| Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico
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Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico explored the influence of de Chirico’s distinctive vision on Guston, and investigated the two artists’ shared motifs, subjects, and affinities. Although the Greek-born, Italian de Chirico (1888-1978) and the American Philip Guston (1913-1980) were from different generations and painted in different artistic environments, Guston closely followed de Chirico’s work throughout his life. In the 1930s, Guston grew up in Los Angeles and became familiar with de Chirico through his mentor Lorser Feitelson, through reproductions in art magazines, and then through a life-changing visit to the collection of Walter and Louis Arensberg in the Hollywood Hills, where he recalled "I was mostly struck by de Chirico. They hit me very hard. In fact it was seeing these paintings by de Chirico. . . it’s what made me resolve to be, want to be a painter. I felt as if I had come home." Later, Guston visited the older artist’s studio during a 1948-49 Prix de Rome, and attended exhibitions on de Chirico from the 1930s to the late 1970s. Featuring works from the early and late careers of both artists, Enigma Variations examines Guston’s transformation of de Chirico’s visual vocabulary - antique statues, mannequins, gladiators, clocks, and canvas stretchers - through his own unique and inimitable style. Guston’s interest in de Chirico’s imagery went hand in hand with a heartfelt admiration for the example the older artist set as an artist. De Chirico had weathered a barrage of criticism after his early success with his Metaphysical paintings from the 1910s, but he nonetheless embraced radical change and painted in a variety of styles while serially revisiting his own earlier motifs for the next 50 years. Guston too made a major stylistic shift - away from the formal purity of abstract expressionism from the 1940s and 1950s - which had won him great acclaim - to raw, controversial figurative paintings at the end of the 1960s - which were initially harshly reviewed. Enigma Variations featured rarely seen late works by de Chirico about which Guston remained an outspoken champion, always inspired and delighted by de Chirico’s "capacity to surprise." Flying in the face of critical opinion, both Guston and de Chirico sought to reinvigorate modern painting throughout their careers. Enigma Variations investgated the specific parallels and points of intersection in their work and ideas, offering a unique lens through which to see and understand the work of these two twentieth-century masters. |
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The first solo museum exhibition of Santa Monica-based artist Miriam Wosk, Euphoria featured three large-scale paintings that were deeply encrusted with a glorious profusion of pearls, glitter, crystals, starfish, collage, and paint. The works resonated palpably with the energy of counterpoints—intuition balanced against craft, physicality in conversation with spirituality, and precision coupled with abandon. These multi-layered paintings were abundantly populated with extraterrestrial flowers, otherworldly vegetation, and cosmological crystalline creatures. Combining pictorial elegance with audacious excess, Wosk explored a fantastical, primordial universe born of pouring, painting, airbrushing, gluing, embedding, and coating in a devotional, mantra-like repetition. Miriam Wosk work has exhibited in numerous local and national venues. Her art is in a wide range of public and private collections. |
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The exhibition featured Mark Dutcher's paintings that grappled with questions related to the universal human issues of loss and death. His exploration was articulated through an intricate visual vocabulary developed over many years. Gone reflected Dutcher's response to Julia Morgan's Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, California. This columbarium, a public display and storage structure for cremation ashes, held niches filled with urns, as well as flowers and numerous idiosyncratic personal keepsakes to memorialize the dead. Like the columbarium itself, Dutcher's paintings were compartmentalized. Each cubicle richly decorated with objects that refer to the passage of time and inspire individual and communal narrative—vases, hour glasses, candles, floral tributes, rag rugs, trophies, beer bottles, locks, and keys. Dutcher’s scenes were inhabited by crudely rendered figures painted in a thick and colorful impasto. Sometimes clearly represented and sometimes abstracted to the brink of recognition, his objects took on a charged iconic significance—mandala-like braided rag rugs, pinwheel collaged elements, and stacked hour glass forms all suggest animated portals that lead to another world. At once celebratory and somber, Dutcher’s imagery blurred the line between quotidian still life and spiritual dreamscape. This project included a new site-specific work, The Martyrdom of the Philosopher, which was created especially for the Santa Monica Museum of Art. |
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| ÁLVARO SIZA/ARCHITECT: DRAWINGS, MODELS, PHOTOGRAPHS
