Extra City

Allegory of the Cave Painting. The Other Way Around

Part II Group Show/ At Middelheim Museum

26 Oct 2014 - 29 Mar 2015

Installation view
ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE PAINTING. THE OTHER WAY AROUND
Part II Group Show/ At Middelheim Museum
26 October 2014 - 29 March 2015

Curator: Mihnea Mircan

This group exhibition, at Extra City (until 7 December 2014) and at Middelheim Museum (until 29 March 2015), takes the prehistoric Gwion Gwion paintings from Western Australia as mental model. Recent research has established that these paintings are alive, colonized by red bacteria and black fungi, ‘living pigments’ that maintain the chromatic vividness of the figures: the Gwion Gwion paintings are as much a product of prehistory as they are made now. The exhibition assembles modern and contemporary artworks in response to these paintings’ materiality, meaning and time.

The exhibition at Extra City approaches the Gwion Gwion paintings as an organism that extends across time and space and reflects on methods of making and thinking about pictures, on the scenographies of light and shadow that accompany myths of the origin of painting and the birth of knowledge. The central aspect of the exhibition in the Middelheim Museum – as second part of the exhibition in Extra City – is the dialectic of intimacy and knowledge of our relation with art objects. ‘Allegory of the Cave Painting. The Other Way Around’ assembles contemporary artworks that dialogue with artists from the museum’s collection, like Dan Graham, Ann Veronica Janssens and Medardo Rosso.

Artists in het Braempaviljoen:
Pavel Büchler, Dan Graham, Hans van Houwelingen, Alon Levin, Ann Veronica Janssens, Michèle Matyn, Dóra Maurer, Ciprian Mureşan, Navid Nuur, Miklós Onucsán, Erin Shirreff, Paola Yacoub
 

Tags: Dan Graham