The Jan Krugier Gallery is pleased to present Stillness, an exhibition on view from November 6 through December 18, 2009.
This exhibition explores dynamic and static notions of stillness, important to such artistic movements as pittura metafisica and Surrealism, but will also explore broader applications of this concept throughout the 20th-century.
Stillness can be understood as both a moment caught in time, a pause in which movement is pending, and as stasis, where movement ceases to exist. Balthus, Domenico Gnoli, Giorgio Morandi, Edward Hopper and Philip Guston investigate these ideas through their still-lifes, whose quiet objects at once suggest permanence and, contrarily, emptiness. Paul Klee, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Pablo Picasso also explore the conflicting nature of stillness through their tense and contradictory geometric elements, which evoke a conflicting sense movement and inertia.
Stillness can also be understood as tranquility and as silence, important aesthetic and philosophical ideals since antiquity. Works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Georges Seurat continue this tradition through images of repose and idyll. Anthony Caro, Henri Laurens and Julio Gonzalez further notions of tranquility and silence through the harmonic balance of their sculptural works.
This exhibition revisits the themes and ideas of Jan Krugier’s 1966 exhibition “Homage to Silence or Metaphisica”. Stillness has always played an important role in Jan Krugier’s vision. He underlined that no serious artistic achievement can exist without some measure of silence. In this way, art is linked to the past, allowing it to surpass the aesthetic constraints of the present. Krugier insisted that the art in which silence has become the primary moving force reaches its goal through space and form alone, without becoming pedantic or anecdotal.
The Jan Krugier Gallery honors the memory of Jan Krugier and, through this and future exhibitions, affirms the timelessness of his unique artistic vision.
www.krugier.com
