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15 February- 25 April, 2010
Curator: Brigitte Léal, Assistant Director in Charge of Collections, Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre de Création Industrielle (MNAM-CCI).
A joint exhibition with the Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona.
Description of the exhibition: Museo Picasso Málaga will be showing the unique and highly personal work of František Kupka (1871-1957), ranging from his earliest academic work to his pioneer ventures into Abstract art. The exhibition will focus on the contribution made by this artist, who earned a significant place in the history of Modern Art: from his fusion of Austrian fin-de-siècle motifs with explorations of the earliest Avant-garde forms, to his special interest in movement and Abstraction.
Work on display: The exhibition contains 91 works, featuring 42 oil paintings, 21 drawings and 28 graphic works from the Centre Georges Pompidou collection of the Czech painter’s work, most of which were legacies donated in 1959 and 1962 by the artist’s widow, Eugénie Kupka.
For some time Kupka’s independent artistic nature allied itself with the Puteaux Group of artists, alongside the Duchamp-Villon brothers, and with the Section d’Or, whose members were also interested in the existence of a fourth dimension in the sense of mathematical proportions, movement and spiritualism. Within this context (with which Kupka was only briefly associated) his investigations led him by 1911 towards a distinctive type of abstraction that he would go on to develop in two principal directions, evident from that point onwards in his work.
Firstly, Kupka investigated the idea of the organic, in other words, the consonance of forms and harmony and of vibrations and fluid forms. Secondly, he focused on a more geometric type of abstraction that involved a profound exploration of the relationship between planes and the idea of the centre, lines, colours and rhythms. “In my opinion, up to that date the entire focus had been on creating a viable type of painting, which could no longer represent anything, given that Nature had died. And my paintings no longer looked like anything that had been seen before […] I took painting, my painting, towards its constituent parts, its elements, as Poussin would have said. And, as you can see, this was always about the plane, the line and the dot. These are the reasons that explain why I sought flight in complete solitude,” the artist explained.
Kupka described his meticulous, systematic and intensely reflective working method in the following terms: “It was just about making a second sketch, a third one and by about the fortieth I began to see it clearly: having closely examined all the elements […] I finally achieved a morphological whole that ‘held together’ and thus really knew what I wanted to do.”
Kupka’s discoveries within both of his two different lines of research aroused the interest of theoreticians and artists such as Theo van Doesburg, who asked him to be involved in the founding of the Abstraction-Création group in 1931. This group defended abstract art in the face of Surrealism’s ideas, and in 1936 Alfred H. Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, included one of Kupka’s works in his legendary exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art.
Kupka had already established some reputation by this point but it was in the 1930s that he started to become well known and to be acknowledged as a pioneer of abstract art, albeit belatedly. Nonetheless, the artist himself saw his aspirations as lying elsewhere: “Even if I never achieve great success in life, I am happy to think that this will come about after my death. My whole self is not just my body, and by then I will be sailing far away, in the realm of space.”
The present exhibition, which has been made possible through the loan of works from the Centre Georges Pompidou and the collaboration of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, features 91 works that offer a comprehensive overview of the different phases of Kupka’s career. It will contribute to an understanding of the artist’s role in the development of an abstract artistic idiom that was independent of early Cubism and which passed through Orphism (a variant of Cubo-Futurism) to associate itself with the ideas of the Abstraction-Création group.
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