Sturtevant
The House of Horrors (The Ghost Train)
Through May 15, 2016
Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris
11 Avenue du Président Wilson
75116 Paris
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 10am–6pm
T +01 53 67 40 00
www.mam.paris.fr
Facebook / Twitter / #theHouseofHorrors
First shown at ARC as part of the solo exhibition The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking in 2010, The House of Horrors was the last major installation by Sturtevant (1924–2014) and the magisterial culmination of her oeuvre. Donated by the artist, over 10,000 works have now been added to the permanent collection at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
In this simulation of the horror of a fun fair ghost train, allusions to director John Waters’ cult actress Divine (Pink Flamingos) and iconoclastic artist Paul McCarthy’s The Painter are mixed in with the traditional bats, skeletons and Frankenstein monster. Following a winding path to the accompaniment of sound and lighting effects, The House of Horrors goes to the heart of an age—ours—dominated by spectacle and anti-intellectualism, as well as by widespread violence, hatred and the obscenity of puritanism. The upshot is a life-size installation that only appears to be pure entertainment, even as it proclaims its exhilarating side.
Here the museum is paying tribute to Sturtevant with a year-long presentation of a work that is monumental not only in size—some 300 square metres in all—but also in critical terms. Donated by the artist and her dealer, Thaddaeus Ropac, in 2013, The House of Horrors has been given its own exclusive space as one of the flagship works at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
15 years ahead of the Appropriationists and the postmodernism of the 1980s, Sturtevant began reproducing the work of other artists including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Frank Stella and Felix Gonzalez-Torres—many before they had been welcomed into the art history canon. In the videos of the last 20 years of her career, she rigorously pursued her exposure of what she had been quick to sense as the era of “simulacra,” together with the excesses of the cybernetic age.
Sturtevant contributed to numerous exhibitions in such leading international art institutions as MoMA, New York (2014), MOCA Los Angeles and MADRE, Naples (both 2015). She was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, and in 2013 received the Kurt Schwitters Prize for The House of Horrors, which, to mark the occasion, was lent to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover from September 2013 to February 2014.
Museum Director: Fabrice Hergott
Exhibition Curator: Anne Dressen
Also at the museum:
Nathan Lerner
until September 13, 2015
Henry Darger 1892–1973
until October 11, 2015
Apartés
until January 10, 2016
Coming soon to the museum:
Warhol Unlimited
October 2, 2015–February 7, 2016
Co-Workers Network as Artist
October 9, 2015–January 31, 2016
Press officer
Maud Ohana: maud.ohana [at] paris.fr / T +01 53 67 40 51
