ITALY / BOLOGNE: MARCEL BROODTHAERS. L’ESPACE DE L’ÉCRITURE

until Sunday May 06 2012
MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna
T : +39 051 64 96 611
Via Don Minzoni 14
40121 Bologne
Italy

info@mambo-bologna.org
www.mambo-bologna.org

The MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna is presenting Marcel Broodthaers. L’espace de l’écriture, the first complete retrospective in Italy devoted to the Belgian artist, curated by Gloria Moure.

In its complexity and scope, the exhibition highlights an artistic path developed over the course of a career that lasted just 12 years, from 1964 to 1976. Marcel Broodthaers. L’espace de l’écriture introduces for the first time to the Italian public a wide selection of approximately fifty works coming from prestigious international institutions, including the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, the SMAK in Gent, the MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona and the Caldic Collectie in Rotterdam, which document the main themes of the artist’s poetics: the relationship between art and language, the status of the artwork and criticism of the museum as device and idea.

The curatorial project of the exhibition is intended to verify how the relationship between image, object and word constitutes the central and constant theme of Marcel Broodthaers’research and has strongly conditioned his entire creative process. His original ideas on how the work of art is identified with reflection on itself and on how the social and economic system of art acts as a context of creation and legitimisation, influencing the public’s perception, cannot be understood in all their depth if not in relation to his twenty years of activity as a poet and his subsequent decision to extend his literary vocation in undertaking a new course with a career as an artist in 1964.