The New Museum presents Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs. On view from May 19–July 3, 2011.
“Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs” is the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the influential eighty-five-year-old artist and activist Gustav Metzger.
For over fifty years, Metzger has worked across a variety of mediums to touch on issues of war, consumerism, and ecology. This exhibition presents the most complete presentation to date of the artist’s series of sculptural installations titled “Historic Photographs.” Begun in the mid-1990s, these works confront the viewer with some of the most powerful and tragic images of twentieth-century history, capturing events including the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, the horrors of the Vietnam War, the Oklahoma City bombing, and environmental destruction in contemporary England.
Metzger conceived of the “Historic Photographs” as a radical response to the desensitization towards images of death and destruction in society and the loss of historical memory. He reconfigures each of these iconic photographs by enlarging, obscuring, or hiding them from view using simple materials. Instead of a momentary glance, the “Historic Photographs” require an engagement with photography that is intimate, tactile, and prolonged. They create powerful physical experiences that transmit the emotional and intellectual weight of history. Instead of creating memorials to the past, Metzger’s works are gestures of social activism with the express intention of rebuilding our understanding of and sensitivity towards historical trauma.
Image: Gustav Metzger, Historic Photographs: To Crawl Into—Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938, 1996. Black-and-white photograph on PVC and cotton cover, Historic Photographs: To Walk Into, Massacre on the Mount,Jerusalem, 8 November, 1990, 1996. Installation view, Generali Foundation, Vienna. Courtesy Generali Foundation, Photo: © Werner Kaligofsky, 2005
About the New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum was conceived as a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding, dedicated building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of ongoing experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas. For more information visit newmuseum.org
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