DMA - DAEJEON MUSEUM OF ART

Daejeon Museum of Art proudly hosts <About this> in cooperation with MMCA Korea.
It is significant that this is a realization of a balanced national development, a major national task, focusing on research and
exhibition exchanges between the central and regional art museums, rather than just exhibitions.

<About this> focuses on the characteristics of 20th century art called 'Experimental Avant-garde'.
Among the collections from MMCA Korea, through artworks that reflect the flow of contemporary art topography,
we can see various experiments and Avant-garde developed under the name of 'Contemporary Art' by age, and the art of the museum's collection,
Introducing the values ​​of the times. This exhibition intends to present the way in which the flow of art, which has been constantly changing in the era of dynamism,
communicates and an indicator to advance. In addition, due to the recent coronavirus infection-19, overseas travel, cultural and leisure life are limited,
and it is also a valuable opportunity for tired citizens to meet international contemporary art in one place.
In particular, you can also meet the works of Fernando Botero (Colombia, 1932 ~), which is loved in Korea with a social-critical message
by witfully transforming cultural icons or proportions of the human body.

* The title of the exhibition refers to the destructive experimental spirit peculiar to contemporary art that resists traditional customs,
borrowed from the poem <About this> (1923) by the Russian avant-garde poet and painter Vladimir Mayakovsky. do.

Fernando Botero, 1932~
Dancers
2000, oil on canvas, 185×122cm
MMCA Collection

Fernando Botero was born in Colombia in 1932, and his works are characterized by the swollen forms of the figures, which are borrowed from paintings by masters. His methodology of appropriating the works of great artists to recreate them is his way to pay tribute to those masters and simultaneously reflects his conviction that an artist needs to have his/her own originality by which a totally different atmosphere can be given to the same image. As a Columbian artist, Botero wanted to spread Latin culture throughout the world. The artist expressed a variety of everyday life and recreational activities enjoyed in Latin America including dance and music, and this can be exemplified by this work in which women and men are dancing together in their daily life.

Data provided by MMCA

Jan Voss, 1936~
Basement
1994, oil on canvas, 195×280cm
MMCA Collection

Jan Voss is a German-born French painter. He once was associated with a group whose artistic focus was placed on narrative-based figuration, but later he turned to symbols and other formative elements which were combined to produce certain meanings. Basement (1994) is one of his works representative of his later style in which shapes and symbols overlap and collide with one another in the way that balances between will and chance and between the rational and the irrational interact
so as to cause unplanned things to occur.

Data provided by MMCA

Gilles Aillaud, 1928~2005
Kilimanjaro in the Storm
1991, oil on canvas, 156×197cm
MMCA Collection

Gilles Aillaud is one of the representative painters of French Nouvelle Figuration. The artist’s focal subjects were the animals trapped in the zoo or living in natural settings. His works in which these ordinary subjects are clearly depicted in thin brushwork are marked by dramatic composition attained by his use of colors, lines, and touches and unhampered emptiness as in watercolor or black ink paintings. With these caged animals Aillaud intended to reflect alienated social relationships in modern society. Kilimanjaro in the Storm (1991) is a work he made on site while witnessing in distance Kilimanjaro amidst the storm during his trip to Africa, enabling one to be immersed in its both realistic and poetic ambience.

Data provided by MMCA

Gilles Aillaud, 1928~2005
Hippopotamus in the Shower
1979, oil on canvas, 161×190cm
MMCA Collection

Hippopotamus in the Shower (1979) shows a hippopotamus showering in its cage. The artist’s use of the bird’s eye view makes the hippopotamus look like a rock. The water from the hose is sprayed on the back of the hippo giving the hippo a shiny appearance and falls down onto the ground and spreads away, and all these are depicted very realistically and refreshingly. Notwithstanding a figurative work, this is quite abstract, and in this respect, it is a kind of semiabstract work. In other words, it deals with the actual , yet the artist’s stylistic attitude toward it is distanced from conventional figurative art. As a result, it is fully imbued with modern visual sensitivity. This is a general characteristic of the figurative art that emerged after the domination of abstract art in the 1950s and 1960s. Also, this work takes a critical stance toward civilization: the one-sided view of an from above represents human dominance over nature; the rock-like body of the hippopotamus addresses the transformation and destruction of nature done violently by humans.

