SPAIN / MADRID : LOCUS SOLUS. IMPRESSIONS ON RAYMOND ROUSSEL

until Monday February 27 2012
Monday - Saturday : 10h - 21h, Sunday : 10h - 14h30
Museo Reina Sofia
T : +34 91 774 1000
Calle Santa Isabel, 52
28012 Madrid
Spain

info@museoreinasofia.es
www.museoreinasofia.es

This is the first major exhibition devoted to the French writer Raymond Roussel and to his influence on 20th century art and literature.

Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), the author of The View (1904) and Locus Solus (1913) aimed at creating a world from scratch in which “imagination is everything”, and in which nothing real should impinge on the writing. He lived through the first third of the 20th century without paying any attention to its political upheavals or their aesthetic consequences among the various avant-garde movements, while failing to understand why the more conventional audience he thought he was addressing remained indifferent to his work, and found its stage adaptations scandalous.

The exhibition Locus Solus aims primarily at relocating Roussel’s oeuvre in its social and cultural context, at the end of the 19th century, because otherwise it is incomprehensible.

The posthumous revelation of Roussel’s writing procedure has lastingly influenced his reception among such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Salvador Dali, and the writings of Michel Foucault, Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet were the source of interest in Roussel among numerous artists, including Vito Acconci, and in the 1980s in Los Angeles, Allen Ruppersberg, Morgan Fischer and Mike Kelley.