Ca’ Pesaro, the International Gallery of Modern Art, hosts from May 8 to September 22 the first exhibition in Italy of the work of Arshile Gorky, the celebrated and influential figure of 20th Century American Art.
Presented as a comprehensive retrospective survey, this exhibition will examine the stages of Gorky’s remarkable career from his earliest works during the 1920s, where his interrogation of Cézanne’s compositions permeated his approach to painting, through to the culmination of his autodidactic study of modern masters and movements, to the point where the elements from these various stimuli explicitly coalesced into Gorky’s singular and powerful vision.
Arshile Gorky: 1904-1948 will seek to highlight that Gorky’s artistic voice is present from the earliest stages of his career, when he was seemingly in thrall to the work of past masters, and strengthened as his work progressed.
The exhibition is bringing 80 emblematic works of art together borrowed from significant international institutions and private collections: among the lenders, the Tate London, the National Gallery of Art of Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Centre Pompidou of Paris, the Israel Museum of Jerusalem. The exhibition will include 80 works.
The final section of the exhibition will illustrate the extent to which Gorky’s pictorial energy and imagination merged with his renewed encounter with nature in the landscapes of Virginia and Connecticut over the summers of 1942-1945. A strong selection of these mature masterworks, with their array of surreal, abstract, and figurative, reveal an artist at the very height of his extraordinary creative power.
The inimitable quality of the late work was recognized by Surrealist poet André Breton who, in a catalogue preface for an exhibition of Gorky’s work in 1945, described it as a ‘hybrid’, thereby acknowledging the complexity of Gorky’s evocation of the natural world united with a myriad of personal memories and differing influences. In addition to paintings, the exhibition will include a selection of Gorky’s works on paper, demonstrating his remarkable skill in drawing.
Website: www.capesaro.visitmuve.it
Location: Ca’Pesaro, International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice
Schedule: May 8 – Sep. 22, 2019
Opening hours: 10 am – 6 pm Closed on Mondays
Ticket: up to €10
