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NEW MUSEUM TO PRESENT A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE OF HANS HAACKE, THE FIRST US SURVEY OF THE ARTIST’S WORK IN OVER THIRTY YEARS
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New York, NY...The New Museum is pleased to present the first major US survey of Hans Haacke in over thirty years, on view throughout the Museum’s main galleries from October 24, 2019, to January 26, 2020. “Hans Haacke: All Connected” will bring together more than thirty works from across the artist’s career, from the 1960s to the present. This exhibition will be the first American museum survey of work by the highly influential artist since the New Museum presented the exhibition “Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business” in 1986.
For six decades, Haacke has been a pioneer in kinetic art, environmental art, Conceptual art, and institutional critique. This retrospective will bring together a wide range of works, focusing in particular on how Haacke expanded the parameters of his practice to encompass the social, political, and economic structures in which art is produced, circulated, and displayed. The exhibition will include a number of Haacke’s rarely seen kinetic works, environmental sculptures, and visitor polls from the late 1960s and early ’70s, all of which were central to discussions around systems aesthetics in art during that period. It will also feature works from the 1970s and ’80s that address the corporate sponsorship of major art institutions and political interference, along with others from the same period that investigate the provenance of artworks and museum collections, and more recent works that consider the intersection of global capitalism, nationalism, and humanitarian crises around the world.
Among the works on view in the Museum’s Second Floor galleries, Large Condensation Cube (1963–67) comprises a sealed acrylic box in which light, air temperature, and other factors influence the pattern of water droplets on its interior walls as they slowly cycle through processes of evaporation and condensation. Other pieces on this floor, such as Sphere in Oblique Air Jet (1964/2011) and the dynamic Wide White Flow (1967/2008), a billowing field of white silk animated by rotating fans, link Haacke’s early experiments in physical phenomena to his later investigations of social and economic systems. Also on view will be Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 and Gallery-Goers’ Residence Profile, Part 2 (1969 and 1970), which surveyed and mapped New York’s gallery-going public of the late 1960s; the noted earthwork Grass Grows (1967–69); and High Voltage Discharge Traveling (1968), a twenty-two-foot-long glass pipe carrying an electric current.
The Museum’s Third Floor galleries will feature works such as Oil Painting: Homage to Marcel Broodthaers (Oelgemaelde, Hommage à Marcel Broodthaers) (1982), for which Haacke installed a gilt-framed portrait of Ronald Reagan across from a photomural of antinuclear activists, with a red carpet and velvet stanchion between them—auguring the increasing links between art, politics, image, and spectacle. On Social Grease (1975), a series of six photo-engraved plaques, gathers quotations from prominent American political and business leaders on the motivations behind corporate involvement in the arts. Haacke would further investigate the ethically complicated relationships between art and business in works like A Breed Apart (1978) and MetroMobiltan (1985), both of which address the role of multinational corporations in supporting art and repressive regimes such as South Africa’s apartheid government. These will be joined by Seurat’s “Les Poseuses” (small version), 1888–1975 (1975), a full-size color reproduction of Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses [The Models] (1888) accompanied by fourteen text panels that lay out the painting’s provenance, presenting biographical information on each of its successive owners—including their economic circumstances and political affiliations—as well as acquisition data, with sales and purchasing prices when available.
The exhibition will also serve as the New York premiere of Haacke’s sculpture Gift Horse (2014), a bronze sculpture of a horse’s skeleton adorned with an LED ribbon streaming stock prices in real time, which the artist originally created for London’s Fourth Plinth Program. On view on the Museum’s Fourth Floor, Gift Horse will be accompanied by Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), a canonical piece of Conceptual art that was at the center of the Guggenheim’s cancelled Haacke retrospective in 1971.
The Fifth Floor of the Museum will include a new edition of one of Haacke’s signature visitor polls, as well as documentation and materials from some of his celebrated earlier visitor surveys: MoMA Poll (1970), created for the Museum of Modern Art’s famed “Information” exhibition, and Documenta-Besucherprofil [Documenta Visitors’ Profile] (1972), a survey produced for the fifth edition of documenta, one of the art world’s most important international exhibitions.
This exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by the New Museum and Phaidon Press, including contributions from Larry Abramson, Tania Bruguera, Daniel Buren, Jeremy Deller, Sam Durant, Maria Eichhorn, Olafur Eliasson, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Sharon Hayes, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, Pamela M. Lee, Park McArthur, Walid Raad, Gloria Sutton, and John A. Tyson, along with Hans Haacke in conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.
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ABOUT NEW MUSEUM
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
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SUPPORT FOR “HANS HAACKE: ALL CONNECTED”
Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the International Leadership Council of the New Museum.
This exhibition is sponsored by the Year of German-American Friendship, initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut.
Generous support is provided by Ken Kuchin and Tyler Morgan, the Robert Lehman Foundation, and Lila Silverman.
Support for the accompanying publication has been provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.
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Image: Hans Haacke, Gift Horse, 2014. Bronze with black patina and wax finish, stainless steel fasteners and supports, and 1/4 in (5 mm) flexible LED display with stainless steel armature and polycarbonate face, 183 × 169 × 65 in (464.8 × 429.3 × 165.1 cm). Commissioned by the Mayor of London’s Fourth Plinth Program. Installation view: Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, London, 2015. Photo: Gautier Deblonde
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