(L-R) John Stezaker, Balázs Kicsiny: Killing Time, and Art and the Mind-Brain installation shots.
The galleries of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum are buzzing with activity as installation of three compelling exhibitions nears completion.
The photographic collages of London artist, John Stezaker, employ classic movie stills, vintage postcards, book illustrations and other found materials to bring new meanings to old pictures. Adjusting, inverting and slicing them together to create collages that are at once captivating and unsettling, eerie and elegant, nostalgic and absurd in the first U.S. museum exhibition of this influential artist’s work.
Hungarian artist, Balázs Kicsiny, has created an installation that explores the nature of service through unconventional three-dimensional representations of the army, the circus and the restaurant. In Killing Time, Kicsiny both investigates and conflates these institutions and their raisons d’être—to protect or kill, to entertain and to feed—immersing viewers in fragmentary, disquieting and sometimes absurdist narratives that challenge assumptions about who is serving whom, and to what purpose.
This season’s Teaching Gallery exhibition is curated by Mark Rollins, professor of philosophy, in conjunction with his course “Art and the Mind-Brain,” offered by Washington University’s School of Arts & Sciences in spring 2012. The exhibition presents works from the Kemper Art Museum’s collection by Joseph Albers, Romare Bearden, Georges Braque, Tom Friedman, Naum Gabo, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Miró, Rembrandt van Rijn, and others that reveal important aspects of how we see and think.
The three exhibitions open Friday, January 27, 2012 with a member’s preview from 6-7 p.m. and a public reception from 7-9 p.m.
On Saturday, January 28, the Kemper Art Museum will host a panel discussion with Stezaker, Karen Butler, assistant curator of collections, and Michael Newman, associate professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at 11 a.m. in Steinberg Hall Auditorium.
Kicsiny will lecture about his work at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, January 30, in Steinberg Hall Auditorium as part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series.
Mark Rollins will offer a gallery talk of Art and the Mind-Brain in the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery on March 7 at 5 p.m.
John Stezaker
January 27, 2012 – April 23, 2012
Kemper Art Museum, Ebsworth Gallery
Balázs Kicsiny: Killing Time
January 27, 2012 – April 16, 2012
Kemper Art Museum, Garen Gallery
Art and the Mind-Brain
January 27, 2012 – April 16, 2012
Kemper Art Museum, Teaching Gallery