1 Exhibition preview MMK 1: A Tale of Two Worlds Experimental Latin American Art in Dialogue with the MMK Collection 1940s-1980s 25 November 2017 – 2 April 2018 In one of its largest exhibitions ever the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main is collaborating with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Moderno) in Argentina. The exhibition, A Tale of Two Worlds: Experimental Latin American Art in Dialogue with the MMK Collection 1940s-1980s, will be presented throughout the MMK 1 between 25 November 2017 and 2 April 2018, and at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires between 7 July and 14 October 2018. The exhibition, jointly curated by Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires Director Victoria Noorthoorn and Senior Curator Javier Villa, and MMK Curator Klaus Görner, brings the masterworks of the Frankfurt collection into fertile in-depth dialogue with key works of Latin American art. The exhibition will accommodate some 500 artworks from private and public collections by 100 artists and collectives from Latin America, the United States and Europe. A Tale of Two Worlds sets out to establish a dialogue between two distinct narratives in Western contemporary art over the five decades spanning the 1940s and the 1980s: the European-North American canon – as represented in the MMK Collection – and Latin American experimental art. The exhibition is structured as a stream of conversations, whereby topics relevant to the history of experimental art practices in Latin America are presented in dialogue with artworks from the MMK Collection. The project has been conceptualized and curated over the past year and a half between two cities – Buenos Aires and Frankfurt – and has a strong Southern perspective. Indeed, it marks the first time a European Museum collection has allowed itself to be re-examined by curators of Latin American art. The project is an answer to the call by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) on major museums in Germany to endow their collections with a more global perspective. For some years now the MMK’s exhibition programme and collection policy has opened up its view to non-European perspectives on international contemporary art and critically questioned the socio-political conditions of art in a globalized world. The invitation from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes was therefore timely. The interrelated perspectives of two continents and cultures represented in A Tale of Two Worlds present the MMK with a chance to see its own collection from a striking new angle. Although emerging from divergent political, economic and historical contexts, the art on show will reveal parallel trajectories, crossover points and contradictions. While the MMK collection from the 1960s and 1970s focuses on European and North American art, the period of Latin American art addressed in this exhibition is somewhat longer: it starts in 1944, the year of the first exhibition of the new Concrete Art movements in Argentina, and continues until the end of the military dictatorships in the late 1980s. Through the example of avant-garde artists 2 from Latin America, the USA and Europe the exhibition attempts to locate the precise tipping point in the transition from modern to contemporary art. It foregrounds various forces of change in order to illustrate this moment of transition, when modernist models collapsed. It focuses on moments of empathy, shared concerns and intellectual bonds between artists from different parts of the world, as well as moments that emerge as counterpoints or challenges, or as tensions between different historical experiences. Close collaboration between the Moderno and MMK curators is essential for the project, since both institutions are subjecting their pre-existent outlooks to a process of revision and allowing an alternate narrative to be told. This process consciously questions and reconsiders the history of art, their positioning as institutions and their collection practices. During the 1940s Concrete Art evolved to become the focal point of experimental art in Latin America. Concrete artists in Buenos Aires and Montevideo tried to go beyond representation and the traditional format of painting. Paintings with an irregular frame (a precursor of the ´shaped canvas´), that promote a new relationship with the surrounding architecture or articulated sculptures that add movement to the object starting from the action of the artist or spectator, became foundation stones in the shift to contemporary art. A wave of progressive thinking emerged in numerous cities across the continent, and the Latin American art scene underwent a potent upheaval. This was an avant-garde way of thinking that did not just involve a way of thinking about the artist’s role in society and art’s potential to transform it; it was a response to real contexts that more often than not were riddled with