The Langen Foundation is showing a solo show by Canadian-British artist Corin Sworn (b. 1976 in London). Often combining images with spoken narrative and using found material, her work examines cultural and personal significance attributed to objects and how they in turn narrate us as social subjects.
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The collection of Japanese art belonging to Viktor (1909-1990) and Marianne Langen (1911-2004) goes back to the 1960s, when Viktor Langen’s interest was awoken during a business trip to Japan. Over the course of the ensuing decades the couple assembled a collection that was housed in a private museum in Ascona, Switzerland, until 2004. Featuring some 350 works, it provides insights into the rich variety of Japanese art from to 12th to the 20th century.
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After presenting two contemporary positions the Langen Foundation shows once again Japanese Art. The exhibition focuses on graphic and plastic illustrations of monks and divinities, which were made by various known and unknown artists in Japan from the 12th to 18th century. All over thirty rolls as well as objects are part of the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection.
The Langen Foundation is showing an exhibition by Otto Piene as its contribution to the Quadriennale 2014. Piene focuses on his most important media in the new installations on show: the energies light and air. The highlight of the show is a day-long festivity with Piene's Sky Event on August 9th.
The Langen Foundation presented the first institutional solo exhibition of J. Parker Valentine (b. 1980) to be held in Europe. Based in Brooklyn, New York, the artist employs a variety of mediums, including film, photography, painting, sculpture, and text. Valentine’s process-oriented work is centered on drawing, which frequently assumes a sculptural or installative character when executed on various materials. J. Parker Valentine developed a site-specific exhibition for the Japan Room, which comprised drawings, photographs, sculptures, and a video.
The Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection not only encompasses 20th-century painting and Japanese art but also objects from numerous non-European cultures. With their wish to “extrapolate the world by means of art,” the collectors assembled over 130 examples of pre-Columbian art in addition to smaller convolutes of Chinese, Korean, African, Oceanic, Egyptian, classical Greek and ancient Persian art.
Abstraction is now generally considered to be representative of modernism. But it first achieved its dominant position in the post-war period. Surrealism existed at the same time as abstraction. Characteristic features of this art movement are the integration of the unconscious into the creative process and often narrative, figurative forms of expression. Numerous examples of Surrealist and Surrealist-related art can be found in the Viktor and Marianne Langen Collection.
The French artist Bernard Réquichot (1929–1961) is practically unknown in Germany. He developed sculptures, paintings and paper collages, for which he employed clippings from periodicals and magazines. Réquichot was an autodidact whose very brief artistic career came to an end through suicide: He jumped out his studio window on the day before the opening of his exhibition.
