Mario Schifano “The ’60s”
Luxembourg & Dayan
This event has ended.
Luxembourg & Dayan announces an exhibition of seminal works by Mario Schifano (1934-1998), one of Italy’s most significant postwar artists. Schifano was a radical figure who considered painting to be the frontier of the avant garde, an intrinsically human art form capable of capturing the beating pulse of contemporary culture. His prodigious talent, somewhat obscured in his day by an eccentric personality and self-destructive drive, was at its height in the 1960s, a decade in which he experimented extensively with ever-changing media and techniques, traversing a wide spectrum of styles that he made entirely his own.
Beginning November 6, 2014, Luxembourg & Dayan will invite new assessment of this iconoclastic artist’s contributions with Mario Schifano: The ‘60s. By focusing upon the years when his artistic output was at its most intense, the exhibition captures Schifano’s extraordinary range and his ability to encapsulate the charged history and aesthetic contradictions of a nation trying to break free of the recent grip of Fascism and the terrible weight of centuries-old artistic traditions amid rapidly changing socio-economic tides.
On view through January 10, 2015, Mario Schifano: The ‘60s is an adapted version of the exhibition Mario Schifano: 1960-1967, recently presented to critical acclaim at Luxembourg & Dayan London. The New York City show is organized in collaboration with Giorgio Marconi, Schifano’s gallerist during the late 1960s, and is accompanied by the catalogue produced for the London show. The book features a new text by Claire Gilman (PhD Columbia University), who is currently curator at The Drawing Center, New York.
Works featured in Mario Schifano: The ‘60s have important early provenance, with some having passed through the hands of such legendary dealers as Marconi and Ileana Sonnabend and important collections, such as Franchetti Collection in Rome.
Mario Schifano: The ‘60s explores the artist’s varied output in an attempt to penetrate the nucleus of his approach. The major ruptures of Schifano’s career played out to greatest effect throughout the decade of the 1960s, a period in which he also created his most compelling and ingeniously experimental works of art – paintings that employed a plethora of media and formats. By focusing on paintings from this decade, Luxembourg & Dayan hopes to reveal the crux of a career that at times aligned with, and other times stood at odds against, the European avant garde’s project at large.
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Schedule
from November 06, 2014 to January 10, 2015