Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero
February 1 – April 14 2014
Peggy Guggenheim Collection
From February 1 to April 14, 2014, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Themes & Variations. The Empire of Light. This innovative curatorial formula for the spaces of the Venetian museum originated in 2002 and is now in its fourth edition. The project offers visitors a fresh perception of familiar and less familiar works in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection through a multi-layered dialogue between Modernist masters and contemporary artists, thanks also to loans from other collections. Within the same spaces, paintings from the 19th- and 20th-century avant-gardes confront thematically works produced in the aftermath of the Second World War and up to the threshold of the contemporary.
Themes & Variations. The Empire of Light combines art from Peggy Guggenheim’s museum, other works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and a number of loans, including a selection from a refined American private collection. Seminal paintings by masters such as Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, and Lucio Fontana will be displayed in the company of other paintings and sculptures in a vivid contrast and comparison. In this way, viewers will be provoked to look beyond the customary categories of the 20th century avant-garde, culminating in contemporary work by Gabriele Basilico, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Ruff, Kiki Smith, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Piotr Uklański.
The exhibition’s theme is light: how its assonances and contrasts interact with the pictorial subject, revealing for us the female nude for example, or deployed in abstract composition, or illuminating landand cityscape. Light as reflection and radiance, light as dawn, as sunset and twilight, light in suspension, light that induces the mystery of continuity and mutability of place. Light, but also the absence of light, a surreal darkness that lends its force to René Magritte’s celebrated Empire of Light, titular protagonist of the exhibition and one of Peggy Guggenheim’s favorites, as were other surrealist paintings displayed here that scan the exhibition rooms, diversifying its themes and scrambling its chronology. Variations of the theme always come back to the collection of Peggy Guggenheim herself, with its immortal masters and works of outstanding quality—inspirational muses for so much contemporary research. This is therefore a unique occasion, an invitation to travel through time in art history guided by the great American collector’s superb eye and far-sighted vision, and to glimpse the evolution of universal themes in art, such as that of light and of its peculiar and always original expressive forms. The final section of the exhibition is a tribute to Italian art by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and specifically to Fausto Melotti (1901-1986), with works by this poetic sculptor such as Contrappunto II, Orfeo dimentico, Chiave di violino. Appropriately Melotti titled several of his sculptures Theme and Variations, whence derives the title of this series of exhibitions, since the first in 2002.
Themes & Variations. The Empire of Light is supported by Intrapresae Collezione Guggenheim, BSI. Swiss Bankers since 1873 and Regione del Veneto. The organizers are grateful to Corriere della Sera and Radio Italia as media partners. Hangar Design Group designed the exhibition’s communication materials. Grateful thanks to Mapei and Tempini as technical sponsors. Programs auxiliary to the exhibition are supported by the Fondazione Araldi Guinetti, Vaduz.