The Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive Presents a Kurt Schwitters Retrospective

Written by Rosalind Shuttleworth Wednesday, 17 August 2011 00:48

Berkeley, CA.- The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) presents "Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, the first major overview of the German artist’s work presented in the United States since the Museum of Modern Art’s celebrated 1985 retrospective. The exhibition includes approximately eighty assemblages, sculptures, and collages made between 1918 and 1947 that elucidate the relationship between collage and painting—as well as color and material—in Schwitters’s work. It also features the reconstruction of the artist’s monumental walk-in installation piece, 'Merzbau', which was bombed by the Allies in 1943. Originated by the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas and on view at BAM/PFA through November 27th, this presentation is the only West Coast stop for the exhibition.

Schwitters (1887–1948) was an integral part of Germany’s revolutionary art and intellectual movements in the tumultuous wake of the First World War. He is one of the most enduring figures of the  twentieth-century international avantgarde, and has been cited as a profound influence by artists ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Damien Hirst. Widely acknowledged as a great master of collage, Schwitters’s diverse body of work cuts across boundaries, hierarchies, and media to include painting, sculpture, typography, poetry, sound, and architecture, and it anticipated most of the leading art movements of the late twentieth century. In 1919, Schwitters coined the term Merz, taken from a portion of the German word for commerce that was pasted into an early collage, to express his philosophical and artistic ambitions. Today he is known for transforming the “useless” forms of everyday life into a language and aesthetic that engaged the turmoil of the postwar era. Nailing and gluing together forgotten pieces of urban waste—train tickets, scraps of fabric, candy wrappers—Schwitters, perhaps more than any artist of his time, advanced collage and assemblage as integral modernist practices.

One of Schwitters’s most fully realized projects, the  Merzbau, expanded these principles into the realm of architecture. Built over a period of fifteen years and later destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, this massive walk-in sculptural environment—a precursor to installation art—had  filled a portion of the artist’s Hannover, Germany home by the time he fled the Nazi regime in 1937. The exhibition includes a full-sized recreation of the Merzbau based on wide-angle photographs taken during the 1930s. Through the exploration of key pieces from Schwitters’s multifaceted work, including the Merzbau, the exhibition uncovers the expressive palettes, textures, and techniques behind the artist’s revolutionary work.

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage highlights Schwitters’s compositional methods and design principles as well as his critical and often witty response to major art movements such as Expressionism, Dadaism, and Constructivism. Schwitters often arranged found objects with a painter’s eye and enhanced his collages with additional layers of paint. In fact, his training as a painter was a central influence throughout his work, particularly his sensitivity to color and light. This exhibition offers the first detailed look at the significance of those two elements, unraveling the artist’s complex fusion of collage and painting.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is the visual arts center of the University of California, Berkeley, the nation’s leading public research university. One of the largest university art museums in the United States in both size and attendance, BAM/PFA aims to inspire the imagination and ignite critical dialogue through contemporary and historical art and film, engaging audiences from the UC Berkeley campus, the Bay Area, and beyond. Each year BAM/PFA presents fifteen art exhibitions, 380 film programs, and dozens of performances, as well as lectures, symposia, and tours. The museum’s collection of more than 30,000 works ranges from Neolithic Chinese pottery to contemporary video art. Among the collection's exceptional strengths are Ming and Qing dynasty Chinese painting, Italian Baroque painting, Old Master works on paper, early American painting, mid-twentieth-century abstract painting—including important works by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse, and Mark Rothko—Japanese cinema, Soviet silent film, West Coast avant-garde video and film, animation, and international classic films. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

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