On Saturday, October 21, the gallery will open "Correspondances", an exhibition of works by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. This show will feature a selection of works in a variety of media dating from 1963 to 1974, thus representing all phases ofthe artist's career. Marcel Broodthaers was born in Brussels in 1924. His work was shown extensively during his lifetime. After his death in 1976, his work was the subject of retrospectives and exhibitions throughout the world. His last major museum exhibition in the United States took place at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1989 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1990.
Although many in the international art community consider Marcel Broodthaers to be, alongside with Joseph Beuys, one of the most influential artists of the European post-World War Two period, his work is still slow in being received by a wider audience. Meanwhile, Broodthaers has proven to be a true artists' artist. His rich oeuvre (which includes sculpture, paintings, drawings, prints, films, slide projections, video work, and large scale installations) has been a continuous source of inspiration for a wide range of contemporary artists.
Broodthaers, who worked as a writer and poet before he became a visual artist, has always been interested in bringing language and the written word into the visual arts. His particular brand of conceptualism combines the highly poetic gesture with a rigorous intellectualism. The image, the word, and the thing/object are the basic elements of Broodthaers' work. They are the smallest units of our thought processes; they are also the three components of the sign/symbol. This interdependency of words, images, and objects and the way this interdependency shapes our perception, creates a point of departure for the work of Marcel Broodthaers. Thus, the artist cited Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte, alongside the poets Baudelaire, Mallarme, Poe, and Carroll as important influences.
"Correspondances", the title of this show and the accompanying catalogue, refers to a series of pamphlets published in the 1920's by the Belgian Surrealists Paul Nouge and Marcel Lecomte. In his life, Marcel Broodthaers emphasized the tradition of the dialogue. Manifested in interviews and letters, he also wanted his work to be a starting point for communication. Today the title "Correspondances" also takes on another significance: it emphasizes how many contemporary artists still pursue an on-going dialogue with the work of Marcel Broodthaers, now some twenty years after his death.
For the catalogue, Broodthaers was made the subject of a questionnaire that was sent to a number of artists working today. Seventeen artists have responded to this questionnaire: Carl Andre; Daniel Buren; Stan Douglas; Hans Haacke; Ilya Kabakov; Martin Kippenberger; Mike Kelley; Thomas Locher; Christian Philipp Muller; Paul McCarthy; Pavel Pepperstein; Raymond Pettibon; Jason Rhoades; Niele Toroni; Lawrence Weiner; Vadim Zakharov; and Peter Zimmermann. The accompanying 142-page, full color, hard-bound catalogue with an introduction by Dorothea Zwirner will be available at the gallery. The exhibition was made in collaboration with Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.