tension and conflict. The exhibition is therefore also intended to prompt a debate about the artists’ reactions to their different socio-political contexts. Latin America’s turbulent political past – decades of economic crises, colonialism, dictatorships, abuse of power, racial discrimination and censorship – has provided its great artists with a platform to react forcefully and articulate their world-views. This troubled history and the long artistic tradition of learning how to live with it has resulted in a mature, wise political art that does not mistake politically-charged gestures or statements for genuine art. Throughout this history – and specifically the five decades encompassed by the exhibition – the terms of the dialogue between European and Latin American practices have varied immensely. Earlier, during the first decades of the century (not covered by the exhibition), experimental art in Latin America first developed as a response to the European avant-gardes. With the advent of World War II artists stopped making educational trips to Europe. Instead they focused on their own origins and developed utopias that drew on intellectual exchanges between the two regions, but mostly on inquiries into each cultural hub’s intellectual circles. In a few cases artists working in Europe travelled to Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s, where they either took inspiration from the experimental practices developed there or found in the South a fertile ground to develop poetics whose reason to be had been lost in the devastation of war. Later, in the post-war period, when the experimental mind-set once again left its mark on many of the North’s practices, the dialogue became far richer and complex as artists travelled the world. They did so either out of intellectual interest or practical necessity or because of the political conditions in their countries of residence. Rather than opting for an encyclopaedic approach to tell the story of the passage from modern to contemporary art in Latin America – a sheer impossibility – this exhibition has chosen to open the conversation with the questions and issues posed by specific works in the MMK collection, and to 3 explore them from an eccentric viewpoint wherein each of the works becomes a pretext for telling a story of art, the vastness and complexity of which is still largely unknown. Both the exhibitions in Buenos Aires and Frankfurt am Main will be accompanied by a substantial programme of events and activities. Exhibition artists: Paul Almásy (HU/FR), Carmelo Arden Quin (UY), Arman (FR), Arte Destructivo (AR), Francis Bacon (IR), Artur Barrio (BR), Geraldo de Barros (BR), Lenora de Barros (BR), Lothar Baumgarten (DE), Thomas Bayrle (DE), Adolfo Bernal (CO), Joseph Beuys (DE), Arthur Bispo do Rosário (BR), Martín Blaszko (AR), Alighiero Boetti (IT), Oscar Bony and Pablo Suárez (AR), Marcel Broodthaers (BE), Teresa Burga (PE), Luis Camnitzer (AR), Augusto de Campos (BR), Antonio Caro (CO), Ricardo Carreira (AR), Ulises Carrión (MX), Flávio de Carvalho (BR), Manuel Casanueva and the Valparaíso School (CL), Willys de Castro (BR), John Chamberlain (US), Lygia Clark (BR), Walter de Maria (US), Juan Downey (CL), Marcel Duchamp (FR), El Techo de la Ballena [The Roof of the Whale] (VE), León Ferrari (AR), Lucio Fontana (IT/AR), Nicolás García Uriburu (AR), Gego (VE), Hermann Goepfert (DE), Mathias Goeritz (DE/MX), Beatriz González (CO), Karl Otto Götz (DE), Alberto Greco (AR), Otto Greis (DE), Victor Grippo (AR), Alberto Heredia (AR), Alfredo Hlito (AR), Jasper Johns (US), On Kawara (JP/US), Kenneth Kemble (AR), Yves Klein (FR), Gyula Kosice (AR), Heinz Kreutz (DE), David Lamelas (AR), Barry Le Va (US), Roy Lichtenstein (US), Raúl Lozza (AR), Anna Maria Maiolino (BR), Tomás Maldonado (AR), Leopoldo Maler (AR), Piero Manzoni (IT), Liliana Maresca (AR), Cildo Meireles (BR), Juan N. Melé (AR), Ana Mendieta (CU/US), Manolo Millares (ES), Marta Minujín (AR), Franz Mon (DE), Bruce Nauman (US), Luis Felipe Noé (AR), Kenneth C. Noland (US), Hélio Oiticica (BR), Claes Oldenburg (SE/US), Margarita Paksa (AR), Blinky Palermo (DE), Lygia Pape (BR), Luis Pazos (AR), Liliana Porter (AR), Charlotte Posenenske (DE), Lidy Prati (AR), Juan del Prete (AR), Alejandro Puente (AR), Gerhard Richter (DE), Albert Georg Riethausen (DE), Peter Roehr (DE), Lotty Rosenfeld (CL), Rhod Rothfuss (UY), Edward Ruscha (US), Fred Sandback (US), Rubén Santantonín (AR), Mira Schendel (BR), Grete Stern (DE/AR), Cy Twombly (US), Ben Vautier (IT/FR), Edgardo Antonio Vigo (AR), Franz Erhard Walther (DE), Andy Warhol (US), Hildegard Weber (DE), Yente (AR). Both exhibitions will be funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) as part of its ‘Global Museum’ programme. Press conference: Thursday, 23 November 2017, 11 a.m. Opening: Friday, 24 November 2017, 8 p.m. Press enquiries: Christina Henneke, Daniela Denninger, Telephone +49 69 212 37761, [email protected] .