Martha Grunenwaldt, ohne Titel, o. J., Gouache, Pastell auf Papier, 36,5 x 55 cm, courtesy Collection ART EN MARGE, Brüssel.
Louise Bourgeois, Femme, 2005, Bronze, Silbernitrat Patina, 33 x 41,9 x 19,7 cm, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve, Cheim & Read, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Foto: Christopher Burke, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008.
Hans Bellmer, Les Jeux de la Poupée, 1949, 16tlg. Farbfotografieserie, je 14 x 14 cm, Privatsammlung, Foto: Henke, Salzkotten, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2008.
Antonin Artaud, Selbstportrait, 24. Juni 1947, Bleistift / Papier, 55 x 43 cm, Privatsammlung, Foto: Philippe de Gobert, Brüssel, © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2008.
Félicien Rops, Les Epaves, 1866, Kreidezeichnung, 43,2 x 34,3 cm, courtesy Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur.
Félicien Rops, Pornokrates, 1878, Pastell, Kreide, 31,8 x 21,6 cm, courtesy Musée provincial Félicien Rops, Namur.
Johann Hauser, Frau, 10. Dez. 1983, Farbkreide / Papier, 40 x 30,1 cm, Musée d’art moderne Lille Metropole, Courtesy Villeneuve d´Asque (Inv. Nr. 999.50.2), Foto : Cecile Dubart. |
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MARTa Herford
Goebenstraße 4-10
+49 (5221) 99 44 30 - 27
Herford
Loss of Control – Crossing the boundaries
to art from Félicien Rops to the present
November 1, 2008-January 25, 2009
"Losing control can mean losing control over one’s own self and expressing the rigid and constraining limits of our lives in images that reveal obsession, repression, and social taboo. Control implies exposing yourself to challenges, that you get to know the inner constraints, fears, passions, and impositions with which people — not just artists — have to live and work today.“
— Jan Hoet,
on Loss of Control
“Madness and enchantment share many similarities. A magician is an artist of madness.”
— Novalis,
New Fragments – From the Secret World (1798)
Obsession, sexuality, madness and death — the continuing exchange between art and life is the theme of the exhibition Loss of Control 1/11/2008-25/1/2009. After an eight-year engagement as the inspirational founding director of the Marta Herford museum, Jan Hoet is saying farewell with a show comprising over 400 works. All the pieces speak about the artistic search for authentic means of expression above and beyond societal norms, and convey in unprecedented depth the varying aspects of loss of control, boundary crossing, and madness.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a series of works by the Belgian symbolist Félicien Rops (1833-1898), drawn from all periods of his career. Rops — simultaneously a painter, lithographer, draughtsman, illustrator and engraver — was one of the foremost artists of the late 19th century. His work railed against the bourgeoisie and their culture of taboos, with its narcissistic fixation on the outward appearance of things. His frequently satirical works caricature the morals and mores of his time. Women, in Rops’ work, appear as demonic and powerful figures, laden with satanic and sexual overtones, they epitomise the decadent lusts of the bourgeoisie. Rops employed shock as an aesthetic experience, to shatter convention. The images of the sexualised bodies of women led his contemporaries to examine their own unconscious desires. He saw himself a champion of a free art, never seeking to hide contempt for the purveyors of "official" art and the wider public. At the same time he was occupied by social questions of his time. A meeting with Baudelaire was, apparently, instrumental in laying foundations for his work.
Félicien Rops (Namur 1833-Corbeil (Essonnes) 1898), spent wild schooldays in his home town. From 1849 onwards he attended courses at the Academy of Namur. In 1851 he enrolled to study law and philosophy at the Free University of Brussels. He was involved in several student groups in Brussels: the Society of Pleasures, The Crocodiles, the Saint-Luc studio, and he founded Uylenspiegel: Journal for Artistic and Literary Debates (1856-1863), for which he drew caricatures.
He also created works in the spirit of realism (Funeral in Wallonia, 1863) or full of political commitment (The Death Penalty, 1860). In 1863 Rops met Charles Baudelaire, for whom he created the frontispiece for Les Epaves (Flotsam and Jetsam) in 1865. This friendship influenced Rops' entire career (The Dancing Death, 1865).
From 1870 Rops increasingly resided in Paris, where he dreamed of recognition. He was interested in the topicality of the social shipwrecks of his era and created works such as the Sailors' Den (1875) or the Absinth Drinker. The year 1878 marked a turning point in the artist's career, who in the series Women with Jumping Jack and the well-known Pornokrates turned to symbolism and allegory.
Rops was an artist, who like no other "let the demon enter his work" (Joris Huysmans, 1889), who dared to call things by name, a painter and a prolific writer of long, rambling letters.
The contemporary Belgian artist Jacques Charlier (b. 1939, Liege) shares Rops’ desire to goad the observer into far-reaching self-examination. Charlier prefers working between disciplines and media. He is equally at home with painting, photography, music, writing, sculpture and installations as he is with comic-book art. The Belgian artist has always cast a mischievous-subversive eye over the world of art. In his works — in which the dramatisation of the female always plays a central role — he references, caricatures, queries and repudiates the artistic avant-garde and in so doing creates his own work which parodies the modern.
"The most important thing to me is sudden inspiration. These are neither gags nor fabrications, (...) a dose of reality and fiction that in the best cases provides a good topic for conversation. That humour is usually the starting point makes things easier."