Data provided by MMCA

Antoni Tapies, 1923~2012
M Blanka
1991, mixed media on panel, 250×300cm
MMCA Collection

Born in Barcelona, Spain, Antoni Tapies led the Spanish avant-garde painting movement from the 1950s through the 1970s. His works is characterized by his choices of subject matters: the dreariness of Spanish lands, the walls of ordinary people’s old houses, abstract images reminiscent of broken doors, the afflictions of Spain after being devastated by its civil war, and its modern conflicts. M Blanka (1991) in which images are drawn over a thick of sand on a wooden panel appears to be an abstract painting at first glance, but a closer look reveals a shocking scene in which a human figure is drawn upside down and a piece of wood is wedged between its legs. Originated from the artist’s keen critical consciousness of his time, both the inner suffering and violence of human beings are exposed to the extent that one is terrified by it. Marked by the element of materiality, which is an essential attribute of contemporary art of the late twentieth century, it is a masterpiece that symbolically epitomizes the problematic issues of the period inundated by war and violence.

Data provided by MMCA

Pierre Soulages, 1919~
Painting
1985, oil on canvas, 222×157cm×3ea
MMCA Collection

Pierre Soulages is a painter who set a new phase of European abstract art. Also, he gave importance to the arrangement of works in space, and in fact some of his works were presented as installations in exhibitions. His “Beyond Black” series announces his long-standing inquiry into the state of light. The artist paints on the pictorial surface the color of black that is black because it absorbs all the light, and ironically this makes him seem to be exploring diverse new effects of light reflected from the canvas. Another distinctive feature of his work is its mural-like nature: Like a folding screen in a building, it occupies one of the walls of the gallery without failing to secure its physicality as a component of the exhibition space.

Data provided by MMCA

Erro, 1932~
Emergency Rescue
2002, acrylic on canvas, 144×72cm
MMCA Collection

Erro’s work is typical of the representative tendency of European Post-pop art. It emerged all over Europe as both a reaction and a complement to American pop art of the 1960s with the intent to criticize the political and social conditions by appropriating cartoon imagery popular in the United States. By appropriating images of globally influential popular American cartoon figures such as Batman and Mickey Mouse, Erro makes indirect criticisms on cultural imperialism and social issues including violence and imperialistic messages ded in children’s cartoon imagery.

Data provided by MMCA

Imi Knœbel, 1940~
New Love(4)
2002, acrylic on aluminum, 75×75cm×4ea
MMCA Collection

Knœbel cultivated a new painting territory composed of forms and colors beyond conventional geometric color abstraction. His work has been a continuous inquiry into the question of what painting is, painting and the physical space and environment in which it is placed, and the work of painting called canvas. By extending the pictorial surface onto the space beyond canvas, in other words, onto the wall and the floor, the artist ignited countless discourses on painting. While still reflecting his unceasing interest in the elements of wall and square, his later works explores into the domain of sensitivity through the use of rich palettes of colors that cover cold and hard aluminum surfaces and the employment of powerful brushwork.

Data provided by MMCA

Jean-Charles Blais, 1956~
A Terrible Disease
1984, gouache on paper, 95×89cm
MMCA Collection

In the 1980s the world art scene witnessed the prence of a tendency pursuing new modes of figuration. An emphatic example is Figuration Libre that emerged in France. Jean-Charles Blais, a representative artist of this free figuration, has painted on various recycled materials such as water bottles, newspapers, and wrapping strawboard. As he paints, he chooses as the ground the uneven surface, thickness, and torn side of the material that enables him to imagine the finished images. In A Terrible Disease the figure occupying the entire picture plane is blocking his seemingly distressed face. The hand in the center represents the anonymity of modern people, and the dominant color of yellow envelopes the image with a strong atmosphere. While holding great significance in the international flow of art in the 1980s, this work also allows one to investigate the origin of Korean figurative art represented by Minjung Art of the 1980s and to observe the correlation between Western art and Korean Minjung art.

Data provided by MMCA

Claude Viallet, 1939~2019
Untitled
1966, oil on canvas, 124.7×193cm
MMCA Collection

Claude Viallet was a major member of Support-Surface, an art group emerged as a reaction to the art being replaced by texts. In painting, support surface refers to the supporting material and the pictorial surface. They abandoned wooden stretcher bars changing the conventional idea of the existing canvas. By hanging the painted surface as a less material on a pole, laying it out on a table, or folding it like a piece of fabric, they blurred the distinction between painting and textile design.
Consisted of an identical amorphous pattern repeated not on canvas but on unprocessed fabric, Untitled (1966) well exemplifies Viallet’s attitude toward painting-making characterized by overlaying, rupturing, and stacking. As one of the works done by Support-Surface, this work contributed to the achievement of Viallet as an artist.

