Artists: Melanie Bonajo (NL), Boyle Family (UK), Hugo Canoilas (PT / AT), Walter De Maria (USA, 1935-2013), Chiara Fumai (IT), Taf Hassam (UK / NL), Carl Michael von Hausswolff (SE), gerlach and buy (NL), Hidenori Mitsue (JP / EN), Emilio Moreno (ES / NL), Xue Mu (CN / EN), Jan van de Pavert (NL), Roland Schimmel (NL) Michael Stubbs (UK).
The group exhibition 'When elephants come marching in: Echoes of the Sixties in Art Now' explores how the 'turbulent' sixties, consciously or intuitively, returns in contemporary art. Curator Mark Kremer selected work by fourteen artists, in which diverse ideas and experiences resonate from the sixties.
The 1960's as a period of protest and activism for freedom, a longing for nature, drug experimentation and intense sensory experiences. There emerged two major movements that have drawn long tracks in Western art and cultural history: Psychedelia and Conceptualism. The two are often seen as opposites; Populist Psychedelia that arose from the desire for an expansion of consciousness - associated with drug use, the sub or counter culture and experimental music. And intellectual Conceptualism; visual art in which the idea is central to it and which is synonymous with high art.
Spirited hippies and conceptual artists therefore are rarely mentioned in one sentence. The desire for wild intoxication is hardly compatible with the pursuit of the pure idea. But does that line go? And how do artists today, consciously or intuitively, do so with that dual legacy of the sixties?
I presented a single, early, cream coloured 'cake' painting which gave me the opportunity to re-contextualise this work in a context that felt alien to its' making and original intentions (as a deconstructed parody of gesture in modernist painting and as an object of 'consumed' luxury in the art market).
This exhibition is preliminary research done in two MA workshops in 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 on the DAI (Dutch Art Institute) in Enschede, which focused on art and ideas of the sixties.
