The Brooklyn Museum Exhibits Rachel Kneebone Alongside Auguste Rodin

Written by Rachel Woodstein Wednesday, 25 January 2012 23:10

Brooklyn, New York.- The Brooklyn Museum is pleased to present "Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin", on view at the museum from January 27th through August 26th. The exhibition will feature new works by the British artist Rachel Kneebone shown alongside iconic works from the nineteenth-century French master Auguste Rodin. Kneebone's first major museum presentation, the exhibition will include eight intricately wrought, large-scale porcelain sculptures paired with fifteen Rodin sculptures from the Brooklyn Museum's collection."Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin" will focus on Kneebone's and Rodin's shared interest in the examination of gender and sexuality, the nature of sculptural form, and the formal representation of mourning, ecstasy, death, and vitality in figurative sculpture. This pairing will also offer a visual comparison of their sculptural materials and processes.

Kneebone's porcelain sculptures make reference to the history of sculpture including comparisons to Michelangelo, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Louise Bourgeois. Her simultaneously pristine and agitated artworks, which integrate human forms that merge into odd mutations, provide a stark contrast to Rodin's heavy, dark, yet equally animated bronzes. Whereas Rodin cast his sculpture, Kneebone creates unique artworks that she fires in a small kiln in her studio. Her larger sculptures are fired in sections and then assembled later into completed pieces. This exhibition marks the first time that Kneebone will present her artwork along with one of her significant historical referents. The centerpiece of the exhibition and the largest work that she has created to date, "The Descent" (2008), was inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, as was Rodin's masterpiece "The Gates of Hell" (1880-1917). "The Descent" is a highly theatrical sculpture consisting of hundreds of hybrid figures tumbling into an abyss of teeming bodies and flesh. Both Kneebone's and Rodin's sculptures take thematic inspiration from The Inferno, the first section of the Divine Comedy, and highlight the charged emotion and the tensions that emerge from life wrestling with death and momentary ecstasy mixed with eternal suffering. Kneebone was born in 1973, in Oxfordshire, England, and graduated in 1997 from University of The West of England, Bristol. In 2004, Kneebone graduated with an M.A. in sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. She currently lives and works in London.

The Brooklyn Museum is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Its roots extend back to 1823 and the founding of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library to educate young tradesmen (Walt Whitman would later become one of its librarians). The original design of the new museum building, from 1893, by the architects McKim, Mead & White was meant to house myriad educational and research activities in addition to the growing collections. The ambitious building plan, had it been fully realized, would have produced the largest single museum structure in the world. Indeed, so broad was the institution’s overall mandate that the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum would remain divisions of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences until they became independent entities in the 1970s. The Brooklyn Museum has been building a collection of Egyptian artifacts since the beginning of the twentieth century, incorporating both collections purchased from others, such as the collection of American Egyptologist Charles Edward Wilbour, and objects obtained in archeological excavations sponsored by the museum. The museum's collection of American art dates back to its being given Francis Guy's "Winter Scene in Brooklyn" in 1846. In 1855, the museum officially designated a collection of American Art, with the first work commissioned for the collection being a landscape painting by Asher B. Durand. Items in the American Art collection include portraits, pastels, sculptures, and prints; all items in the collection date to between circa 1720 and circa 1945. Represented in the American Art collection are works by artists such as William Edmondson (Angel, date unknown), John Singer Sargent (Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife, ca. 1889), Georgia O'Keeffe (Dark Tree Trunks, ca. 1946), and Winslow Homer (Eight Bells, ca. 1887). Among the most famous items in the collection are Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington and Edward Hicks' "The Peaceable Kingdom". The oldest acquisitions in the African art collection were collected by the museum in 1900, shortly after the museum's founding.


The collection was expanded in 1922 with items originating largely in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in 1923 the museum hosted one of the first exhibitions of African art in the United States. With over five thousand items in its collection, the Brooklyn Museum boasts one of the largest collections of African art in any American art museum. Although the title of the collection implies that it includes art from all of the African continent, in reality works from Africa are sub-categorized into a number of collections. Western and Central sub-Saharan works are collected under the banner of African Art, while Northern African and Egyptian art are grouped with the Islamic and Egyptian art collections, respectively. he African art collection covers 2,500 years of human history and includes sculpture, jewelery, masks, and religious artifacts from more than one hundred African cultures. Noteworthy items in this collection include a carved ndop figure of a Kuba king, believed to be among the oldest extant ndop carvings, and a Lulua mother-and-child figure. The museum's collection of Pacific Islands art began in 1900 with the acquisition of one hundred wooden figures and shadow puppets from New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia); with that hundred items as its foundation, the collection has grown to npw encompass close to five thousand works. Art in this collection is sourced to numerous Pacific and Indian ocean islands including Hawaii and New Zealand as well as less-populous islands like Rapa Nui and Vanuatu. The museum’s center for feminist art opened in 2007 and is dedicated to preserving the history of the movement since the late 20th century as well as raising awareness of feminist contributions to art and informing the future of this area of artistic dialogue. Along with an exhibition space, and library, the center features a gallery housing a masterwork by Judy Chicago, a large installation called "The Dinner Party". Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.brooklynmuseum.org

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