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Álvaro Siza/Architect: Drawings, Models, Photographs was the first museum survey in the United States to explore the visionary fifty-year career of preeminent Portuguese architect and Pritzker Prize winner Álvaro Joaquim de Meio Siza Vieira. Designed by Siza himself, the exhibition comprised technical drawings, photographs, models, floor plans, and elevations for five major projects—Mário Bahia House, Gondomar, Portugal (1983); Water Tower, Aveiro, Portugal (1988–1989); Santa Maria Church, Marco de Canaveses, Portugal (1990–1996); The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in collaboration with Eduardo Souto de Moura, London, England (2005); and Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil (1998–2006). The exhibition also featured 40 original travel sketches, highlighting Siza’s extraordinary talent as a draughtsman. One of the greatest architects of our time, Álvaro Siza’s eloquent body of work is testimony to his belief that “Architecture is an art.” Throughout his career, Siza has embraced a variety of commissions including private residences, office buildings, mass housing developments, restaurants, and museums. His inspired understanding of spatial relationships, considerations of scale, sensitivity to material and texture and use of light as an expressive and active element transforms the natural and built landscape with depth and originality. In working with the pre-existing built environment, Siza seeks to integrate past and present, “not from a removal of historical references, but from an attempt at creating a synthesis.” The resulting buildings are modern yet appropriate, natural additions in harmony with their neighboring structures. Siza’s commitment to the buildings he creates extends to the furnishings and fixtures—door and window handles, light fixtures, stair railings, even ashtrays—that he designs and fabricates wherever the situation will permit. Born in Matosinhos, Portugal, in 1933, Siza studied at the School of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal, from 1949 to 1955. From 1955 to 1958 he was assistant to architect Fernando Távora. Siza’s first built project was completed in 1954. Since that time he has been the architect of more than 150 buildings and projects and designed countless more. Siza has the highest honors in his profession, including the Prince of Wales Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University (1988), the European Award of Architecture by the European Economic Community/Mies van der Rohe Foundation (1988) and the Pritzker Prize (1992). |
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The exhibition featured a wide array of objects from the vast collections of life-long hoarder Ken Brecher. It was a visual evocation of obsessive collecting and arranging of objects and the rationale that develops to justify and support the habit. It was an homage to the ephemeral, the overlooked, and the undervalued—about not forgetting to look down, about slipping things into one's pocket, about finding treasure that has no worldly value except the power to change your life. Ken Brecher, a social anthropologist by training and former museum director, has amassed an empire of objects which represent an idealized view of material culture—a nonhierarchical world in which everything is considered and appreciated for its meaning and not its market value. Being an inveterate traveler, the trail of artifacts took us from his parents' bedside in Highland Park, Illinois to the Mato Grosso in Brazil and the sand dunes of the Sahara. Brecher’s odd but harmless addiction represents one person’s attempt to make sense of the world through the creation of a personal taxonomic system. Epiphanies also included a video by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. |
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Conceptual artist Mariella Bettineschi has garnered acclaim in her home country of Italy since the early 1980s. Voyager highlighted portions of her oeuvre from 1999 to 2005, and was Bettineschi’s first West Coast museum exhibition. Though abstracted, Voyager nonetheless told a science-fiction story—of a young woman’s journey through space and time on a quest for omniscience. For SMMoA, Bettineschi created an installation comprising two bodies of work that formed a visual mosaic. The first, a series of light boxes titled At the Speed of Light (2005), transmitted rich colored and gestural light drawings and motion-altered photographs alluding to extraterrestrial travel. The second, Spaceship (1999), comprised images printed directly on Plexiglas in reflective silver and black, portraying real and imaginary flying machines. Both series depend on the transparency and luminosity of the glass to combine the poetic and the ethereal with the mechanized and the concrete. Voyager underscored Bettineschi’s long-standing interest in cosmic motion models and optical theory as well as her experiments with printing techniques. At once slick and haunting, Bettineschi’s work transported the viewer to an alternate universe. |
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| DARK PLACES |
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Dark Places explored the subtle interconnections between memory and social space—and the possibility that traces of events are scripted into the fabric of our physical and psychological environment. Conceived and organized by guest curator Joshua Decter, and designed by the architectural collective servo, the exhibition featured the work of 75 distinguished artists and architects from around the world. Dark Places brought an alternative, experimental approach to the organization and installation of the group exhibition. It was conceived to reanimate relationships among art, architecture, media, and technological design, and to generate a new kind of immersive environment—the hallucination of a futuristic noir scenario inside the frame of the museum. The exhibition asked: what, and where, are the enigmatic places in our urban and suburban worlds? How do we navigate through ambiguous social spaces? How do we experience the historical traces of complex and disturbing events within our homes, neighborhoods, and cities? What are