Dates: June 14–October 6, 2013
Curator: Bice Curiger
Galleries: third floor
Venues: Kunsthaus Zürich and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Co-organized by Kunsthaus Zürich and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Riotous Baroque. From Cattelan to Zurbarán – Tributes to Precarious Vitality strikes up a dialogue between 17th-century artworks and contemporary pieces in an attempt to extricate the concept of the Baroque from its conventional stylistic pigeonhole, moving away from clichés such as pomp, rich ornament, or gold and instead focusing on the Baroque as a "tribute to precarious vitality": the riotous yet uncertain nature of existence.
The show juxtaposes works by great 17th-century masters such as Pieter Aertsen, Giovanni Battista Langetti, Alessandro Magnasco, José de Ribera, Jan Steen, David Teniers the Younger, Simon Vouet, and Francisco de Zurbarán with that of renowned contemporary creators like Maurizio Cattelan, Robert Crumb, Urs Fischer, Glenn Brown, Tobias Madison, Paul McCarthy, and Cindy Sherman, among others. Rather than drawing superficial thematic and formal analogies, the exhibition attempts to enable the two realities, with all their differences and affinities, to collide, cross-fertilize and permeate each other, inviting the audience to see them in a whole new light.