Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
May 2021
May 28–August 29, 2021
Palazzo Strozzi presents American Art 1961–2001, a major exhibition taking a new perspective on the history of contemporary art in the United States. The exhibition brought together an outstanding selection of more than eighty works by fifty-three artists including Matthew Barney, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Barbara Kruger, Louise Nevelson, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and many more, exhibited in Florence through a collaboration with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Exhibiting many formative works for the first time in Italy, the exhibition examines the most important figures and movements that marked the development of American art from the beginning of the Vietnam War until the 9/11 attack.
Curated by Vincenzo de Bellis (Director, Fairs and Exhibition Platforms, Art Basel) and Arturo Galansino (Director General, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi), the exhibition takes an in-depth look at the breadth of American artistic production—from pop art to minimalism, from conceptual art to the Pictures Generation—and including more recent artistic developments from the 1990s and 2000s. Paintings, photographs, videos, sculptures, and art installations propose an unprecedented reinterpretation of forty years of history, exploring the role of art as a powerful tool for addressing such topics as consumerism, mass production, feminism and gender identity, racial issues, and the struggle for civil rights.
The era of the Sixties is witnessed through works by masters such as Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, and John Baldessari, figures who became reference points for subsequent generations of artists to redefine the possibilities of art. Artists of the subsequent generation continued to address such topics as the reframing of the male gaze in the work of Cindy Sherman; the appropriation of mass-media images by artists Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, the denunciation of the stigma of AIDS in the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres; or the disquieting narratives of Matthew Barney, whose 1999 video installation Cremaster 2 is shown in an original setting for the first time in Italy.