Overview
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of important work by Marcel Broodthaers which opens on September 12th and continues through November 1st. Marcel Broodthaers' 1977 exhibition inaugurated the Marian Goodman Gallery.
Born in Brussels in 1924, Marcel Broodthaers career as a visual artist lasted only twelve years during which time he created a richly varied and elusive body of work which explored the nature of language and the many nuances and meaning of art itself. He died in Cologne in 1976.
Marcel Broodthaers
September 12, 1997 - November 1, 1997
Opening Reception: Friday, September 12, 6-8 pm
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of important work by Marcel Broodthaers which opens on September 12th and continues through November 1st. Marcel Broodthaers' 1977 exhibition inaugurated the Marian Goodman Gallery.
Born in Brussels in 1924, Marcel Broodthaers career as a visual artist lasted only twelve years during which time he created a richly varied and elusive body of work which explored the nature of language and the many nuances and meaning of art itself. He died in Cologne in 1976.
Marcel Broodthaers' early objects were partially a response to American Pop Art which he first saw in Paris in the spring of 1963. At that time he wrote about several American Pop Artists in the article titled "Gare au défi!" ("Beware the challenge!") wherein he criticized such artists as Jim Dine and George Segal amongst others. And yet when in July of 1964, Marcel Broodthaers had his first-one-man exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels, he wrote a telling statement that served as an announcement for the exhibition. It indicated a perverse debt to the Pop artists whom he had publically criticized:
"I too, wondered if I couldn't sell something and succeed in life. For quite a while I had been good for nothing. I am forty years old. The idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind, and I set to work at once."
His skepticism would preoccupy him in later works. In fact, the culmination was a series of fictional museum installations that he created beginning in 1968, with the Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles which was exhibited at the now famous Documenta V in 1972, as well as in Documenta X currently on view in Kassel. It was also exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery from October 6th through November 25th, 1995.
Marcel Broodthaers originally wrote a one-page statement that accompanied the Musée d' Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Sections Art Moderne et Publicité in the form of a handout which was placed in a pile on the first vitrine in the room. In it, he ponders the significance of museums and institutions within our culture. He writes:
"This museum is a fiction. In one moment it plays the role of a political parody of artistic events, in another that of an artistic parody of political events which is in fact what official museums and institutions like documenta do as well. With the one difference that a fiction enables you to grasp both reality and at the same time those things that reality hides."
Marcel Broodthaers created a unique artistic legacy via his enigmatic films, writings, lectures and visual artworks. In addition to the posthumous exhibitions mentioned previously, Marcel Broodthaers exhibitions with accompanying catalogues have also been mounted by among others, the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (1992), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1989), the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1988) and the Tate Gallery, London (1980). Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs edited by Benjamin H.B. Buchloh (October Books/MIT Press, 1987) includes critical essays and a complete bibliography.
Please join us for an opening celebration on Friday September 12th, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
