HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS PRESENT AN EXHIBITION EXPLORING THE WORK OF AMERICAN ARTIST ED RUSCHA AND GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHER ANDREAS GURSKY
"Landmark Pictures" Examines Two Approaches to Landscape Photography and Demonstrates Art Museums’ Growing Commitment to Contemporary Art
Cambridge, MA – February, 2000 – The Harvard University Art Museums is presenting an exhibition exploring the work of artists Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937) and Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955). Landmark Pictures: Ed Ruscha and Andreas Gursky opened January 8 and will remain on view though April 23, 2000. The exhibition will be presented in two parts, the first (January 8 – March 19) at the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the second (mid March – late April) in the Sert Gallery, inaugurating the newly renovated space in the Corbusier-designed Carpenter Center for Visual and Performing Arts, adjacent to the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger Museums.
"The Art Museums have actively collected the art of our times since the early twentieth century. Over the years, these holdings have grown significantly, prompting the recent creation of a curatorial department of modern and contemporary art. The Sert Gallery will be dedicated to contemporary art, and along with other programming at the Art Museums, will allow us to expand our initiatives in this area," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard University Art Museums. "Landmark Pictures also marks the beginning of collaborations between the Art Museums and Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies Department, which builds upon our growing role with the University for fostering collaborations between schools and departments."
Landmark Pictures: Ed Ruscha and Andreas Gursky encompasses more than forty objects, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and books. Both artists are well known for their large-scale images of recognizable sites – Ruscha for the particular L.A. and Hollywood landscape and Gursky for German and international landscapes and sites. Landmark Pictures examines how each artist has reconfigured the traditional understanding of landscape by creating highly seductive, richly associative images that evoke landmarks that are at once foreign and familiar to viewers.
Neither Ruscha nor Gursky focuses on "set-up" photography, instead reinforcing the experience of a particular site by applying abstract effects from painting and commercial imagery, investing the familiar, often overlooked details of places we visit daily with acute significance. Ruscha and Gursky are also linked by the degree of distance they each maintain from their subjects. By focusing the viewers’ attention deliberately on overall design elements rather than the subjects themselves, the seemingly simple imagery of their works is revealed as highly complex.
A comparison of the work of the two artists is furthered by their individual connections to the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, with whom Gursky studied and who were early proponents of Ruscha’s work. The Bechers are renowned for their pioneering photography as well as their tremendous influence as teachers at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. The Bechers’ work – comprehensive photographic records of industrial buildings such as water towers and gas tanks – countered the prevailing expressionism and angst of much postwar European art. As teachers, they were impressed by an American achievement they felt had been lost in Europe after the war: the ability to transfer everyday images to the realm of myth. They saw this in Ruscha’s work and used his books in their teaching, focusing on the irony and subjectivity that marks Ruscha’s idiosyncratic documentary sensibility. Gursky builds upon a similar sensibility in his work by elevating the everyday images that are his subjects through an exacting focus on their inherent design elements. This focus takes his subjects out of their natural context and imbues them with grander, almost epic, characteristics.
Part I of Landmark Pictures: Ed Ruscha and Andreas Gursky features Ruscha's 1963 painting, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, as well as many of the artist’s books from the 1960s, including recent edition photographs based on his 1967 book, 34 Parking Lots in Los Angeles. His new painting Highland, Franklin, Yucca and two works from his Metro Plots series are also included. These works are installed with five photographs by Gursky, dating from 1989 to 1994. Part I also features several edition photographs by the Bechers from the Busch-Reisinger Museum's collection. Part II of the exhibition will feature a number of recent photographs by Gursky, including his dramatic panorama Los Angeles, along with several other works by Ruscha from the mid-1990's, such as pieces from his Cityscape series as well as several prints and drawings.
"The ways in which photography and painting inform each other is a topic of great interest to many artists right now and Gursky is one of the most celebrated contemporary "painter-photographers". Gursky’s virtuosity as a photographer masks the conceptual complexity of his pictures: his photographs are painterly precisely because everything transpires on the surface," added exhibition curator Linda Norden, Barbara Lee Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Fogg Art Museum. "Ruscha, who used photography to rethink painting when painting meant Abstract Expressionism, was also among the first to recognize that surface can be as telling as depth. Looking at Gursky's works next to Ruscha's allows us to see just how much "photographic" and "painterly" have evolved over the last four decades."
Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums is one of the leading arts institutions
in the United States and the world. It is distinguished by the range and
depth of its collections and its groundbreaking exhibitions and original
research. For more than a century it has been the nation's premier training
ground for museum professionals and scholars, and is renowned for its
seminal and ongoing role in the development of the discipline of art history
in this country.
The three Harvard University Art Museums – the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum – are all outstanding institutions in their respective fields. The Fogg also houses the Straus Center for Conservation, a leader in the research and development of scientific and technology-based analysis of art. The 150,000 objects in the Art Museums' collections range in date from ancient times to the present, and come from Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Each Museum also has an active program of special exhibitions that promotes new scholarship in its respective areas of focus.
As an integral component of the Harvard University community, the Art Museums serve as a resource for all students, adding a special dimension both to their specific areas of study and to their lives at and after Harvard. The Art Museums welcome members of the public to experience its collections and special exhibitions, as well as to enjoy its lectures, symposia, and other programs.
The collections are divided among ten curatorial areas (Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics; Architecture and Design; Asian Art; Busch-Reisinger Museum; Drawings; Islamic and Later Indian Art; Modern and Contemporary Art; Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts; Prints; and Photographs) and are comprehensive and encyclopedic within their areas. Developed with an emphasis on their value for teaching and research, these holdings are unique in their breadth and quality, and are enhanced continually through gifts and acquisitions. Together, they comprise one of the finest university art collections in the world, with resources rivaling those of many major public museums.
The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed National holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18 and for individuals on Saturdays until noon and all day on Wednesdays.
For general information, please call (617) 495-9400. All groups of 7 or more must be scheduled in advance, please call (617) 496-8576. Web site: www.artmuseums.harvard.edu. The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.