The Circle Walked Casually
November 28, 2013–March 2, 2014
Deutsche Bank KunstHalle
Unter den Linden 13/15
10117 Berlin
www.deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.com
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The Circle Walked Casually
With 132 works by 50 artists, the exhibition The Circle Walked Casually opens up a whole new perspective on international works on paper of the Deutsche Bank Collection from Classic Modernism to the present day.
The Circle Walked Casually marks the beginning of a new series of exhibitions that enables us to experience the Deutsche Bank Collection with different eyes and recurs to diverse exhibition strategies and narratives. Renowned international guest curators are invited on a regular basis to develop thematic presentations at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle that feature innovative and experimental formats to provide a look at previously undiscovered aspects of the collection.
On this occasion, the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle has invited Argentine curator Victoria Noorthoorn, who has focused on the Bank’s collection of drawings, collages, and other works on paper. The line as a symbol of drawing and the idea of an imaginary, abstract journey are central themes of The Circle Walked Casually. Noorthoorn creates an extraordinary panorama of international drawing between 1900 and the present. Featuring artists ranging from Josef Albers and Otto Dix, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse, to Laura Lima and Jakub Julian Ziółkowski, The Circle Walked Casually honors drawing as a means of expression in contemporary art, as an autonomous medium that is opening up new, contemporary realms of thought and presentation.
“How could a mere line, casually developing, unfolding, growing, speak of our contemporary existence as human beings, of our loneliness, introspection and need for love, of the twists and turns of art as it opens the door to continual movement, transformation and social change?” These are some of the central issues Noorthoorn addresses.
The Circle Walked Casually documents artistic concepts and formal developments of works on paper without providing a chronological development. Instead, the exhibition follows a narrative line arising from a dialogue between the works. Together with the Brazilian set designer, filmmaker, and author Daniela Thomas and the architect Felipe Tassara, Noorthoorn conceptualized an exhibition architecture in which the drawings seem to be suspended in space. The individual works form elements of an intricate story told from work to work. Each work refers to the previous one—invokes it, as it were. This both real and imaginary line created by the sequence of works guides visitors through the exhibition. Mexican artist Erick Beltrán’s design for the exhibition catalogue followed the same underlying principle.
At the same time, the choice of works for The Circle Walked Casually reflects the development of the Deutsche Bank Collection. Beginning with Classic Modernism and postwar German art, pioneering works have been collected since the end of the 1970s. In the last few decades the collection has focused increasingly on the global art scene.
Born in 1971, Victoria Noorthoorn stands for a generation of international curators who focus on young artists but also place works from art history in a new context. In 2013, she was appointed Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in her home city Buenos Aires. Aside from current artists, she shows positions which had a strong impact on art in the 1960s and 1970s and have recently been rediscovered. Among these are the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino, a contemporary of Hélio Oiticica, who took part in the groundbreaking exhibition Objetividade Brasileira in 1967 and who was shown at the last documenta, and David Koloane, who co-founded South Africa’s first black gallery in Johannesburg in 1977 and whose work was on view in the South African pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale 2013.
More information at deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.com and db-artmag.com.
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