Dates:
First installation: February 2–August 4, 2002.
Second installation: April 6–End of May 2002.
Third installation: June 7–August 4, 2002.

Venue:
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

Curator:
Luca Massimo Barbero.

Artists:
Edmondo Bacci, Alberto Burri, Francis Bacon, César, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Gwyther Irwin, Asger Jorn, Bice Lazzari, René Magritte, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Mimmo Rotella, Giuseppe Santomaso, Tancredi, Laurence Vail, Victor Vasarely and Emilio Vedova, among others.

Exhibition description:
Themes and Variations: Post-war Art from the Guggenheim Collections was a six-month cycle of installations that brought together paintings, sculptures and works on paper from the holdings from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The cycle of installations offered both European and American art, with an emphasis on Italian art, and included a number of private loans. The project provoked a fresh understanding of some of the works of art in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection through the presentation of works that have not been seen by the Italian public for many years. The project contextualized the post-war art that is an integral part of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

A series of three two-month installations displayed works by a core of post-war twentieth-century artists, including Edmondo Bacci, Alberto Burri, Francis Bacon, César, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, Asger Jorn, Bice Lazzari, René Magritte, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Mimmo Rotella, Giuseppe Santomaso, Tancredi, Laurence Vail, Victor Vasarely and Emilio Vedova, and others.

The first installation explored the manner in which Peggy Guggenheim promoted and collected art of an emerging group of young Italian artists that were active in Venice in the 1950s, such as Bacci, Pizzinato, Santomaso, Tancredi and Vedova. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was simultaneously assembling its own collection of art by Italian artists of the same generation, among them Afro, Burri and Capogrossi. This first installation of the cycle presented in depth the work of Mirko Basaldella.

The second installation was mainly devoted to Peggy Guggenheim’s collection of surrealist art, which provided a visual tool in the comprehension of fundamental concepts such as the unconscious, the idea of metamorphosis, primordial fantasies, or the magic of ritual. Three consecutive rooms were articulated with the themes Fantastical Settings; Myth, Magic and Ritual; and Metamorphosis of the Human Figure. The exhibition presented sculpture from the collection: Giacometti, Moore, Armitage, Chadwick, Richier, to Butler, Hare, César and Lipchitz. These sculptures expressed themes ranging from metamorphosis to a new interpretation of the human body; both of which were a typical interest of sculptors working during the post-war years. This second installation of Themes and Variations included a small gallery of American abstract expressionists, de Kooning, Marca-Relli, Tobey and Sam Francis. Another room was devoted to Venetian artists linked to Peggy Guggenheim, followed by a gallery entirely dedicated to the abstract art of Bice Lazzari. The installation concluded with works by the CoBrA artists: Alechinsky, Appel, Corneille and Jorn.

The third installation was concentrated on Alberto Burri, with two galleries dedicated solely to his work. From early in his career, Burri expressed a strong gestural quality, letting matter transform itself by chance processes, similar to the style of the American Abstract Expressionists. After having worked with tar, molds and other expressive non-traditional mediums, Burri began to burn materials in the mid 1950s, manipulating and transforming them with a flame torch, creating a technique that he would later call “combustione.” He first practiced this technique using wood and then plastic, a material that melts in strange and capricious forms, sometimes resembling human skin and tissue. The two rooms dedicated to Burri exhibited six large burnt plastics, dating from the early sixties. This installation was organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini “Collezione Burri,” Città di Castello, and made possible thanks to the support of Maurice Kanbar and Isabella del Frate Rayburn Eich.

Catalogue:
No catalogue. Brochure in English.