The Last First Decade
30 April–18 December 2011
Opening:
Saturday, 30 April, 7 pm
Ellipse Foundation is located in Cascais, Portugal. Opening hours are 11 am to 6 pm, from Friday to Sunday.
Art Centre
Alameda das Fisgas, 79
2645-117 Alcoitão
Cascais, Portugal
T (+351) 939 212 258
T (+351) 214 691 806
info [at] ellipsefoundation.com
www.ellipsefoundation.com
Ignasi
Aballí
Adel
Abdessemed
Eija-Liisa
Ahtila
Slater
Bradley
Olaf
Breuning
Pedro
Cabrita Reis
Sophie
Calle
Rui
Chafes
David
Claerbout
Tatjana
Doll
Jimmie
Durham
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Olafur
Eliasson
Elmgreen & Dragset
Rodney
Graham
Mona
Hatoum
Kiluanji Kia
Henda
Candida
Höfer
Roni
Horn
Pierre
Huyghe
Angel
Ihosvanny
José
Iraola
João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva
Zoe
Leonard
Glenn
Ligon
Sarah
Lucas
Ryan
McGinley
Aleksandra
Mir
Muntean/Rosenblum
Nick
Oberthaler
João
Onofre
Catherine
Opie
Gabriel
Orozco
Raymond
Pettibon
Jack
Pierson
Richard
Prince
Gonzalo
Puch
Julião
Sarmento,
Collier
Schorr
Steven
Shearer
Andreas
Slominski
Dash
Snow
Hiroshi
Sugimoto
João
Tabarra
Wolfgang Tillmans
João Pedro
Vale
Adriana
Varejão
Júlia Ventura
Yonamine
The Ellipse Foundation Contemporary Art Collection is pleased to announce its new exhibition, The Last First Decade.
Almost 100 years after the advent of the historical avant-garde, the exhibition The Last First Decade proposes revisiting it through the art of the first decade of the 21st century. The idea, however, is not to trace a genealogical line linking the avant-garde to the art of today or to suppose a direct and immediate influence. Unlike the historiographer’s approach, which struggles to free itself from its discursive rigidity, the exhibition format is based on the polysemy of the artworks. To some extent, this is a double exhibition: something presented but not visible (the avant-garde movements whose concepts structure the show) and something visible but whose structure fuses (the work produced in the last decade). Based on this paradox—between a past which saw itself as a construct of the future and a present which considers itself as actuality—The Last First Decade replicates the way in which the avant-garde idea runs through contemporary art via return and departure, anticipation and retrospection.
Taking the self-criticism intrinsic to modernity to a state of paroxysm, the historical avant-garde represented the founding moment of contemporary art, placing at the centre of this the connection between art and life. In the mid-20th century, the neo-avant-garde (re)appropriated the avant-garde legacy by means of a relationship of trauma, of reinscription in the symbolic order. At the start of the 21st century, in the face of a contemporaneity that seems to invert the avant-garde dream—with the change from ethics to aesthetics replaced by a globalized aestheticisation—we are faced with the political question of how art can continue to connect to reality. In this context, the art of the last 10 years, when faced with some of the fundamental concepts bequeathed by the avant-garde, emerges as a re-opening in the symbolic order that identifies its cracks. The exhibition The Last First Decade accentuates the paradoxes created by this confrontation and challenges the observer to interprete them in his own way.
Curated by: Alexandre Melo, Ivo André Braz
*Image above:
Copyright: the artist.
Photo by: DMF.
