Declaring Space

Start date: Sunday, September 30, 2007
Event is ongoing: Until Sunday, December 30, 2007

Declaring Space focuses on the work of four artists whose works had a dramatic impact on the complex development of abstract space and color in the years following World War II: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. The curator, Michael Auping, sees the work of each of these artists as representing a different stage in the expansion of the grand space abstract painters were imagining in the 1950s and 1960s. He comments, “To my mind Rothko draws back the curtains, if you will, on the opening up of this space. Newman emphatically ‘declares’ an almost totemic space, while Fontana literally slices through the picture’s plane with a razor, and Klein, as he pronounced it, leaps into the void.” Creating complex and dramatic philosophical and visual metaphors, these artists crossed the boundary of pictorial space, entering a new realm of abstract theater.

Information from the museum's site