January 21, 2016 (El Segundo, California) – What is the point of making plans if the future is uncertain? By what process do we lay out a day’s, a month’s, or a year’s agenda even while knowing that mere coincidence may blow it apart like dandelion seeds in the breeze? And once we actually make a plan, do we stick with it, whatever the consequences, or do we improvise, come what may?
ESMoA in El Segundo, California, is musing on all of the above and more with
Art Experience #21: PLAN, curated by Joes Segal, chief curator of The Wende Museum of Culver City and Bernhard Zünkeler, chief curator of ESMoA. .
PLAN opens at ESMoA with curatorial remarks from Joes Segal, chief curator of The Wende Museum, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, February 21, 2016. The art experience will run through May 22, 2016.
PLAN juxtaposes rare artworks and artifacts from Eastern Europe with artworks by Egon Schiele, Odilon Redon, Stephan Balkenhol, Camille Pissaro, Gajin Fujita, Cornelius Voelker and others to explore the fantasy world of calculated planning against an obstinate creative reality that seldom coincides with the original plans.
Objects on display include medals for heroes of the Third World War, five year plans, and a map of the projected Soviet invasion of West Berlin. East European and Soviet artworks betray the multi-layered tensions between utopian designs and their practical implications. Other works in the exhibition play with fate and coincidence. Spontaneous drawings by Egon Schiele and Henri Matisse contrast with dutifully corrected compositions by Stephan Balkenhol. A huge work by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, founders of Sots Art, bridges the two hemispheres.
ESMoA’s artist-in-residence, sculptor and performance artist Taka Kagitomi, will perform spontaneously with the original entrance lettering to the London headquarters of now-defunct Lehman Brothers. The two feet high letters have all the makings of eternity, but history shows that eternity proves all future plans wrong.
ESMoA and The Wende Museum previously collaborated on Art
Experience 05: FAME, exploring the ambivalent soul of Los Angeles. By looking closer at an unusual juxtaposition of artworks and artifacts from different eras and geographies, ESMoA and The Wende Museum showed the multifarious foundations of memory and fame, questioning celebrity and what makes people famous.
Located on 208 Main Street in El Segundo, California, ESMoA opened in 2013. Artnet recently listed ESMoA as one of America’s Top Ten Private Contemporary Art Museums in America, and the museum’s exhibition platform has been lauded for architectural design and focus on environmental sustainability. Described as an “art laboratory,†it offers an active artist-in-residence program including a studio with on-site living quarters. The museum is the creation of Eva and Brian Sweeney who together have supported the arts through their Los Angeles-/Berlin-based Artlab21 Foundation with the purpose of fostering education and creativity through art and art appreciation.
The Wende Museum was founded by Justinian Jampol, a Los Angeles native and scholar of modern European history, to address the wholesale neglect and rampant destruction of Cold War material culture in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Named for the German word for “turning point†or “change,†The Wende Museum challenges and engages the public through experimental exhibitions and interdisciplinary programming inspired by its collection of artwork, artifacts, films and more, while illuminating the past and informing the present through creative collaborations with contemporary artists and designers.
For more information on PLAN, ESMoA, or The Wende Museum, please contact Andrea Schnoor Communications at aschnoor@andreaschnoor.com or 310.878.4812