— Jacques Charlier
Jacques Charlier is an autodidact who finances his artistic work by means of his work for Liège municipal works and as a graphics professor at Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Liège.
In the constant search for a suitable combination of idea and medium, Charlier prefers to work in an interdisciplinary way: His forms of expressions are painting, photography, lyrics, sculputures, installations as well as comics. His oeuvre is characterised by a roguish-subversive approach to the world of art. He breaks with the usual clichés of an artistic avant-garde, which he quotes, caricatures, queries and discards in order to create his own work on this basis, that parodies the fictions of modernity. With Félicien Rops has in common the representation of women, the caricaturing view of the world and the enjoyment of the shocking.
Jacques Charlier has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and his works can be found in important private and public collections in Belgium, France and Luxembourg.
Loss of Control is further accompanied by other independent visual worlds in which the historical tension that has always existed between art and psychiatry is made manifest: the psychiatrist Jean Martin Charcot’s famous documentary photography of Parisian mental patients, selected works from the Prinzhorn collection, the University of Heidelberg and from the Brussels-based Art En Marge collection, works from Adolf Wölfli, Hans Bellmer, Louise Bourgeois, Henri Michaux, Jean Dubuffet, Antonin Artaud, and many other artists from the Art Brut movement.
The neurologist and physician Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) published L’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (The Photographic Collection of the Salpetrière Hospital, 1876-1877), a series of black-and-white photographs showing women in the throes of fits of hysteria. The generally accepted psychiatric image of hysteria was at that time associated with female sexuality and an aberration of the soul, associated with the powers of the devil.
The effect of Charcot’s striking images went far beyond their documentary and medical significance: Félician Rops and the artists of the Surrealist movement who found in the subconscious the source of artistic creation, and who saw in madness a metaphor for absolute freedom, were, apparently, inspired by them. In Les Jeux de la Poupée (Doll’s Games, 1949) Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) created a fetishistic doll, whose anatomy with its unforseen possibilities for dislocation typified human desire. Louise Bourgeois’ (b. 1911) famous sculpture Arch of Hysteria (1993), by showing a male body in the most-recognised poses of Charcot’s patients, critically reflected the vulnerability and strength of the women in the photographs.
In his role as a doctor at the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic, Walter Morgenthaler (1882-1952) investigated the artistic versatility of his schizophrenic patient Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930). Wölfli, who was a writer, poet, illustrator and composer, in some 45 books brought together over 25,000 handwritten pages and some 3000 drawings. Morgenthaler was convinced that Wölfli’s illness was the basis for his artistic aptitude.
In 1919 the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933) was charged with collecting and analysing photographs of mentally ill patients. His interest lay in works of art that had an honest, spontaneous, creative origin. His 1922 book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artwork of the Mentally Ill) marked a turning point in the history of ‘outsider’ art, and bestowed artistic worth on certain works by mentally ill patients. Loss of Control contains selected works from the distinguished Prinzhorn collection.
In his search for an anti-cultural position the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) coined the term Art Brut in 1944. Dubuffet collected works from the patients of psychiatric clinics alongside those from spiritualist mediums. He investigated works by prisoners and by those cut off from society, and brought into focus the isolation and marginalization of cultural and artistic positions.
In an imagined dialogue with the great Belgian symbolist Rops, the exhibition also reveals the positions of further artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Works by Jörg Immendorff, René Magritte, Bjarne Melgaard, Yue Minjun, Tracey Moffatt and Francis Picabia, will be on display.
On the first floor of the museum the Belgian artist Marco den Breems (b. 1955, Rotterdam) will present a room-filling installation, suffused with African-inspired "living" magic that will undermine the pretensions of modern Western art.
For many years the artist Marco den Breems has lived and worked in Rotterdam and in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. Under the guise of his alter ego, Ibrahim Bengali Ba, he lives in one of the oldest quarters of Ouagadougou. In Burkina Faso — a land where Christians and Muslims live side by side in peace — den Breems works on installations. His work deals with the many and various problems of globalisation, which in this part of the world are especially evident.
Following the example of Burkina Faso, den Breems undertakes the task of creating bridges between the two world religions. In his artistic work he employs Christian as well as Muslim symbolism, with the aim of analysing them, but without making judgements.
Marco den Breem’s works have been exhibited in the Netherlands as well as in several African countries.
Jan Hoet’s comprehensive farewell exhibition Loss of Control, puts the borders of art and the "controls" of our prevailing society and its culture up for discussion. Starting with the taboo-breaking and decadent fantasies of Félicien Rops, the exhibition confronts us with ambivalences that are as ancient as they are modern — ambivalences between art and life, madness and clear-sightedness, death and sexuality, autistic self-relation and extrinsic constraints.
Social taboos and repressed desires that we have internalised all through our lives, return here in fears, fantasies and passions, in the shapes of hysterical bodies and dissolve the boundaries of the perceptions that hold us under control. Loss of Control undertakes to "shake up our perception of art, rather than art itself.” (Jacques Charlier)
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in three languagesa catalogue in three languagesa catalogue in three languagesa catalogue in three languages with a foreword by Jan Hoet and contributions by Jacques Charlier, Véronique Carpiaux, Carine Fol, Michael Kröger, Pierre Sterckx and Detlef Petry. The catalogue is available at the museum.
Louis Umgelter, o. T., o. J., Bleistift, Farbstifte / Zeichenkarton, 33,2 x 10,7 cm,Inv. Nr. 2848, Courtesy: Sammlung Prinzhorn, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg. |
