EXTRAVAGANZA at Centro de Arte Olivia

Installation View © Dinis Santos

EXTRAVAGANZA

Curator: Antonia Gaeta

April 13, 2019 – September 15, 2019

Centro de Arte Oliva

The show EXTRAVAGANZA includes works by Agatha Wojciechowsky, Anna Zemánková, Aurel Iselstöger, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Margarethe Held, Derrick Alexis Coard and Karl Hans Janke among others from the Treger/Saint Silvestre Collection.

Read here Antonia Gaeta's text about the exhibition:

The rhetorical apprehension of a specific strangeness

In the chronicle Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, Jorge Luis Borges wrote about “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which he catalogued species and different shapes in a random and subjective way. Every one of those shapes could assume a meaning or a substance created ad hoc for the situation that could basically be used for all things in the universe according to the level of interest and imagination of the readers. This apparent disorder or non-rigorous cataloguing made the coexistence of a great number of realities possible and found a place capable of welcoming objects and ideas.
In a simple exercise of comparison and analogy – conditio sine qua non for all sorts of intellectual production -, “that” Chinese encyclopaedia seemed to be the most suitable in order to explain the ideas that underlie and materialise in the exhibition Extravaganza.
A certain strangeness that is present in the artworks, the obsession with the obscene and nonsense, the refusal of logical rules, several etcetera (as Borges would say), the abstractions, the taste for the absurd, the chaos, the incongruence and all kinds of paradox, are assembled in an irreverent and discontinuous fashion, in an ingenious, ambiguous and redundant exhibition design, with several white walls.
A softly announced feeling of surprise surrounds the exhibition: the artworks don’t belong to the same genre or a specific geographical area, or even the same historical period. The artists are sometimes anonymous, unknown or working under pseudonyms. Almost illiterate, without artistic or literary training, they are, however, capable of bringing a great spiritual and creative emotion through drawings and portraits of never seen before landscapes, hard to catalogue physiognomies, the obsessive repetition mixed with autofiction and possibly the promise of another identity.

And here the artist’s biography helps contextualise and better understand – in case some find it necessary – the artworks: all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, had complex lives, irreparable losses, accidents, went through deprivations, were persecuted and cast aside, had multidimensional and extra-terrestrial experiences.
Through a creativity that is free from reason it is possible that they have found the access keys to the beyond and, perhaps, had the possibility to create other connections with body and mind. All these suppositions are possible, at least I like to think that.
However, what is favoured in Extravaganza is the pars destruens of the Treger/Saint Silvestre collection, in other words, the analysis of the relation between the idea of beauty and harmony that is done through a set of artworks whose common denominator is a non-linear speculative dynamic; an erratic or rapidly changing situation, unusual, bizarre. An extravagating that replaces ratio and norms with intuition and the visionary, that combines brilliance and revelry, dementia and insanity with contradictory and anomalous situations. (...)

For more Information and to see all Installation Views of the Exhibition visit: tsscollection.org

centrodearteoliva.pt

"Outliers and American Vanguard Art" at Lacma, Los Angeles

Type 42 (Anonymous), Ava Gardner, mixed media on photography, 1960s-1970s, 8,3 x 10,8 cm

Type 42, Morton Bartlett and Eugene von Bruenchenhein are part of the show "Outliers and American Vanguard Art", curated by Lynne Cooke at LACMA, Los Angeles until March 17, after it was shown in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. in 2018.

LACMA hosts the West Coast presentation of Outliers and American Vanguard Art, the first major exhibition to explore key moments in American art history when avant-garde artists and outliers intersected, and how their interchanges ushered in new paradigms based on inclusion, integration, and assimilation. The first part of the exhibition illustrates how the early history of American modernism, especially the first years of the Museum of Modern Art, championed folk art and self-taught artists before the ascendance of abstract expressionism. The second section begins in the late 1960s when artists affiliated with the Chicago Imagists and West Coast assemblage practices became the leading advocates for outliers and visionary artists. The third section shows the continued impact of outlier practices on contemporary art.

The exhibition features over 250 works in a range of media by more than 80 self-taught and trained artists such as Henry Darger, Sam Doyle, William Edmondson, Lonnie Holley, Greer Lankton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Matt Mullican, Horace Pippin, Martín Ramírez, Betye Saar, Judith Scott, Charles Sheeler, Cindy Sherman, Bill Traylor, and Kara Walker.

Read more on the homepage of Lacma.

Check out the catalogue of "Outliers and American Vanguard Art" at National Gallery of Art

Catalogue "Outliers and American Vanguard Art", National Gallery of Art

Type 42, Morton Bartlett, Eugene von Bruenchenhein are on view until May 13, 2018

"Outliers and American Vanguard Art is the most comprehensive show ever to examine outliers in dialogue with their established peers. It is sure to inspire vigorous conversation about how artists and the work they make are represented.

Since the last century, the relationship between vanguard and self-taught artists has been defined by contradiction. The established art world has been quick to make clear distinctions between trained and untrained artists, yet at the same time it has been fascinated by outliers, whom it draws selectively and intermittently into its orbits. For a new exhibition launching at the National Gallery of Art, curator Lynne Cooke explores shifting conceptualizations of the American outlier across the 20th century, drawing on the inherent sociality of the exhibition in her installation of these works. This companion catalog, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, offers a fantastic opportunity to consider works by schooled and self-taught creators in relation to each other and defined by historical circumstance."

Lynne Cooke

For more information click here:
nga.gov/exhibitions/2018/outliers-and-american-vanguard-art.html

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