the atmospheric, psychological, and political conditions that define our constructed environments? How are we affected by fear, violence, and paranoia, expressed through such technologies as surveillance and the Internet, as well as by the popular media? And, how might we reappropriate these actual and fictional narratives to achieve social, political, and spiritual transformation—to illuminate the dark places? Participants who responded to these questions by making new work, or selecting or modifying existing work to be recontextualized within the exhibition in digital form included: Acconci Studio, Franz Ackermann, Francis Alÿs, Michael Ashkin, Jaime Ávila Ferrer, Dennis Balk, Matthew Barney, Judith Barry, Thomas Bayrle, Julie Becker, Douglas Blau, Monica Bonvicini, Daniel Bozhkov, Mark Bradford, Troy Brauntuch, François Bucher, Sophie Calle, Eduardo Consuegra, Jordan Crandall, Teddy Cruz, Jonas Dahlberg, Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte, Diller + Scofidio, Sam Durant, Anna Gaskell, Douglas Gordon, gruppo A12, Fariba Hajamadi, Pablo Helguera, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Julian Hoeber, Emily Jacir, Christian Jankowski, Vincent Johnson, Mitchell Kane, Joachim Koester, Glenn Ligon, Dorit Margreiter, Fiorenza Menini, John Miller, Muntadas, Paul Myoda, Yoshua Okon, Catherine Opie, Lucy Orta, Hirsch Perlman, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Phillips, Richard Prince, Raqs Media Collective, Miguel Rio Branco, Alexis Rockman, Julian Rosefeldt, Aura Rosenberg, Peter Rostovsky, Sam Samore, Paige Sarlin, Julia Scher, Gregor Schneider, Allan Sekula, Andres Serrano, Nedko Solakov, Doron Solomons, Wolfgang Staehle, Javier Tellez, Anton Vidokle, Eyal Weizman/Nadav Harel, James Welling, Wim Wenders, Judi Werthein, Charlie White, Måns Wrange, Jody Zellen, and Heimo Zobernig. Decter then organized the varied submissions—painting, photography, drawing, video, film, animation, architecture, and film clips—into eight curatorial sequences that generate unique, visual correspondences and thematic linkages. Upon entering the museum space, the viewer encountered a hovering, translucent armature with elongated vacuum-formed plastic strands that delivered the succession of scripted digitized works through four front projectors, four rear projectors, and a network of glowing fiber optics. Information about the participants and the works on view was accessed through four workstations positioned beneath the armature. The entire installation—which echoed and embodied the themes of the exhibition—produced an animated viewing experience for museum visitors. |
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Far Off the Beaten Path: Paintings by Annabel Livermore consisted of five richly textured monumental oil paintings from her Big Bend series.Livermore began the series in plein air fashion during three weekend drives to Texas Farm Road 170 where she hauled eighteen pieces of plywood, laid the boards down on the ground before each craggy scene and quickly drew her impressions with a light mixture of oil paint and gasoline. During the next two years she worked on the pictures in her studio in El Paso. Unlike traditional plein air painting, Livermore’s landscapes are filled with a brooding implied narrative—fractured, jutting, cavernous, and glowing, they allude to a maelstrom brewing above and beneath the surface. Born and raised in the Upper Midwest, Livermore was a librarian before she retired to El Paso to paint. She has completed many radiant and lyrical bodies of work, including Jornada del Muerto - developed out of time spent in this southern New Mexico valley; “N” Bar - reflections on a storied, local drinking establishment; and Desert Dream City - powerful explorations of life in the cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. The intensely private Livermore has garnered a following of distinguished collectors and patrons throughout the United States. Her work was included in a 1999 exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery titled Postmodern Transgressions: Art Beyond the Frame, and has been exhibited at the Cline Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Adair Margo Gallery, El Paso, Texas, and the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, Texas. |
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Coming soon - an entirely new creation by Bismuth conceived for the Santa Monica Museum of Art – comprised a single screen color video montage of the last segments of film trailers. The focus of the piece is embodied in the iconic phrase "Coming Soon," which is typically used to announce the release of a film. By repeating this language, Bismuth presented a paradox to the viewer, as the words create an expectation that will never be fulfilled. Pierre Bismuth utilizes diverse media such as drawing, collage, musical composition, and video, to track, document, and reveal the complex thought processes that underlie human memory, comprehension, and interpretation. His work also explores the effects of language and the proliferation of images on every day life. Bismuth has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in such venues as Art Basel, the Venice Biennale, the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Canada, Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Kunstmuseum, Thun, Switzerland, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Born in Paris, Bismuth lives and works in Brussels and London. He is best known to American audiences for his work on the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for which he, Michel Gondry, and Charlie Kaufman received an Academy Award in 2005 for Best Original Screenplay. |
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