Data provided by MMCA

Yvan Le Bozec, 1958~
But what, who is looking at?
2001, acrylic on canvas, 140×200cm×2ea
MMCA Collection

French artist Yvan Le Bozec delves into the notions of artistic mediums and an artist through his works in various mediums including painting, drawing, video, installation, and design. He focuses on the extreme personalization phenomenon that even denies the artist's individuality and the art itself, and questions about the relationship between such extreme liberation and totalitarianism. This work deals with an individual overshadowed by the collective in an era when psychological individuals disappeared and submerged in simulacre.

Data provided by MMCA

Walid Raad, 1967~
Preface to the Ninth Edition : On Marwan Kassab-Bachi(1934-2016)
2017, 29 s and drawings, wood wall, wall paper, variable size
MMCA Collection

Walid Raad gained worldwide attention with “The Atlas Group,” a project that displays historical and imaginatively processed data about Lebanon War as if they were archived. The artist utilizes diverse mediums such as photography, film, and performance, and bases his work on his studies of Lebanese modern history and the Arabic culture during the Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1991. For Preface to the Ninth Edition : On Marwan Kassab-Bachi(1934-2016) (2017) Raad copied twenty nine drawings from the sketchbook of the Syrian painter Marwan Kassab-Bachi onto the backs of d canvases and attached them onto a wooden wall with a wallpaper printed with decorative patterns. In recent years there have been the construction boom of museums and galleries in the Arabic regions and the proliferation of iconography, which is one of the main forms of Arabic art, and its artists, and his recent works reflect this trend that is being formed in the midst of the wars in Yemen, Palestine, Libya, Turkey, and Egypt.

Data provided by MMCA

Jean-Pierre Pincemin, 1944~2005
Untitled
1969, a lattice weaved of dyed canvas, 180×196cm
MMCA Collection

French-born painter Jean-Pierre Pincemin abandoned the brush in the late 1960s and started to produce works by making marks with bent zinc or wire mesh on canvas espousing the concept of free canvas. During the period between 1968 and 1974, he focused on grid patterns by cutting the fabric soaked in the dye into square, diamond, and trapezoid shapes and attaching them to one another. What he attempted to achieve here were the contrast between colors and the interconnection and difference between them. In Untitled (1969), the grid of dark brown and black forms a strong contrast on one hand and on the other through reconciliation and integration comes a subtle harmony. Like Claude Viallet, Pincemin participated in the Support-Surface movement, and returned to canvas and brush again being self-confident that he was now capable of competing with the masters of the past in the mid-1970s. Made in his early career when he involved himself in the movement of Support-Surface, this work well demonstrates the ideas and substance of the movement.

Data provided by MMCA

Louise Bourgeois, 1911~2010
Crochet Ⅱ, Ⅲ, Ⅳ
1998, mixography on paper, 71.1×84.8cm
MMCA Collection

Louise Bourgeois is a French-born American abstract expressionist. Produced in 1998 using the technique of mixography, these print works show how treads are woven. The continuity of the thread whose starting and ending points cannot be known alludes to the artist’s conviction that reality owes its existence to the past. For Bourgeois, memories of the past are means for resolving today's conflicts and are the most basic starting points for her sculptural work. The continuity of time enabled by memories, which connect the past and the present, is embodied by the medium of thread, and the thread on paper is interconnected to represent time-based continuity. This is also related to the artist's childhood memories having a direct association with the housework of restoring a tapestry.

Data provided by MMCA

Mady de la Giraudière, 1922~
Paris Parade
unknown year, lithograph on paper, 64.5×42cm
MMCA Collection

Mady de la Giraudière is a representative French painter, printmaker, illustrator, and cartoonist. Giraudière imbued commonplace subjects closely related to everyday life such as customs, traditions, legends, sun, rain, and forest with mysteriousness and novelty using colors that are bright, clear, and unique. Paris Parade is a lithographic work that clearly demonstrates the artist's artistic originality. The vividness of the joyful festival scene is achieved by her use of intense primary colors, clear shapes, subtle symmetry, and balance.

