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Installation
view from Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, New Museum, New
York, 2010. Foreground: Rain Rains (2002). Aluminum buckets, water,
steel cable, and ladder, dimensions variable. Background: After the
Storm (2010). Acrylic paint on maps, wood, 31 1/2 x 26” each.
Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Galeria Fortes Vilaça,
São Paulo; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo by Benoit Pailley.
High-resolution images available upon
request.
Brazilian conceptual artist Rivane
Neuenschwander creates playful, ephemeral and often participatory artworks that
blur distinctions between author and viewer, object and memory, permanence and
temporality. This fall, the Mildred
Lane Kemper Art Museum will present Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like
Any Other, the artist’s first major midcareer survey. Covering a
decade of work, the exhibition reveals a wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice
that merges painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation and
collaborative action. Like her predecessors Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica,
Neuenschwander is at once artistic instigator, commissioning agent and social
organizer, exploring themes such as nature, language, time and the poetry of the
quotidian.
The exhibition will highlight three works
that invite direct audience participation: Walking in Circles (2000),
First Love (2005) and Joe Carioca and Friends (2005).
Walking in Circles consists of several circles of varying size rendered
in transparent adhesive on the gallery floor. The circles darken over time as
they pick up dirt from visitors’ shoes, creating a physical map of
movement through the exhibition space. In First Love, participants are
asked to describe their “first love” to a forensic sketch artist;
the resulting portraits will be displayed in the gallery for the duration of the
exhibition. For Joe Carioca and Friends, Neuenschwander painted over
several pages of a popular Brazilian comic, leaving visible only the speech
bubbles and vibrant background colors. Each panel is then transferred to the
wall as a large blackboard on which people are invited to draw their own
stories.
Further highlights include a pair of
large-scale environmental installations. In Rain Rains (2002), buckets
suspended from the ceiling drip water into corresponding buckets beneath them,
creating artificial rain. Every four hours, museum staff will pour the collected
water back into the upper buckets, thus maintaining the Sisyphean system of
circulation. The second installation, The Conversation (2010), pays
homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film of the same title and, like the
film, investigates the systematic invasion of privacy in an era of dangerously
purposed technology. To stage the piece, the Kemper Art Museum will work with
security experts to create an Orwellian environment filled with listening
devices. Then, prior to the exhibition’s opening, Neuenschwander will raid
the “bug-filled” room in an attempt to uncover those devices —
a performance that will be recorded and played back in the partially dissembled
exhibition
space.
In addition to these participatory works
and installations, the exhibition will include two recent suites of paintings.
For After the Storm (2010), Neuenschwander exposed maps of New York
state counties to the elements for the length of the Brazilian rainy season.
At a Certain Distance (Ex-Voto Paintings) (2010) alters the traditional
form of the ex-voto — a type of commemorative painting that serves as a
remembrance or an expression of gratitude — by removing all reference to
pictorial drama or caption, leaving only brilliantly colored abstract
spaces.
Other works will include The
Tenant (2010), a lustrous film that follows the journey of a soap bubble as
it drifts through the rooms of an empty apartment; Involuntary Sculptures
(Speech Acts) (2001–10), a series of communally evolved sculptures
made by customers during conversations at bars and restaurants near
Neuenschwander’s home in Brazil; and A Day Like Any Other (2008),
an installation consisting of modified flip clocks in which all numbers have
been replaced by zeros. Indeed, by constantly advancing but leading nowhere,
these altered clocks — which will be placed all around the museum building
— highlight the theme of temporality that runs throughout
Neuenschwander’s
work.
About the
artist
Rivane Neuenschwander was born in 1967 in
Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where she currently lives and works. Over the past 20
years she has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the South
London Gallery, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo
Horizonte, Brazil; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Saint Louis Art Museum; and
Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at
the Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands; Museum of
Modern Art, New York; and Guggenheim Museum, New York. She was featured in the
55th Carnegie International (2008); the 28th São Paulo Biennale (2008); T2, the
Torino Triennale (2008); the 9th Havana Biennial (2006); the 51st Biennale di
Venezia (2005); and the first Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art
(1999).
Organizers and
support
Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any
Other was organized by the New
Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art,
Dublin. The exhibition is curated by Richard Flood, chief curator at the New
Museum. The presentation of First Love at all exhibition venues is made
possible by a gift from Romero Pimenta. Support for the exhibition in St. Louis
is provided by James M. Kemper, Jr.; the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation;
the Hortense Lewin Art Fund; the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the
Regional Arts Commission; and members of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art
Museum.
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a
bilingual catalog (English and Portuguese) with essays by Richard Flood; Paulo
Herkenhoff, director, Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro; Lars Bang Larsen,
curator; Yasmil Raymond, curator, DIA Art Foundation; and Rachel Thomas, senior
curator and director of exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern
Art.
Exhibition
Tour
Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any
Other opened June 23 at the New Museum, where it remains on view through
Sept. 19. Following its presentation at the Kemper Art Museum, the exhibition
will travel to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ (Feb.
12–June 19, 2011); the Miami Art Museum (July 17–Oct. 16, 2011); and
the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (Nov. 15, 2011–Feb.
2012).
Mildred Lane Kemper Art
Museum
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, part
of Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is
committed to furthering critical thinking and visual literacy through a vital
program of exhibitions, publications and accompanying events. The museum dates
back to 1881, making it the oldest art museum west of the Mississippi River.
Today it boasts one of the finest university collections in the United
States.
Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any
Other will open with a reception for the artist from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday,
Oct. 8, and remain on view through Jan. 10, 2011. In addition, the Kemper Art
Museum will host an artist dialogue with Neuenschwander and curator Richard
Flood at 11 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 9, in Steinberg Hall
Auditorium.
Both the reception and the dialogue
are free and open to the public. The Kemper Art Museum is located on Washington
University’s Danforth Campus, immediately adjacent to Steinberg Hall, near
the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Regular hours are 11 a.m. to
6 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; and 11 a.m.
to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The Museum is closed
Tuesdays.
For more information, call (314)
935-4523 or visit
kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.
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CALENDAR
SUMMARY
WHO: Mildred Lane Kemper Art
Museum
WHAT: Exhibition, Rivane
Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other
WHEN: Oct. 8 to Jan. 10, 2011.
Opening reception 7 to 9 p.m. Friday, Oct.
8.
WHERE: Mildred Lane Kemper Art
Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, near the intersection of Forsyth and
Skinker
boulevards.
HOURS: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday,
Wednesday and Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays
and Sundays. Closed
Tuesdays.
COST: Free and open to the
public.
INFORMATION: (314) 935-4523 or
www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu
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URL: http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/21011.aspx
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