Opening date: January 22 - May 19, 2013
Curator: Petra Joos
Location: Galleries 305, 306, 307
The presentation Stories of History compares and contrasts two important works from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection, created by Cy Twombly and Georg Baselitz. Both are personal narratives that revisit historical figures from two chronologically distant periods, using a language charged with gesturality yet unrelated to the Expressionisms.
In their praxis, Twombly and Baselitz are not like other contemporary artists who appropriate history in order to introduce new angles or reinterpretations of reality; as José Luis Brea described it, “The world of the latest things, now become image.” Ernst van Alphen also coined the term “new historiography” in reference to the tendency of many contemporary visual artists to modernize or update history and the past by putting inherited reality through a kind of “post-production” process, which means that the artist’s work ends up being that of a historian in the Benjaminian sense of the word. However, Twombly and Baselitz do not do “remakes” of historical events; instead, they present “stories” based on those facts, told from the artist’s point of view, in which their provocations are made within the artistic process rather than on the political stage.