Antoni Tąpies: The Resources of Rhetoric Opens at Dia:Beacon
May 16-October 19, 2009
* Please note the museum will be closed May 17th for Dia's Spring Benefit *
Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY 12508
845 440 0100 www.diaart.org
Dia and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, will inaugurate a series of institutional exchanges with a presentation of works by Antoni Tąpies at Dia:Beacon. Whereas Modernist painting was supposed to be anti-narrative, Tąpies sought the contrary: his narrative art exploits the resources of rhetoric. This exhibition invites a reconsideration of the contribution of this venerable Spanish artist by recontextualizing his work in relation to Dia's collection of American and German art of the Sixties and Seventies.
Co-organized by the State Corporation for Spanish Culture Action Abroad
Antoni Tąpies was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1923 into a family of booksellers and Catalan nationalist politicians. During protracted periods of illness in his adolescence, he began drawing and developing a serious interest in literature. After abandoning his studies of law at Barcelona University in 1944, he began to work as an artist, establishing his studio in Barcelona. Tąpies first exhibited his work in the late 1940s, in Barcelona. He had his first solo exhibition in 1950 at Galeries Laietanes, Barcelona, and his first New York solo exhibition in 1953 at Martha Jackson Gallery. He first traveled abroad, to Paris, in 1951, where he met Picasso, and in 1953 he visited New York, where he met Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, Robert Motherwell, and Hans Hoffman. In 1984, he established the Fundacio Antoni Tąpies in Barcelona.
Retrospective surveys of his work have been presented at venues including the Kestner-Geselschaft, Hannover, Germany (1962); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1962); the Kunsthaus Zurich (1962); the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna (1968); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1973); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1977); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1980); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (1989); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2000). In 1993, Tąpies and Cristina Iglesias represented Spain at the 45th Venice Biennale. Tąpies lives and works in Barcelona.
Funding
Antoni Tąpies: The Resources of Rhetoric is made possible in part through the generosity of the State Corporation for Spanish Cultural Action Abroad (SEACEX) and the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and Culture, and PaceWildenstein.
Image: Antoni Tąpies, L'escala (The Ladder), 1974. Mixed media on wood, 98 3/8 x 118 inches (250 x 300 cm). Fundación Telefónica, en depósito en el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofķa. © Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofķa.
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Please note Dia:Beacon will be closed on Sunday, May 17, 2009 for the annual Spring Benefit. Purchase tickets here.
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Artists on Artists Lecture Series, Nancy Davenport on On Kawara
 
Monday, May 18, 2009, 6:30pm
Dia Art Foundation
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
212 989 5566 www.diaart.org
Admission for the lecture is $6 general; $3 for students, seniors, and Dia members. For reservations call 212 293 5583 or artistsonartists@diaart.org.
Nancy Davenport, who was born in 1965 in Vancouver, lives and works in New York. Her recent solo shows include exhibitions at DHC/Art Fondation pour l'art Contemporain, Montréal (2008); Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York (2008); and MIT List Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2004).
On Kawara, Kawara's first exhibitions include the first Nippon Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1953, and at the Takemiya and Hibiya galleries the following year. He began traveling throughout the world in 1959, then settled in 1965 in New York City, where he has been an intermittent resident ever since. His work was exhibited at New York's Dwan Gallery in 1967, and his one-person exhibition "One Million Years" was shown in Düsseldorf, Paris, and Milan in 1971. Kawara's work was included in Documentas 5 (1972), 7 (1982), and 11 (2002), in Kassel, and in the Tokyo Biennale (1970), the Kyoto Biennale (1976), and the Venice Biennale (1976). He won the Carnegie Prize in 1991 and the Kunstpreis Aachen the following year. In 1993, Dia held the yearlong exhibition "One Thousand Days, One Million Years," for which Kawara installed paintings from the Today Series that had been executed in New York City. The exhibition also included his book work One Million Years (Past), and a sound work, One Million Years (Future).
Funding
Made possible by a grant from Art for Art's Sake, New York, the SEA Foundation, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, this series, established in 2001, highlights the work of contemporary artists from the perspective of their colleagues and peers, and focuses on artists in Dia's collection and exhibition programs.
Image: (left) Nancy Davenport, Classroom #2, 2004. C-print, 83cm x 63cm. Courtesy the artist and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York. (right) On Kawara, JUNE 16, 1966, 1966. From the Today Series, 1966-present. Dia Art Foundation; Lannan Foundation, long-term loan; collection of the artist. Photo: Bill Jacobson.