Data provided by MMCA

Philippe Ramette, 1961~
Irrational Walk
Unreasonable Meditation
2003, pigment print on fibrous paper fixed on aluminum, 100×80cm
MMCA Collection

Philippe Ramette’s s and photographs allow viewers to broaden their perspectives and see the world from a distance. The artist makes use of devices designed to be worn on the body such as artificial prosthetics, to create a stage for new artistic activities in relation to the world. Although these devices, which are also restrictive as well as supportive, cause him to twist his body and even hurt his body, they enable him to create a completely unrealistic imaginary world without a trick.
Exemplifying the distinctive style of Ramette’s work, this work was made by the process of putting his self-made s in his body, making all other s appear weightless, and finally photographing them. Building new virtual stages unrelated to both reality and unreality through which he draws people into his art world, Ramette creates photographs that are illogical using the elements such as gravity-defying images. His photographs are the products not of photographic manipulation but of his experimental photographing of s done by the artist himself.

Data provided by MMCA

Valerie Belin, 1964~
Fruit Basket
2007, jet print on paper, diasec, 180×153cm
MMCA Collection

Valerie Belin, who creates series and works in strict forms, looks into the form of photographic images and images of reality. The artist systematically analyzes the nature of the medium of photography and is particularly interested in the role of light. The artist develops a very unique style that is neither ary-oriented nor naturalistic by completely separating the subject from the background through the use of intense contrast and close-up shots, which aggrandize the subject.
This work is one of the fruit basket series taken as the artist studied the workings of light. Fruits that look appetizing are accurately photographed in the controlled light. As a result, they appear to be fake fruits, but it is actually a picture of real fruits. The artist is devoted to maximizing the effects of the camera light, and thus the images of the subjects captured are sometimes very flat, unindividual, or very unrealistic.

Data provided by MMCA

Yogesh Barve, 1989~
Explaining could be Exploiting Ⅱ
2018, polyester, variable size
MMCA Collection

Through various mediums such as painting, sculpture, video, and installation, the Indian artist Yorgesh Barve inquiries into the social phenomena surrounding the artist in the way that speculates on the dual meaning of one word by marking a slash in words as in in/equality, ir/rationality, un/seen, in/outsider, and so on. This work intends to challenge the intrinsic value of the of color, and to address the difficulty of finding a clear interpretation of or the correct answer to an or an event. How many countries are there in the world we live in? For Explaining could be Exploiting Ⅱ (2018), the artist collects the flags of many different nations and dismantles them into wefts and warps. Flags defined by specific images and shapes appear to have an absolute identities and unique traditional values, but when they are broken up into weft and warp yarns, one finds that the color threads that make up the flags are not that different from each other. The blurred boundaries between the dismantled national flags challenge each and every country's absolute values, traditions, and identities.

Data provided by MMCA

Mathieu Mercier, 1970~
Drum and Bass
2011, shelves, blue boxes, red vases, yellow flashlights, 150×156.7×20cm
MMCA Collection

Mathieu Mercier is an artist who combines industry and art. He uses the existing processed industrial s and reconstructs them. In this work, the artist connects two different places of an art museum and a market. This piece, which is both a painting and a sculpture, integrates the geometrical composition of Mondrian who is one of the proponents of modernism and the concept of ready-made by Marcel Duchamp. Looking at everyday s, he always comes up with unusual compositions, and this work also consists of the three basic primary colors of red, yellow, and blue placed on the shelves in the way to give a balance to the picture plane. In consideration of the fact that Mondrian's Broadway boogie-woogie is a simplification of the city and is related to jazz, the music genre representative of the city of New York, Mercier titled the work “Drum and Bass”.

Data provided by MMCA

William Kentridge, 1955~
I am not Me, the Horse is not Mine
2008, 8-channel video, color, sound, 6 min
MMCA Collection
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William Kentridge is a South African video artist. He is also an artist who has been active in the fields of art, film, and theater. Although born in a privileged white family, he was influenced by his parents who opposed racial discrimination and became politically sensitive. He photographs the charcoal drawings after erasing or modifying them in a subtle manner and projects the film in continuity so as to finish them in the form of stop-motion animation. These works take the form of a series about the stories of the characters' lives.
This is 8-channel video work made by Kentridge when a return performance of Shostakovich 's opera, The Nose was being produced to be shown at New York Metropolitan Opera in 2010. It was first showcased at the Sydney Biennale in 2008. Like Gogol's novel of the same title, the work is about the ridiculous incident that occurs when a nose was detached from a lower official in Russia. It caricatures the terror and hierarchies of the Russian class system and the destruction of subjectivity in the Czarist era through the story of a detached nose’s escape. For this work Kentridge collaged the propaganda slogans and newspapers of Russia, Germany and France in a constructivist way, and used film footages, the shadows of puppet dolls, and the images of his body.

