Opening at the Guggenheim Bilbao next week is the exhibition Riotous Baroque: from Cattelan to Zurbarán – Tributes to Precarious Reality curated by Bice Curiger and arriving from a run at the Kunsthaus Zürich. The exhibition, according to the press release on the Guggenheim website (see here for the full, very illuminating, text: http://prensa.guggenheim-bilbao.es/src/uploads/2013/06/Dossier-Barroco_EN.pdf) aims to initiate a ‘dialogue between 17th century artworks and contemporary pieces in an attempt to extricate the concept of the Baroque from its conventional stylistic pigeonhole.’
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| Nicolas Poussin, Satyrs Taking Sleeping Venus by Surprise, ca. 1625 (detail). Oil on canvas, 77 × 100 cm. Photo © Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland |
As I am currently in Bilbao for the month of June and first week in July, I shall be posting a series of responses to the exhibition that focus on how Classical myth, literature and culture are caught-up in the dynamic between the Baroque and the Contemporary and especially how this kind of exhibition can offer a productive, novel and irreverent model by which the dynamic between Classical Antiquity and Contemporary Art can be explored and understood.
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| Urs Fischer Noisette, 2009 Collection of Anne Faggionato, Monaco © Urs Fischer |