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Pinault Collection: Self-portrait and Self-invention

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The  Museum Folkwang, in Essen (Germany), In collaboration with the Pinault Collection, is presenting a collective exhibition devoted to the way artists make their images, their bodies, their identities, their personae, the preferred material for their works. It is the first time that an exhibition from the Pinault Collection has been shown in Germany. Dancing with Myself is a poetic and political journey through contemporary art from the end of the 1960s to the present day.

Here, the artist’s body is the starting point for the creative act. It implies a self-criticism that pushes back the limits of the classical self-portrait. The artist’s presence shows through each of these works in different ways. The artist’s body, biography, sexual and social identity, humour or melancholy: all these aspects come into play and are the basis for the artistic work. This exhibition covers a vast field, from the Dadaist’s interest in their immediate environment and their own bodies, up to the display of each individual’s political identity. Constructed in four parts, Dancing with Myself doesn’t tell a story to which we know the ending, but offers the exploration of a contrasting group of artistic practices that range from ironic role plays to the existential experience of the passing of time.

Dancing with Myself brings together about a hundred works (of which about forty have never been shown in earlier Pinault Collection exhibitions) from different disciplines: painting, photography, sculpture and video. The huge canvases by Rudolf Stingel respond to Bruce Nauman’s monumental video installation For Beginners (2010), some magnificent photographs of the duo Gilbert & George from the beginning of their career are shown in the exhibition, and are confronted by their own image in Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture We (2010). One room is devoted to Cindy Sherman’s work, whose postmodern questioning of traditional social roles find a counterpoint in the committed works by young artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier, Paulo Nazareth and Adel Abdessemed.

These exceptional sets from the Pinault Collection, set up a dialogue with the major works from the  Museum  Folkwang collection. This dialogue encourages a stimulating reflection on the question of the staging of the self – diverse, fluctuating and anarchic – in art in the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century, which brings us back to the debates of our time.

Dancing with Myself: Self-portrait and Self-invention
Works from the Pinault Collection
Until 15thJanuary 2017
Museum Folkwang
Museumsplatz 1
45128 Essen
Allemagne

www.museum-folkwang.de

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