Data provided by MMCA

William Kentridge, 1955~
The Nose 1
2007, bronze, 30×16×14cm
MMCA Collection

This work is a personification portrait of “the nose” from The Nose (1936) by the Russian novelist N. V. Gogol and the opera of the same name by D. D. Shostakovich based on the novel. One morning, Kovalev, a lower officer in the Czarist era, finds
that his nose is missing and searches about St. Petersburg to find his nose, and finally meets his nose. But the nose denies his owner’s authority and the man crawls into his nose’s favor because the nose is wearing a higher-grade uniform than his own. Kentridge allegorically embodies this irrational and satirical story through a bronze nose and a pair of scissors.

Data provided by MMCA

Christian Boltanski, 1944~
Comfort Women
1997, White cloth (12), wire (2 rows), lamp (1), 220×145cm×12ea
MMCA Collection

Christian Boltanski is a French conceptualist who is well known for his photographic installations. His father who was a Jew fled from Russia to France to escape persecution and evacuated from Paris during World War II. Such painful family history due to the war and their Jewish origin had a profound effect on his work. He has been exploring the subject matters of human life and death, and memory and collecting simple-shaped everyday s and faded black-and-white photos containing memories and emotions to tell narrative and universal messages through his works.
Chistian Boltanski's Comfort Women (1997) is an installation created by the artist in Korea to console the comfort women during Japanese colonial period. The work was produced in a way that twelve white fabrics were hung in two rows at the front and back with the back row higher so that they look overlapped. In this work, the abstract effect related to the regularity or order of fabrics that are repeatedly arranged is highlighted. As a result, the viewer’s gaze moves in regular rhythms over repeated forms, resulting in the viewer’s appreciation of the beauty of order.

Data provided by MMCA

Joseph Beuys, 1921~1986
Sulfur Box
1970, sulfur box on zinc, 63×30.5×18cm×2ea
MMCA Collection

Joseph Beuys was a German-born Fluxus, happening, and performance artist. He attempted to tear down the boundary between life and art, advocating that “every human being is an artist and a free being” and attempted to narrow the gap between art and life and restore humanity. In 1971, Beuys established the Free International University, and since then, he extended the concept of sculpture to the political field, asserting the concept of social sculpture and practicing the expansion of the concept of art.
Sulfur Box (1970) embodies his main artistic concepts of warmth and coagulation using the material of sulfur. Beuys who was a pilot of a German military fighter was rescued by the Tatars after being shot down by the Russian Army in 1943, and they took care of him by wrapping his body with felt and fat. This mystical personal experience later led him to deny the separation of art and life and to work with experimental mediums and forms to become interested in spiritual power and the spirituality of material forms. In Sulfur Box, a triangle gauze is attached to one corner of the bottom of the yellow box. Beuys often uses open boxes as metaphors for human heads. If the geometrical metal box symbolizes rationality, the ignitable sulfur and zinc, a material that transmits energy, are metonymies of the intuition or the spiritual state of existence and represent the state of human existence.

Data provided by MMCA

Anton Vidokle, 1965~
The Communist Revolution was Caused by the Sun
2015, single-channel video, color, sound, 33min 36sec
MMCA Collection

Anton Vidokle was born in Moscow, Russia, and is a curator and artist who works in both New York and Berlin. In 1998, he established e-flux, an international art platform. The Communist Revolution was Caused by the Sun (2015) is the second video work of Vidokle's trilogy on the Russian cosmological philosophy movement. The work revolves around the theory of the Soviet multidisciplinary scientist and biophysicist Alexander Chizevsky (1987-1964). Chizevsky conducted a study of the relationship between the Earth's temperature and large-scale civilization activities, claiming that the large-scale civilization activity appears with an eleven-year solar cycle. In 1942, Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) claimed that Chizevsky's claims about the solar cycle contradict against the theory of Russian revolution and demanded to withdraw those claims, but Chizevsky, who rejected to do so, was imprisoned in a gulag, a forced labor camp in Kazakhstan. The video was made in Kazakhstan where Chizevsky settled after being imprisoned and released in 1950. Centered on the story of Chizevsky's life and research, this work is a visual and symbolic representation of Lenin's death and his preserved body, the worship of the sun in ancient Egypt, and the influence of the sun on social change.

