FRIEZE MASTERS 2020 VIEWING ROOM
CREATION FROM DESTRUCTION
The birth of the new and unique comes from the destruction of the old. This year for Frieze Masters 2020 Viewing Room, Robilant+Voena will present art that manifested in the wake of calamity and that testifies to our innate impulse of beauty, meaning, and reconciliation in the act of creation.
“Every act of creation was once an act of destruction”.
-Pablo Picasso
Watch our new video 'CREATION from DESTRUCTION': https://www.robilantvoena.com/video/40/
Early modern Europe was beset by calamity. Life was fragile, and conflict, pestilence, and famine felled even the most prosperous. Macabre images like the Vanitas from the circle of Jacopo Ligozzo bear witness to a society in which death was a brutal fact of daily life. Yet the Christian message promised resurrection and eternal joy for those who had suffered. Artists responded by portraying skeletal remains such as the Skull by Ubaldo Gandolphi to remind viewers that power, riches, and beauty were fleeting, images of martyred saints suggested an antidote to the transience of earthly life—the faithful could anticipate heavenly rewards greater than any worldly pleasure.
The eighteenth century ushered in a new age of reason, science and enlightened philosophy. Rationalism competed with religion in the quest for truth and meaning. Scholars rediscovered the great civilizations of the ancient past, and travellers to Italy confronted the monumental ruins of the Roman Empire, inspiring awe but also reflection—if this greatest civilization could fall and be lost to time, so could their own achievements. Artists painted the ancient ruins again, which is illustrated by Vanvitelli’s View of the Colosseum and Arch of Constantine from the East and Antonio Joli’s Interior of the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum. Like the memento mori images of past centuries, these works such as Alessandro Magnasco’s Joseph Interprets the Dreams of the Pharaoh’s Servants Whilst in Prison (ca. 1726–31) found beauty in decay. But while a memento mori spoke to the exigencies of the individual soul, Rome’s ruined temples exposed the fragility of entire civilisations.
In the twentieth century, world wars threatened the civilisations forged in the crucible of the Enlightenment. Empires fell, and new global powers emerged. Unprecedented physical and psychological destruction spurred artists to demolish and reconfigure Western artistic practice. Echoing contemporary advances in science and technology, material experimentation, technical innovation and conceptual invention were hallmarks of post-war art, for example John Chamberlain, Untitled, ca. 1963, And. Channelling their ruined surroundings, artists like Mimmo Rotella and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale assaulted and jettisoned canvas. Ripping, cutting, burning, and affixing objects to their surfaces in lieu of paint, they created an iconoclastic art which evoked life and death, creation and destruction.
The history of humankind is pockmarked by calamity. Yet from the detritus of destruction emerge works of art that enable us to see the opportunity of what lies ahead.
Link to the exhibition pages our website at www.robilantvoena.com
For further information please contact the gallery at [email protected] or at +44.207.409.1540
All images are subject to copyright. Gallery approval must be granted prior to reproduction.
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