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Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, um 1962/1982 Magna und Acryl auf Leinwand  182.9 x 244.5 cm Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museumsankauf, Friends of Art Endowment Fund © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

review

Robert Motherwell

Pure Painting

12.10.2023 - 14.01.2024

Wall Painting with Stripes, 1944 / 1945 Öl auf Leinwand 137,2 x 170,5 cm The Art Institute of Chicago © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYRobert Motherwell, Two Figures with Cerulean Blue Stripe, 1960 Öl auf Leinwand 213.4 × 277.5 cm Privatbesitz. Courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYRobert Motherwell, The Garden Window, 1969/1990 Acryl und Kohle auf Leinwand  153.4 × 101.9 cm Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museumsankauf, Friends of Art Endowment Fund © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 103, 1965 Öl auf Leinwand 182,9 x 243,8 cm Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof.a, Madrid © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYRobert Motherwell, Caprice No. 3, 1962 Öl auf Leinwand 167.6 × 121.9 cm  Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. Eliza S. Paine Fund und Schenkung der Dedalus Foundation, 1997 © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYJe t’aime No. II, 1955 Öl und Kohle auf Leinwand 137,2 x 182,9 cm Privatbesitz © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYThe Little Spanish Prison, 1941–1944 / um 1959 / 1969 Öl auf Leinwand 69,2 x 43,5 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Schenkung Renate Ponsold Motherwell © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYThe Feminine II, 1988 Acryl und Kohle auf Leinwand 223,5 x 304,8 cm Liong Keng Kwee © Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NYRobert Motherwell, in a 1986 photograph, seated in front of his painting Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70 from 1961. © Photograph by Renate Ponsold. Courtesy of the Dedalus Foundation Archives.

With Robert Motherwell – Pure Painting, the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien is showing the work of a leading representative of Abstract Expressionism, the monumental, gestural movement in painting that began in the late 1940s and is regarded as the first original form of American Post-War art. The exhibition will be the first retrospective since 1976 held in Austria that deals with the work of this important American artist, and the first in Europe since 1998.

Motherwell, the intellectual counterpart to the more media-effective Jackson Pollock, has close links to European literature and painting. His figurative beginnings are rooted in French Surrealism; in the mid-1950s he developed a purely abstract painting style in large format as his artistic language.

Dominating his oeuvre are series and variations that give expression to an intensive and ever-recurring handling of specific themes. The exhibition shows his most important cycles: Elegies to the Spanish Republic, a reaction to the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), which, Motherwell viewed as a metaphor of every injustice. From 1948 until his death, he produced more than 150 Elegies as an unforgettable commemoration of human suffering, and abstract, poetic symbol of the inexorable cycle of life and death.

Juxtaposed to these paintings is his series aptly named Opens, which preoccupied him from 1967 until 1981, likewise in more than 200 examples. Here, in a monumental, “pure” kind of painting marked by austerity and reduction, Motherwell transports emotions by means of sophisticated colour systems and reserved expression.

 

Robert Motherwell – Pure Painting is produced in cooperation with The Modern in Fort Worth/Texas. The exhibition includes around forty representative works from Motherwell’s total oeuvre. Loans come from important private collections and major, mainly American museums, as The Art Institute of Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach/Florida; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Tate, London.

 

 

Opening on Wednesday, October 11, 2023 at 6.30pm.

Exhibition visit from 7pm-10pm.

Robert Motherwell Pure Painting

12.10.2023 - 14.01.2024 Videopodcast

curated by

Evelyn Benesch

Susan Davidson

Cooperation

Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth

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