Data provided by MMCA

Constantino Ciervo, 1961~
Pale-Judea
2003, single-channel video, drawings, 35cm×35cm×7ea, 10min
MMCA Collection

Constantino Ciervo was born in Italy and currently lives and works in Berlin. The theme of his early works in the early 1990s was the modern tautological social system. In 1995, he used Berlin buildings to analyze the subject of complexity hidden within the interior of totalitarian modern society and also dealt with the issue of the relationship between matter and morals from an ethical perspective. In the late 1990s, he took as his subjects Germany's contemporary history and terrorism due to his interest in the divided social condition, and in 1998, more symbolic languages were used in his works. In 2000, biotechnology and its ethical issues were also used as his themes. Pale-Judea (2003) is a ten-minute video work based on the issue of the international conflict between Palestine and Israel. The footage created by combining the recorded images shows a quite intense and serious political dispute. However, the actual audience cannot understand the content of the debate at all and can only hear the daily noises, and thus even the event itself becomes comic. It is a work that shows the dementalization and deconstruction of modern civilization in the flood of mass media and images.

Data provided by MMCA

Gerhard Richter, 1932~
128 Photographs of a Picture
1988, offset print on paper, 61×101cm×8ea

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Germany, and has been devoted to reaffirming the uniqueness of painting that new media and photography cannot express through the combination of painting and photography. The unique method of coloring on the surface of the photo reveals the fictionality of the representativeness of the photo or our eyes, while giving a new perspective to and confidence in the representational capacity of the painting. Richter produced both abstract and figurative paintings, and refused to be restricted by a certain and changed the way he paints every two to three years, or employed different painting styles simultaneously. Among Richter's various methods of work, the most well-known is applying paint on the photo as if squashing it. Contrary to this, 128 Photographs of a Picture (1988), a photograph taken of his painting, can be seen his representative work that raised a question about the reproduction of paintings.

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Peter Hally, 1953~
Untitled
2001, mixed media on canvas, 161.5×127cm
MMCA Collection

Born in New York, Peter Hally has been producing geometric abstract paintings and print works. Hally criticizes the abstract art of modernism for remaining in self-satisfaction, and appropriates the form of abstract art to capture the physical and psychological mechanisms of modern industrial society and consumer society. The repetitive form of vertical stripes and rectangles in his work symbolizes the oppression and contradiction of modern society, represented by the prison bars, and also takes geometric forms modelled after computer network, and ceiling of a motel to represent the life of the modern people who are connected with the outside world solely by phone lines and networks. He also adopts the lattice shapes frequently appearing in abstract art and prints them, rolls it out with a roller, or produces it by employing anonymous handwork, invalidating its originality and degrading modernism abstraction to the mundane level. In Untitled (2001), a clear-shaped small room of magenta color within the squares of geometric shapes reflects the representative concept of the artist symbolizing the modern era. According to the author's own writings, the squares or the square planes surrounding them in his works are the diagrammatic representations of one unit cell and lines such as electric wires surrounding it.

Data provided by MMCA

Thomas Struth, 1954~
Audience 06 Florence
2004, C-print on paper, diasec, 178×283.8cm
MMCA Collection

Audience 11 Florence
2004, C-print on paper, diasec, 179.5×291.5cm
MMCA Collection

The German photographer Thomas Struth presents strict typological photography. Gained global fame through his museum series that started in 1989, the artist tells the stories and histories of cultural spaces through the emphasis placed on the visitors to historic places such as museums, art galleries and cathedrals.
This work is an interesting observation of the viewers in the museum from different perspectives. Invited to the Michelangelo's 500th anniversary exhibition, he analyzed the exhibition space where David was displayed, and then installed a camera at the bottom of the sculpture to capture the viewer's gazes from the perspective of the statue rather than focusing on the sculpture. In this way, the viewers become the focal point of the work, and the Michelangelo's sculptural work, David, which is an each of them pays attention to, remains out of sight.

