(New York, May 24th, 2019) To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's building, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents the first ever artist-curated exhibition, Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection.
The exhibition opens on May 24th, 2019, and will be on view through January 12th, 2020.
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Installation view of Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Curated by six contemporary artists, all of whom have shaped the Guggenheim's history with their own pivotal solo shows—Cai Guo-Qiang, Paul Chan, Jenny Holzer, Julie Mehretu, Richard Prince, and Carrie Mae Weems—this full rotunda presentation brings together collection highlights and rarely seen works from the turn of the 20th century through 1980. Working with Artistic Director Nancy Spector and the museum's curators and conservators, these artists-curators have probed the Guggenheim collection in storage, encountering renowned masterpieces while also bringing to light singular contributions by lesser-known artists.
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Cai viewing landscape paintings by Kandinsky in the Guggenheim collection
Photo by Hong Hong Wu
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Cai viewing paintings by Rothko in the Guggenheim Collection
Photo by Xinran Yuan
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Cai viewing paintings by Chagall in the Guggenheim Collection
Photo by Hong Hong Wu
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The curatorial approaches of the six presentations vary greatly, ranging from sociopolitical issues such as race, sexuality, identity, and immigration, to reflections upon the formal explorations of abstraction in relation to museum collections, the art system, and the canon of art history itself. Artistic License celebrates over 300 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations, some of which have never before been exhibited.
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Installation view of Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Cai Guo-Qiang: Non-Brand 非品牌
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Rotunda Level 1 and High Gallery
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Ever-present throughout his career, Cai Guo-Qiang views the Guggenheim as nothing less than an “old lover." In 1996, the museum presented Cai’s major installation Cry Dragon/Cry Wolf: The Ark of Genghis Khan at the inaugural Hugo Boss Prize exhibition, introducing Cai Guo-Qiang to New York. In 2006, Deutsche Guggenheim held Cai’s solo exhibition Head On, followed by the retrospective I Want to Believe at the New York and Bilbao Guggenheim Museums (2008 and 2009, respectively), breaking attendance records for a solo exhibition held by a visual artist.
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Installation view of Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008
Photo by David Heald
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For this exhibition, Cai was thrilled to discover among the Guggenheim’s collection a wide array of little-known works by prominent 20th century abstract painters—Wassily Kandinsky’s landscapes, Franz Kline’s self-portrait, Piet Mondrian’s chrysanthemums, and so on. He calls his presentation Non-Brand (非品牌), in reference to his idea that these figurative works lack the “brand,” or the sought-after, recognizable style associated with a famous artist.
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Left: Wassily Kandinsky, Pond in the Park, ca.1906
Right: Wassily Kandinsky, Munich, ca. 1901-02
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Left: Piet Mondrian, Chrysanthemum, 1908-09
Right: Piet Mondrian, Blue Chrysanthemum, early 1920s
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Left：Mark Rothko, Untitled (Still-Life with Rope, Hammer and Trowel), ca. 1937;
Right：Cai Guo-Qiang Collection, Mark Rothko, Brighton Beach, ca. mid 1930s
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Over 80 works from 30 artists—renowned and the lesser known alike—are hung according to “Salon-style” in the High Gallery. Tossing in a few of his own early figurative works into the spotlight, Cai hopes for a chance to “hang out with the big names.”
Cai Guo-Qiang also embarked on a new series of gunpowder paintings on glass which cite iconic canvases that form the Guggenheim collection’s “brand.” These four works line the walls of the first level rotunda, citing works by Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Yves Klein.
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Installation view of Cai Guo-Qiang: Non-Brand 非品牌
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Non-Brand 非品牌 confronts the issue of “brand” head on—a fundamental question for both art institutions and artists alike. The New York Guggenheim, with its landmark architecture, as well as its outposts in Venice, Bilbao, Abu Dhabi, are they not quintessential examples of an exceptional “brand” in the business of contemporary art?
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Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, Peggy Guggenheim Collection Venice,
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
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In our contemporary art world, artists have created exemplary instances of images transformed in service of a recognizable style, namely brands, which amount to easily accepted and widely admired representatives of art history. The culture industry—which includes the art market and art museums—flourish, and as a result, artworks and other cultural commodities move freely in the global capitalist system. The auction result seems to represent the value of an artwork. Cai observes, “Art history is written around the golden careers and heartening stories of certain artists who are championed by museums and galleries around the world as icons of various styles, periods, or movements. Functioning like a trademark, the work of these artists unwittingly fulfills the expectations of cultural tourism.”
