Xanti Schawinsky + Monster Chetwynd
- art
- exhibition
-
show
Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion — a Retrospective + Monster Chetwynd: Xanti Shenanigans
Curator: Raphael Gygax
This exhibition is the first retrospective dedicated to the Swiss-American artist Alexander "Xanti" Schawinsky (1904, Basel – 1979, Locarno) outside his country of birth, Switzerland. Influenced by the Bauhaus spirit (Germany), where he studied in the 1920s, and the Black Mountain College (USA), where he taught in the late 1930s, Xanti Schawinsky's work is distinguished by its multidisciplinary nature: staging, scenography, photography, graphic design, painting, and even typography are among the fields the artist explored during the six decades of his career.
With great formal diversity and driven by a process of constant experimentation, Xanti Schawinsky's work maintains close and multiple connections with the main currents of pre and post-war modernism, both in the United States and in Europe – a continent he had left in 1936 to escape Nazism and fascism to which he returned in the 1960s. His practice is emblematic of the transatlantic artistic exchanges prompted by World War II, leaving a lasting imprint on art history, with Schawinsky being an important actor in this area.
Xanti Schawinsky: Play, Life, Illusion – a Retrospective covers Xanti Schawinsky's entire artistic trajectory, from his early works, driven by questions of scenic space and the relationship between man and machine, to the pictorial work he developed from the 1940s, progressively incorporating a processual and even performative dimension. The exhibition also highlights Xanti Schawinsky's achievements in the field of graphic design, notably produced during the few years he spent in Milan (1933–1936), or the experiments he pursued in the theatre field around the concept of "spectodrama", through which he sought to bring together "colors and shapes, movements and lights, sounds and words, pantomime and music, graphic art and improvisation". The pioneering role he played in the field of performance also resonates with the most current artistic practices.
In the Foyer space, which connects the two galleries where the retrospective unfolds, British artist Monster Chetwynd (1973, London) was invited to create a new installation in response to Xanti Schawinsky's work. Driven by a similar transdisciplinary approach, her ambitious creation, entitled Xanti Shenanigans, incorporates some of Xanti Schawinsky’s motifs and artistic principles while transposing them into her own visual and performative universe.
Where does it take place?
Mudam Luxembourg - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3 Park Drai Eechelen
1499 Clausen Luxembourg
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