Data provided by MMCA

Simon Norfolk, 1962~
Daruramen Presidential Palace Government Building - Afghanistan Series
2002, C-print on paper, 101.6×127cm
MMCA Collection

Simon Norfolk is a Nigerian-born photographer and began working as a photojournalist in the 1990s, dealing with political issues such as British racism and fascism, and the Northern Ireland conflict. After purchasing a view camera in 1995, he began to take landscape photographs away from typical photojournalism. Norfolk's interest lies in photographically representing wars, the social memory of the people who have been scarred by them, and the traces of the destruction of cities and natural environments.
Daruramen Presidential Palace Government Building - Afghanistan Series (2002) was photographed in Afghanistan when the United States attacked the country. Built in neo-classical style, the Presidential Palace was destroyed by a US Army bombing in 2002 and was used as a refugee camp. The photograph delivers a peaceful and static atmosphere redolent of an ancient ruins despite the cruel reality.

Data provided by MMCA

James Casebere
Yellow Hallway2
2001, digital chromogenic print on paper mounted on plexiglass, 175×217.5cm
MMCA Collection

James Casebere is one of America's leading photographers. Since the late 1970s, the artist has been investigating spaces that we may have visited or encountered in photographs such as churches, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and boarding schools. Cacebere makes models of buildings that are small enough to be placed on a table as a film director has a movie set built in order to take pictures of strange and dreamlike photos. In order to capture the scene that he wants, the artist makes small models out of plaster, Styrofoam and cardboard, stages spaces in detail, and projects lights, and uses liquid plastic to achieve the effect that the space appears to be soaked in water. This is not the conventional method of photographers who selects and photographs an that is already there, but rather a modern creative method of art in which the artist directs the entire process from conception to production and recording.
Yellow Hallway2 (2001) captures the moment when in the interior of a neo-classical structure water gradually passes through the inner court with a vaulted ceiling and rises to the stairs and goes beyond the thresholds. As the original static indoor view and the dynamic scene reflected in the water are integrated with each other, an imaginary space is forged at the instant moment of pressing the shutter. Here, the photographed image is enlarged by the artist to a much greater scale, enabling the space in the photograph to enter the space where the viewer stands.

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Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd Becher 1931~2007 / Hilla Becher 1934~2015
Walls and Conduits
1991, photograph in black and white on paper, 40×30cm×12ea
MMCA Collection

The couple Bernd Becher and Hila Becher are photographers who worked in Germany and photographed industrial structures that were in danger of disappearing for about fifty years. They rejected the photographic tendency to explore the human inner world and adopted the style of Neue Sachlichkeit, the root of German traditional photography, to pursue the realistic depiction of s. In their works, particular emphasis is placed on the exclusion of the artist’s subjective emotions and expressional distortion basing their attitudes on the intrinsic attributes of ary photography such as observation.
Walls and Conduits (1991) shows the exact frontal views of the industrial structures emblematic of the forms of the twentieth-century industrialization era using the perspective that is as much ive as possible. Structures of industrial architecture that are anonymous, huge, and complex are captured on a small picture plane in whole or in part with no detail lost and without any distortion.

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Vanessa Beecroft, 1969~
Vienna Art Museum
2001, cibachrome print on paper, 127×244cm
MMCA Collection

Vanessa Beecroft is a performance artist born in Italy and currently working in the United States who works in many mediums including photography, painting, sculpture and video art. Employing the human body in the production of works, the artist address issues related to humanity, race, and gender. From 1993 to the present, Beecroft has been showcasing VB performances whose focus is placed on women's bodies. In these works, the identically equipped female models are instructed to perform specific actions in a uniform manner and not to communicate with the viewers at all.
In Vienna Art Museum (2001), young women appear in the same appearances wearing wigs, stressing the anonymity of modern society. Taken at the forty-fifth performance at the Vienna Art Museum in 2001, this performance features dozens of models wearing thigh-high boots.
In the natural human appearance made of flesh and blood, they are looking at certain points of the room with a sluggish gaze remaining still of human beings made of flesh and blood, saturating the space with a deep and profound atmosphere. This is not to show the naked bodies of women, but rather highlights the alienation effect intended by the artist, indicating the recent trend of contemporary photography to address social issues using the human body.

Data provided by MMCA

Andres Serrano, 1950~
Thinker
1988, cibachrome print on paper, silicone, plexi, glass, woods, 152.4×101.6cm
MMCA Collection

Andres Serrano is currently working in the United States. In his early days, the artist showed shocking pictures using liquids such as human blood and semen, and toward his later years, his artistic concern has been moving onto abstraction. With his strong resistance to the authoritarianism of religion, white supremacism, and social prejudices and his consistent social consciousness and insight, the artist articulates through his intense images the energy that is within the marginalized individuals and the lives that deviate from the central power and common notions of the society.
Thinker (1988) is a parody of the work of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Instead of gracefully treating a noble subject, the work evokes a unique artistic inspiration with undiluted contrasts of primary colors. Serrano's unprecedented choice of themes and expression of dual values reaffirm the powerful capacity of the art of photography.

