"Yoko Ono ~ Between the Sky & My Head" Exhibition Featured at Kunsthalle Bielefeld

Written by Keira Chavez Monday, 26 December 2011 21:23

BIELEFELD, GERMANY -Yoko Ono, born in 1933 in Tokyo, is one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art. In 1952, she became one of the first women in Japan to study philosophy. In 1953 she took composition courses at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and studied creative writing at Harvard. In the mid-1950s, Yoko Ono lived in New York City, where she knew John Cage, and many other artists and composers. In 1960, she rented a loft on Chambers Street, and together with La Monte Young, organized a series of concerts, attended not only by young musicians and artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Fluxus founder George Maciunas, but also by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and Isamu Noguchi.

On her mother’s side, Ono is a member of one of Japan’s most respected families, and so, as a child, she attended a school for members of the Japanese imperial family. Her father, who originally intended to be a pianist before he ultimately became a leading Japanese banker, insisted she take piano and voice lessons at an early age. Her parents and relatives acknowledged that Yoko had a strong will and an irrepressible desire for freedom. The lengthiest publication on the artist to date says that her main intention was “to think the unthinkable—and then do it.” After beginning a relationship with John Lennon in 1967, Ono began working on no less an ambition than to bring inner peace to different peoples. Representing one of her chief messages, her work Imagine Peace will be presented in front of the Bielefeld Kunsthalle.

As a young artist, Ono left New York in the early nineteen-sixties in order to return to Japan. During this period she performed several concerts with John Cage and the pianist David Tudor. In 1962 at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, she began hanging texts, instead of the pictures she had shown in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York. Her work in conceptual art manifested in the famous collection of works, Grapefruit, which she first published herself on July 4, 1964 in Tokyo. It went on to be published in several editions. Some of the works in it date back to 1953. The book divided her oeuvre into chapters dealing with music, painting, happenings, poetry, and objects, documenting her affinity for all categories of art. To this day, she has remained interested in the process of tearing apart various forms of presentational media to the point where their boundaries dissolve. Yoko Ono. Between the Sky and My Head will run until 16 November, 2008, and is sponsored by the Kulturstiftung Pro Bielefeld.

The show will be seen at the Baltic Centre of Contemporary Arts, Gateshead, England, between December 13, 2008 and March 15, 2009. The catalogue will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König and D.A.P

With the works of Yoko Ono (*1933) the Kunsthalle Bielefeld is featuring an artist who has been active for over fifty years, and who should undoubtedly be credited with having invented Conceptual Art. This exhibition is the artist’s largest show in Germany to date, and it deals with Ono’s cosmic, poetic, and political understanding of human culture. It contains a selection of Ono’s works dating from 1961 to the present, and will also include works outside the museum, which will reference the city itself. Inside the Kunsthalle there will be three levels of sculptures, paintings, drawings, photographs, films, and sound installations. An introductory film will accompany the presentation. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Kulturstiftung Pro Bielefeld. Visit : www.kunsthalle-bielefeld.de/

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