in the arts, to Philadelphia, and to Pennsylvania. Before she died we both had in mind doing an exhibition devoted to Cai Guo-Qiang in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Afterward, in discussions with the artist I began to see that in his hands a larger meditation embracing the memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt might emerge, something that would find in the expression of the momentary something infinite.”
PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART (December 11, 2009 – March 21, 2010) Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project will occur in front of the Museum's East Façade, where the image of a blossoming flower will appear at sunset, suggesting the ephemeral beauty of a spring blossom as the sky darkens behind it. The December 11 event is open to the public, beginning with remarks at 4 p.m.
Inside the Museum, an exhibition of four gunpowder drawings will be on view in the Lynne and Harold Honickman Gallery 172. The drawings, which follow the cycle of the four seasons, were created by igniting patterns of gunpowder on paper, evoking and renewing the spirit and tradition of Chinese literati ink painting. In the same gallery will be 99 Golden Boats (2002), an installation consisting of leaf-shaped boats made of gold and suspended as if floating on an invisible river.
“It is a testimony to Cai Guo-Qiang’s sensibility and perceptiveness that this overall project is so particularly appropriate to its setting in Philadelphia, where history and reflection have always played such an important role in civic life,” said Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art. “It explores and represents its themes so precisely, in a manner that is at once public and intimate.”
FABRIC WORKSHOP AND MUSEUM (December 11, 2009 – March 1, 2010) Themes of friendship, the passage of time, and loss will be reflected at the Fabric Workshop and Museum through its presentations incorporating textiles, fibers, and other media. An audio recording of Stroud’s reminiscences of her friend Anne d'Harnoncourt, which the artist used to create the exhibition’s works, will be heard in the galleries where Cai Guo-Qiang’s work is on view.
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