Programme highlights 2013-2014
Henry Moore Institute
The Headrow
Leeds, LS1 3AH
www.henry-moore.org/hmi
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The Henry Moore Institute is a centre for the study of sculpture. Our 2013–2014 exhibition programme features a series of exhibitions addressing relationships between sculpture and display, the original and the copy, and how an action, encounter or object becomes a sculpture.
Spring
Vladimir Markov: Displays and Fictions
Voldemārs Matvejs was a Latvian painter and art theorist fascinated by the display and understanding of art. On publishing his writings in 1912, he assumed the name ‘Vladimir Markov.’ The following year, he travelled across Europe with a camera, visiting ethnographic collections of sculpture in search of a universal theory for the development and understanding of art. This display presents twenty-four photographs taken in museums and storerooms in London, Paris, Oslo and St Petersburg.
Robert Filliou: The Institute of Endless Possibilities
Filliou declared ‘art is what makes life more interesting than art.’ This first UK institutional solo exhibition devoted to the French artist asks the question: When does an everyday object become a sculpture? Using tools ranging from mobile museums to absent cleaners, masterpieces to chance operations, telepathic sculptures to musical economies, this spring, the Henry Moore Institute turns into an institute of endless possibilities, conducting its research through forty artworks made between 1962 and 1984.
Keir Smith: From Wall to Floor
In 2012, the Henry Moore Institute Archive of Sculptors’ Papers acquired the complete archive of British artist Keir Smith. This exhibition charts his evolving sculptural ideas through sketchbooks, highly detailed drawings and sculptures made between 1968 and 1979. In this period, Smith pushed the possibilities of painting into sculpture, using the landscape as a subject, site and support experimenting with the material possibilities of paint, canvas and stretcher and harnessing process into performance.
Alberto Giacometti: ‘Tête de femme (Flora Mayo)’ (c. 1927/1990)
Alberto Giacometti moved to Paris in 1922 to study under the French sculptor Emile-Antoine Bourdelle at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. It was here he met Flora Mayo, an American artist with whom he had a relationship in the mid- to late 1920s. From his first drawings, paintings and sculptures Giacometti held a keen interest in portraiture, often sculpting those he was close to. Presented in the Institute’s series of single sculpture exhibitions, this posthumous cast highlights relationships between drawing and sculpture.
Summer
Indifferent Matter: From Object to Sculpture
Acts of naming and the power of display turn objects into sculptures. Pairing four ancient objects with four American sculptures of the 1960s and 1990s addressing museum conventions, Indifferent Matter explores what happens when matter becomes indifferent to its origins and perceivers. Neolithic Chinese jade discs and columns are displayed alongside Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Placebo) (1991). Roman sculptures by unknown authors of unknown sitters sit within a display structure made by British artist Steven Claydon, surrounded by Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (1966).
‘The Age of Innocence’: Replicating the Ideal Portrait in the New Sculpture Movement
Through replication and repetition, this display explores the search for the ‘ideal’ portrait in late Victorian sculpture. Bronze, plaster and marble versions of Alfred Drury’s The Age of Innocence (c.1897) are presented alongside works and archival material by Edward Onslow Ford, Alfred Gilbert and George Frampton. Each of these sculptors studied the notion of ‘ideal’ in portraiture, as opposed to a depiction of a particular person, choosing the female head as their subject.
Autumn
Jean Tinguely: ‘Spiral’ (1965)
Jean Tinguely began experimenting with mechanical sculptures in the late 1940s, exploring how animated objects could initiate sculptural events. Using scrap metal and spinning motors, Tinguely unleashed creative forces to deny sculpture its monumental status. Spiral is a motorised winding form mounted on a curved iron bar standing at human height. With the press of a red button, Spiral rushes into a spinning motion that fills the gallery with the sound of humming movement and dissolves the contours of the sculpture.
Dennis Oppenheim: Thought Collision Factories
Dennis Oppenheim invented factories of ideas to stretch the limits of sculpture. This exhibition explores his use of fireworks and flares, sculptural materials he believed embodied creative forces. The galleries are filled with firework-machines, video-sculptures and drawings outlining the artist’s use of and interest in the forces of labour that perform productive activity. Six flare-sculptures are ignited outside the Institute at unannounced moments during the exhibition, each burning a phrase brightly in red, yellow or green for one minute.
Stephen Cripps: Pyrotechnic Sculptor
This first exhibition of works on paper by the sculptor and performance artist Stephen Cripps celebrates the 2013 acquisition of his archive. Cripps transformed objects with actions, sound and pyrotechnics, developing numerous schemes for mechanical sculptures and performances involving military hardware, fire, smoke, light and amplified sound. His proposals range from mobile crematoria to mechanical gardens and exploding balloons, through to floating fires and choreographed aerial performances.
The Henry Moore Institute is a part of The Henry Moore Foundation, which was set up by Moore in 1977 to encourage appreciation of the visual arts, especially sculpture. An award-winning exhibitions venue, research centre, library and sculpture archive, the Institute hosts a year-round programme of exhibitions, conferences and lectures, as well as developing research and publications, to expand the understanding and scholarship of historical and contemporary sculpture.
www.henry-moore.org/hmi
