The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s–1970s

The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s–1970s examines a brief yet historically significant moment in the post-war era during which artists from Eastern Europe and Latin America cultivated a shared enthusiasm for Kinetic and Op art.

This trend represented both an alternative and a challenge to the critical consensus of mainstream Northern-Atlantic art production: while in the established art centers of Paris, London and New York, abstract expressionism, informel and lyrical abstraction reigned supreme, another art history was being written linking the hubs of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Bucharest and Moscow together with Buenos Aires, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Here arose a network of artistic practices dedicated to an entirely different set of aesthetic questions situated in relation to various shared political and economic realities.

The blossoming of Kinetic art and Op art in those regions was, among others, a manifestation of a fascination with movement—its aesthetic effects and the dynamic opportunities it generated to create new, interactive relations with audiences. These mobile and/or mobilizing objects were frequently created by multidisciplinary teams joining artists together with scientists and engineers, and were rarely conceived as finished masterpieces to be admired by a disinterested beholder but, rather, to be displayed in museums and public spaces as an open invitation to audience interaction and participation. Uncentered, unattached and featuring constantly evolving parameters, these objects were primarily artistic experiments that expressed an earnest belief in the utopian power of art at a precise time when the West’s reigning art ideology had abandoned the idea of utopia as such. In contrast, the South American and Eastern European movements’ fascination with science, new technologies and cybernetics symbolized a continued commitment to building a better future through art.

The exhibition presents works by more than thirty artists and artistic groups from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, providing evidence of common interests and intuition. ​An English-language collection of texts presented at The Other Transatlantic: Kinetic and Op art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, an international conference organized in Warsaw in 2016, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Volume 14 in the Museum under Construction series is edited by Marta Dziewańska, Dieter Roelstraete and Abigail Winograd, and features contributions from international scholars Anindita Banerjee, Waldemar Baraniewski, Dušan Barok, Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, Daniel Garza Usabiaga, Ariel Jiménez, Armin Medosch, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Daniel Muzyczuk, Sasha Obukhova, Attila Tordai-S., Andrzej Turowski and Abigail Winograd. The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America (ISBN: 9788364177422) is distributed worldwide by the University of Chicago Press.

The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, in collaboration with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and SESC, São Paulo.

The dates of the presentation in Moscow: March 17, 2018–May 9, 2018
The dates of the presentation in São Paulo: July 25, 2018–September 30, 2018

Artists:
Vladimir Akulinin, Vojin Bakić, Martha Boto, Feliza Bursztyn, Lygia Clark, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Milan Dobeš, Dvizhenie Group, Wojciech Fangor, Constantin Flondor, Vladimir Galkin, Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt), Oskar Hansen, Francisco Infante, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Julije Knifer, Vyacheslav Koleychuk, Gyula Košice, Grzegorz Kowalski, Vlado Kristl, Julio Le Parc, Almir da Silva Mavignier, Mir Group, Vera Molnar, Lev Nussberg, Hélio Oiticica, Abraham Palatnik, Andrzej Pawłowski, Prometheus Group, Ivan Picelj, Ludmiła Popiel, Vjenceslav Richter, Jerzy Rosołowicz, Mira Schendel, Nicholas Schöffer, SIGMA Group, Jesus Rafael Soto, Aleksandr Srnec, Henryk Stażewski, Zdeněk Sýkora, Victor Vasarely, Magdalena Więcek, Ryszard Winiarski

Curatorial team: Marta Dziewańska, Dieter Roelstraete, Abigail Winograd

Cooperation: Snejana Krasteva, Sasha Obukhova

Exhibition co-organizers: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; SESC São Paulo

Exhibition partners: Adama Mickiewicz Institute, Monoskop, Galeria Nara Roesler

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is financed with funds from: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and the City of Warsaw.

Press contact:
prasa@artmuseum.pl