Press Release

Brussels • October 2016 Guggenheim Full Abstraction

ING Art Center Place Royale 6 – 1000 Brussels 19 October 2016 – 12 February 2017

Opening 19 October 2016, ING Art Center in Brussels will present an impressive set of works from the Collection in and the Solomon Guggenheim Collection in New York. Many of these are masterpieces representing the American and European Post- War Abstract Expressionist streams, dating from the 40’s to the 60’s. The exhibition will present a number of works realised by artists shown for the first time ever in Brussels.

The exhibition will be a narrative that reconstructs relationships and ties across the Atlantic through the museums of two American collectors—Peggy Guggenheim and Solomon R. Guggenheim. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, associate curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, the exhibition – a joint venture of the ING Art Center and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York – offers visitors an exceptional opportunity to view parts of the collections of the museums of both Solomon and his niece Peggy together through the work of some of the greatest figures in 20th century art.

Opening with masterpieces by such major artists as Duchamp and Max Ernst, the exhibition goes on to explore post-war developments on both sides of the Atlantic with the Informalism of European masters such as Alberto Burri, Emilio Vedova, Jean Dubuffet and Lucio Fontana, and with work by leading figures on the American art scene from the 1940s to the 1960s, through a large selection of masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Alexander Calder with the so-called ‘mobiles and stabiles’, alongside work by Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and others.

The and sculptures from the Guggenheim Collections in New York and Venice, as well as from a small number of other museums and private collections, offer the visitor a unique opportunity to admire and compare some of the great masterpieces which played a crucial role in defining the very concept of post-war 20th Century art.

ART FROM THE GUGGENHEIM COLLECTIONS

The exhibition will be a testament to the importance of the two collections and confirms the crucial role played by Peggy and Solomon Guggenheim in the history of 20th century art. On the one hand, it will feature Solomon Robert Guggenheim (1861– 1949). Under the guiding hand of German painter and Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, who was to become the first director of the Guggenheim in New York, he opened a Museum of Non-Objective in 1939 based on the purist notion of abstraction as an absence of figures, and on Kandinsky's art in particular. Four years later he commissioned the innovative and visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design the famous museum on Fifth Avenue that was to open in 1959.

On the other hand, it will feature Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), who opted for more transversal collecting open to a variety of movements of her time. Her commitment to contemporary art began when she was almost forty years of age. Following the advice of historian and critic Herbert Read and of friends such as Marcel Duchamp, Howard Putzel and Nellie van Doesburg, she focused on European movements such as Cubism and Surrealism, in addition to the various abstract avant-garde movements. Her collection was eventually to include works of American Abstract Expressionism by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, which she showed in New York over the course of the short but intense and productive period during which she operated her Art of This Century Gallery (1942–47), prior to opening her museum in the Palazzo Venier in Venice in 1951.

When Solomon died in 1949, his New York museum was named after him and, under its new director James Johnson Sweeney, it expanded its collecting beyond abstraction and its sources, focusing in particular on post-war European and American works, thus becoming a truly comprehensive museum of modern and contemporary art. Solomon's original collection was to grow over the years, acquiring other collections such as the legacy of Karl Nierendorf (1948), the Justin K. Thannhauser collection (1976), the collection of Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (1990–92), major donations from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation (1992) and the Bohen Foundation (2001), and, most recently, eighty works of postwar American and European art (2012), including several masterpieces from the collection of Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof. A

crucial moment in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s internationalisation was marked by Peggy Guggenheim's donation of her collection in Venice to the Foundation in 1976.

THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition explores several artistic themes.

The ING Art Center offers an introduction to the two great collectors of the Guggenheim family: Peggy, with the Art of This Century Gallery in New York, and Solomon, with the famous Frank Lloyd Wright museum. A major timeline documented with archive pictures, documents, film fragments, etc. will give the visitors the chance to discover the impact of these two main collectors for 20th Century art both in the US and in Europe.

The presentation of artworks starts with a selection highlighting Peggy's career as a collector and her affinity for Surrealism. The two are surrounded by an important selection of artists who based their practice on surrealism and paved the way to abstraction, such as Roberto Matta, who introduced William Baziotes and Clyfford Still to an expressionist abstraction.

The next room is devoted to Jackson Pollock and his astonishingly original developments in painting. Such a selection of art pieces is a first in Belgium.

The major exhibition hall focuses on the post-war Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffmann, Sam Francis and on pictorial trends that were coming to maturity in the States during the same years as Colour Field Painting in the 50s. Major emphasis is given to the work of Mark Rothko, whose potential Peggy recognised early, and to the works of Adolf Gottlieb, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell and others. A large selection of Calder's mobiles, some suspended from the ceiling, will complete the set.

The major works of European artists from this same period have a very particular effect when hanging together in groups. Here we highlight very important works by Lucio Fontana, Jean Dubuffet, and Alberto Burri.

The exhibition concludes with artistic research in the United States in 60s Post Painterly Abstraction or so-called Colour Field Painting. Major works from Cy Twombly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly and others will constitute a major ensemble for the last part of the exhibition in order to familiarise visitors with important American art works from the generation that followed.

The exhibition is organised by the ING Art Center and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York and Venice, with the recognition of both the US and Italian Embassies in Belgium.

Press Contacts

Team Gracious: Isabelle Peemans & Lia Delpierre, [email protected], +32.2.346.60.59 ING Belgium: Anne-Catherine Zoller, [email protected], +32.2.547.24.84

Practical details

Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am - 6 pm, including holiday as well as on Monday 31/10/2016, 26/12/2016 and 2/01/2017. Wednesday late evening open until 9 pm

ING Art Center Mont des Arts Place Royale, 6 1000 Brussels

Reservation : ing.be/art

Rates

Tickets Charges via Ticket Online Charges at the desk Adults 10 € 12 € ING customers 5 € 7 € Senior citizens 6 € 9 € Children (<13 years) accompanied Free of charge Free of charge by an adult Students (<26 years) Free of charge 4 € Teaching staff (free on Wednesdays) 5 € 8 € Disabled Free of charge Free of charge Job-seekers Free of charge Free of charge