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Monday, 27 June 2005 16:52 |
HUMLEBAEK, DENMARK.- The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents Michael Bevilacqua - Paintings 1996-200. Louisiana is the first museum in the world to mount an exhibition of the work of the American painter Michael Bevilacqua, who was born in 1966, grew up in California and now lives in New York. The exhibition will be a collaboration between the artist and Louisiana’s director Poul Erik Tøjner, and will show fifteen of his works from the past ten years including one of the artist’s race cars in full size.
Bevilacqua is already represented in the Louisiana collection by the work Busy, Busy, Sunny Day, 2003, originally conceived as part of a triptych which, now that we have borrowed the other two parts, can be seen in its full length 18 metres! Bevilacqua can be regarded as a kind of heir to Pop Art. In Bevilacqua’s iconic kaleidoscope we find the bogeymen of pop culture, the freaks with mental late-night passes: the punk supremos The Ramones with the cover photo from Rocket to Russia, the eighties Goth pastiche group The Cramps, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and many others as well as much more innocuous figures: the super-cute teddies The Care Bears and Andy Warhol's stylized, gaudy flowers, for example.
The cuddly animals of the MTV generation come from all cultural strata and populate all the spaces of consciousness. The sampled works with references to brand-name clothing, the music idols of the seventies like Kraftwerk, McSolaar and Air, the visual artist Mathew Barney’s video works, Japanese food products and Chinese characters are a remix of the high and low cultures in which the artist has grown up meticulously executed by hand in through-composed pictures with a graphic look and processed in a technique and aesthetic with roots in the racing car milieu in California. Michael Bevilacqua sets all these signs in motion in a kind of self-portraits or diary entries with references to his cultural preferences and personal biography.
Bevilacqua’s art is not without a sting in its tail, but it is certainly not without warmth and charm too. What one is struck by here is the loving satire; but also – indeed especially – the formally aware painting. For the whole concoction of more or less familiar icons serves first and foremost to compose picture-spaces and juxtapose colours. The many patterns, stripes, grids, dots and other more or less abstract forms and figures hold the collages in a kind of tension and create a strange cosmopolitan fantasy landscape that can set off many different kinds of associations in the individual viewer.
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