The exhibition features 111 works on loan from museums and collections around the world.
The exotic trip of Gauguin
Gauguin exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Coinciding with the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of its opening, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum is hosting the exhibition, “Gauguin”, which promises to be a glimpse into the exotic.
With the journey of Paul Gauguin to Tahiti as a guideline, the viewer sees how his time there produced an authentic renewal of creative language, and how his experiences transformed modernity.
Gaugin became interested in showing off the possibilities and potential of developing this new avant-garde art language, and this new approach is addressed in the show.The exhibition highlights the debate on primitivism in modern art and the experience of exotic adventures compared to colonial cosmopolitanism.
Spurred on by his romantic passion for adventure and scientific curiosity, the artist became interested in traveling to distant countries in the late eighteenth century. His journey to North Africa supplemented the Grand Tour and the exotic came to be considered not only a stimulus for artistic imagination, but also as a new way of life. In the late nineteenth century, the growing skepticism in modern society unleashed an unstoppable desire to regain the innocence of the past and to reconnect with the inner-self outside Western conventions.
The experimentation began with Gauguin in the South Seas and continues on with the contributions of later artists such as Emil Nolde, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and August Macke, with the aim learning about the mark left behind by Gauguin in the artistic movements of the early twentieth century.
Curated by Paloma Alarcó, Chief Curator of Modern Painting in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the exhibition brings together 111 works on loan from museums and collections all around the world like the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Albertina in Vienna, Budapest Fine Arts, and National Gallery of Art in Washington. Noteworthy works in the exhibition include paintings from Paul Gauguin Matamoe (death. Landscape with peacocks, 1892) from the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Two Tahitian Women (1899) from the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, and Girl with a Fan (1902) from the Museum Folkwang in Essen. It also highlights the contribution of the Nolde Foundation which has provided six watercolors from the Artist of the Series Native South Seas (1913-1914), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris with a strong representation of works by the Kandinsky legacy
www.museothyssen.org
WINTER 2012