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Artists' Projects Web Launch, Dorit Margreiter, alphabeth
Reception May 19, 2009, 6pm to 8pm
Remarks at 7pm by the artist and Dia curator at large Lynne Cooke
www.diaart.org/margreiter
Dia Art Foundation
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
212 989 5566 www.diaart.org
Dorit Margreiter will present two animations utilizing the zentrum typeface which she designed in 2005 to document the signage of Bruehlzentrum, a modernist housing project in Leipzig, Germany. Featuring the letters broken down into their modular pieces, one animation will present all of the characters of the typeface, while the other will channel information from Dia's press office, transforming it from information to something more akin to abstraction.
Dorit Margreiter was born in 1967 in Vienna, graduated from the Vienna University of Applied Arts, and in 2001 was a MAK Center Artist in Residence in Los Angeles. She currently teaches video and video installation at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Her work has received several awards, including the renowned Otto Mauer Prize. Margreiter, together with Elke Krystufek, and Lois and Franziska Weinberger, was invited to create the Austrian contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale of Art.
Artists' Projects for the Web
Dia initiated a series of web-based works in early 1995, becoming one of the first arts organizations to foster the use of the world wide web as an artistic and conceptual medium. Dia's collection of web projects currently numbers twenty-eight. Previous projects include Barbara Bloom's Half Empty Half Full (2008); Rosa Barba's Vertiginous Mapping (2008); Ezra Johnson's Wrestling with the Blob Beast (2008); Wilfredo Prieto's A Moment of Silence (2007); Maja Bajevic's I Wish I was Born in a Hollywood Movie (2006); Dorothy Cross's Foxglove: digitalis purpurea (2005); Ana Torfs' Approximations/Contradictions (2004); Allen Ruppersberg's The New Five Foot Shelf (2004); Glenn Ligon's Annotations (2003); Shimabuku's Moon Rabbit (2001); Stephen Vitiello's Tetrasomia (2000); Diller + Scofidio's Refresh (1998); and Komar and Melamid's The Most Wanted Paintings (1995), among others. All may be visited at Dia's website, www.diaart.org.
Funding
Funding for this project has been provided the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Beverages for the launch event compliments Brooklyn Brewery.
Image: Dorit Margreiter, alphabeth, 2009. Dia's Artists' Projects for the Web. www.diaart.org/margreiter
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Philippe Vergne, director, Dia Art Foundation, will lecture on Andy Warhol
Saturday, May 30, 2009, 1pm
Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY 12508
845 440 0100 www.diaart.org
Free with museum admission. For reservations call 845 440 0100 x44 or gallerytalks@diaart.org.
Philippe Vergne was appointed director of Dia Art Foundation in 2008. As director, Vergne oversees all aspects of the institution's operations and programming, and serves as an ex-officio member of Dia's Board of Trustees and a member of the board of the Andy Warhol Museum. Previously, Vergne was Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, where he organized over 25 international exhibitions; coordinated artist residencies; and oversaw the collection exhibitions which inaugurated the Walker's expanded facility in 2005. In 2008, he organized Kara Walker: My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love which was awarded the "Best Monograph Museum Show Nationally" by the International Association of Art Critics and in 2006 he co-curated the Whitney Biennial of American Art in New York. From 1994 to 1997 Vergne was director of the Musée d'Art Contemporain (MAC), Marseille, and in 2004 he was appointed Director of the Franēois Pinault Foundation and Museum in Paris.
Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia. He studied pictorial design at the city's Carnegie Institute of Technology, then moved to New York City upon graduation. Relinquishing a successful and acclaimed career as a commercial illustrator in New York in the 1950s, he began exhibiting paintings with silkscreened Pop imagery in 1962. In 1963 he began to produce films and other projects, including Interview magazine, which was begun in 1969. Retrospectives of his work have been organized by the Pasadena Art Museum (1970), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989), and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2002). Shadows (1979) was first exhibited at Heiner Friedrich's gallery at 393 West Broadway, New York City, in January 1979, and most recently at Dia in 1998-99. Dia's other exhibitions of Warhol's work include "Andy Warhol: Disaster Paintings, 1963" (1986), "Andy Warhol: Hand-Painted Images, 1960-62" (1987), and "Andy Warhol: Skulls" (1987-88). Warhol died in 1987. In 1994, Dia collaborated with the Carnegie Institute and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to open the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Gallery Talks at Dia:Beacon is a series that takes place the last Saturday of every month at 1pm and is free with museum admission. Focused on the work of the artists in Dia's collection, the one-hour presentations are given by curators, art historians, and writers, and take place in museum's galleries.
Image: Andy Warhol, Shadows, 1978-79. Installation at Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY. Collection Dia Art Foundation.Photo: Bill Jacobson.
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