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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For more information, please call Anne Wrinkle or Beth Finch, at (212) 219-2166. |
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THE DRAWING CENTER PRESENTS: THE PRINZHORN COLLECTION: TRACES UPON THE WUNDERBLOCK, FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG April 15-June 10, 2000 |
From April 15 - June 10, 2000, The Drawing Center presented The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wunderblock, the first New York exhibition of a legendary and influential group of works amassed in the early 1900s by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn. Based at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, the collection is comprised of drawings made by psychiatric patients who suffered social exclusion, psychic illness, and isolation-experiences that are common, yet often erased from collective memory. The Drawing Center's exhibition, which consisted of over two hundred drawings and books, will mark the last time that the collection will be lent prior to the opening in 2001 of a museum at the University of Heidelberg dedicated to the collection. Following its presentation in New York, the exhibition will travel to the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from June 25 - September 17, 2000.
Exhibition Title Drawings in the exhibition, which are astounding in their beauty and intensity, chronicle the painful struggle to reconcile personal, interior existence with the demands of external forces. The Prinzhorn Collection was assembled during an era of new research into mental illness and Dr. Prinzhorn, in his belief in the curative power of personal expression, particularly through the act of drawing, was at the forefront of these methodological changes in treatment. Dr. Prinzhorn was also an advocate for the aesthetic legitimacy of the drawings in his collection. In fact, the collection was assembled with the idea of opening a museum dedicated to them in the 1920s, but due to unrest in Europe, Dr. Prinzhorn's plan for a museum was not realized during his lifetime. Concurrent with Dr. Prinzhorn's research into mental illness were the activities of many avant-garde artists who attempted to transgress existing visual practices by exploring spontaneous acts of creation and the unconscious. People such as the artist Alfred Kubin and the sociologist Georg Simmel came to visit the collection, but its works became more widely known, particularly to artists, with the publication of Prinzhorn's Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill) in 1922. This book became a source of inspiration to numerous European artists, particularly in Germany and France between World War I and II, and for a great number of American artists after 1945. Although avant-garde artists have often turned to the artworks of individuals who evade established categories of art history, the Prinzhorn Collection had a particular influence on the theorization and practice of automatic writing and drawing undertaken by the Surrealists. [Proof that works of the Prinzhorn Collection were challenging the most traditional notions of art became strikingly clear when, between 1931 and 1938, the collection was used by the Nazis as an example of "degenerate art." Works from the collection were juxtaposed with those by other artists such as Kokoschka, Kandinsky, and Schwitters, to discredit and reject modern art.] Following the war, interest in the modes of expression found in the Prinzhorn Collection took root in the United States, particularly during the Abstract Expressionist movement.
Organizers
Publications The Prinzhorn volume of the Drawing Papers will offer the opportunity for new scholarly research into the collection. Containing four major essays, it will introduce New York audiences to a body of drawings that, while little known to the general public, has been influential to the theorization and practice of the avant-garde and some of the most important art movements of the twentieth century. Focusing on drawing in relation to insanity, the Drawing Papers will explore the imaginary order versus the symbolic order in visual language. Drawing Papers (no. 7), will include a foreword and acknowledgments by Catherine de Zegher, Director, The Drawing Center, with essays by: Sander L. Gilman, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Hal Foster, and Allen S. Weiss, as well as selected color plates of works in the exhibition and an exhibition checklist. Contributors:
Funding (March 23, 2000) |
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