Before being recognized as inventors of the trademark styles of their eras, most pioneering artists went through lengthy explorations, the testaments of which are buried in museum coffers. The common starting points of these explorations are realism and figuration; the result is a world seemingly captured through the eyes of a newborn child. In artists’ childlike innocence, one can perceive an unyielding love of painting and a shared “primordial complex,” or fixation on unprocessed, unedited fundamentals that manifest as an art that transcends both artistic movements and the pursuit of a trademark style. And yet, more often than not, an artist's "immature" works remain unrecognized. In Non-Brand 非品牌, the legends hang amidst the unsung, in a Salon-style grid without distinction in era nor class. Cai notes that, in a sense, these paintings reflect the essence of the Guggenheim's collection.
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Installation view of Cai Guo-Qiang: Non-Brand 非品牌
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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In the foreword to the exhibition, Cai writes: “On the difficult path to procuring their place in art history, artists make rational decisions to create methodologies. Delving into their sensibilities to unearth new potentials, they eventually arrive at a mature style characterized by an established, recognizable trademark. Some artists express sentiments toward the natural world, which manifested in their early work and is carried into their mature stages. Abiding by their own methodological frameworks, these artists are nevertheless free of self-imposed constraints. This is a rebellion against the life path regulated by social expectations. As for the rebels of art history, who are first and foremost anxious, such fright and unease are fundamental to their defiance. Yet upon establishing sophisticated systems of rules, many inevitably lose this invaluable sensibility.”
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Installation view of Cai Guo-Qiang: Non-Brand 非品牌
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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While Cai has been experimenting with exploding gunpowder on glass since 2018, Artistic License will be the first exhibition of these works to the public.
“Gunpowder works on glass and mirror appear as specters of a few modernist masterpieces,” the artist noted. “It is perhaps a witticism of my own trademark style, the artists, and the art ecosystem, for the amusement of the audience.”
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Cai Guo-Qiang during the creation of gunpowder painting Non-Brand 非品牌, 2019
Photos by Sang Luo
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More Exhibtion Information
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Rotunda Level 2
Paul Chan: Sex, Water, Salvation, or What Is a Bather? investigates the theme of bathers in Western art history and attendant ideas about water, relationships between pleasure and the human body, and exile in the canon of twentieth-century art.
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Installation view of Paul Chan: Sex, Water, Salvation, or What Is a Bather?
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Rotunda Level 3
Richard Prince: Four Paintings Looking Right investigates the uncannily coherent formal qualities of the museum's international holdings of abstract painting and sculpture from the 1940s and '50s, ultimately questioning how taste is formed.
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Installation view of Richard Prince: Four Paintings Looking Right
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Rotunda Level 4
Julie Mehretu: Cry Gold and See Black reflects on how trauma, displacement, and anxiety in the decades after World War II found expression across cultural boundaries and in a wide range of art.
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Installation view of Julie Mehretu: Cry Gold and See Black
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Rotunda Level 5
Carrie Mae Weems: What Could Have Been focuses on the formal and metaphoric resonances of a strictly black-and-white palette across different decades, mediums, and genres, and as a conduit to expose inherent biases of museum collections focused on the Western art-historical canon.
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Installation view of Carrie Mae Weems: What Could Have Been
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Rotunda Level 6
Jenny Holzer: Good Artists illuminates gender disparity and the exclusion of women from the art-historical canon.
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Installation view of Jenny Holzer: Good Artists
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2019. Photo by Wen-You Cai
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Artistic License is organized with the artists by Nancy Spector, Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, supported by Ylinka Barotto, Assistant Curator, with Tracey Bashkoff, Director of Collections and Senior Curator, and Joan Young, Director, Curatorial Affairs.
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Reflections on Artistic License: Cai Guo-Qiang
Artist Talk and Screening of Cai Guo-Qiang’s documentary, October: The Unrealized Century, 2018
Directed by Shanshan Xia, Produced by 33 Studio
Time: June 18th, 2019, 6:30-8:00pm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
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Cai Studio
Website: www.caiguoqiang.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/cgqstudio/
Instagram: @Caistudio
Guggenheim Museum
Website：https://www.guggenheim.org/
Instagram: @Guggenheim
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