Lending new vitality to Modernism through an interplay with contemporary works—this is the goal of Jürgen Bock, curator of Drawing a Tension. The exhibition is neither chronologically ordered nor traditionally classified according to medium, technique, or art historical criteria; instead, Drawing a Tension invites viewers to discover related aspects in works of very different disciplines, styles, and countries of origin. This juxtaposition of contradictory positions proves that even works long since part of the art historical canon can regain their original "tension" on a political, social, and intellectual level.

The spectrum of artists from the Deutsche Bank Collection now on show at the 60 Wall Street Gallery of Deutsche Bank New York ranges from Max Ernst to Zoe Leonard and from Louise Bourgeois to Francis Alys, while Marcel Broodthaers’ surrealism-influenced works encounter Olav Christopher Jenssen’s excursions into abstraction. According to the curator, an object by Thomas Hirschhorn, Musée Précaire Albinet (Lighter), serves as an illuminating leitmotif to the exhibition. The Swiss artist glued portraits of important Modernist protagonists to an oversized disposable lighter covered in gold and silver foil. Hirschhorn’s work indicates that the utopias of Malevich and Le Corbusier have lost nothing of their relevance, despite being questioned by post-modernist theory.

Drawing a Tension
until March 6 2009
60 Wall Street Gallery
New York

Send a friend

Print