Data provided by MMCA

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1960~1988
Untitled
1982, crayon and water-based pigment on paper, 108.5×77.5cm
MMCA Collection

Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat who was born in Brooklyn, New York are always concerned with marginalized culture. Alienated culture and his nihilistic attitude towards it are conveyed through his use of the playful and unsophisticated childlike images, deliberately misspelled characters, and occasionally appearing death symbols such as skeletons, intestines, bones and teeth. His art is characterized by the graphic figures with huge and flattened faces as in African masks. Stylistically, Basquiat made a distinctive use of drawing, color, and composition, and his keen artistic sense allowed him to keep a balance between conflicting forces such as primitiveness and refinement, spontaneity and control, and with and brutality.
Like in Basquiat’s other works, weight is given to the figures in Untitled (1982). The frontally depicted figures are of flatness and simplicity. It is a work that demonstrates his way of painting that is marked by the qualities of freewheelingness as of a child's graffiti and expressiveness.

Data provided by MMCA

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925~2008
BoardⅠ
1971, cardboard collage on panel, 128×91cm
Board Ⅳ
1971, cardboard collage on panel, 116×114cm
MMCA Collection

Started as an abstract expressionist, Robert Rauschenberg was one of the most creative and original American artists and expanded the scope of his work through pop art to various forms of conceptual art. In the 1950s, he began to gain fame as an artist with Combine Painting, the term he coined himself. In the 1960s and 1970s, Rauschenberg's greatest interest in the field of painting and sculptural construction was large-scale cardboard constructions intended for specific spaces and the transfer of silkscreen images onto fabrics. In this piece made of cardboard, Rauschenberg integrated daily s as they were into the work. Rauschenberg opened the world of pop art by covering various art forms and breaking the boundaries, using the elements of abstract expressionism such as massive scale and gestural brushwork, and inviting everyday images and s onto the picture plane. In addition, he attempted to bridge the gap between art and reality, and further strived to overcome the gap between the viewer and the artist.

Data provided by MMCA

Charlie Sofo, 1983~
Watermelon Seeds
2011, watermelon seeds on wood board, 90×90cm
MMCA Collection

Charlie Sofo is a young artist based in Melbourne, Australia, who focuses on small and commonplace s in daily life and discovers meanings in the processes, materials, and actions that are simple and ordinary. Sofo’s sculptural works are often made after collecting ordinary s that seem to be irrelevant to art such as buttons, rubber bands, chocolate wrappers, and pictures of dog ears cut out from books. Sofo defines his work as the activities, consciousness, observations, acts of finding and discovering that he comes to have or carries out in his everyday life. Placing importance on the elements of process and concept and works he explores the relationship between life and art.
Watermelon Seeds (2011) consists of watermelon seeds arranged in rows on a white wooden board. The subject matter of this work, which can be seen as a parody of a minimalist work, is such unexpectedness itself. It reminds one that very simple s and very simple ideas themselves are the basic conditions for works of art.

Data provided by MMCA

Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1933~
Etruscan
1976, bronze, mirror, 200×120×80cm(bronze), 250×300cm(mirror)
MMCA Collection

Michelangelo Pistolleto is an artist from Biella, Italy. The artist has been experimenting with all forms of art such as painting, sculpture, photography, stage art, opera, and performance art, and is known as a proponent of the Italian Arte Povera movement. The most characteristic of his diverse practices is the mirror works he has been producing since the early 1960s, which concerns the artist's question about the existential world. Using the properties of the mirror, the artist attempts to generate the interaction between the viewer and the image on the mirror and between the viewer’s space and the virtual space in the mirror. As the viewer look in the mirror and moves around in front of it, he/she becomes an active entity being part of the work.
Etruscan (1976) shows a statue of a slightly bigger than life-size Etruscan dressed in ancient costumes with his left hand placed at a point in the mirror at which his gaze is also directed. The mirror is large enough to contain not only the whole body of the figure but also its surrounding. Here, the mirror literally reflects the physical real world and is simultaneously reflective of the infinite world in imagination.

Data provided by MMCA