[영국 여행13]테이트 모던에 소장된 걸작품들 3편(Dalí/Miró/Klee/Pollock/Ernst/Tanguy at Modern Tate)

 

Peinture  1927

Painting/그림

by Joan Miró (미로: 1893-1983)

born and worked Spain

Tempera and oil paint on canvas

Purchased 1971

Delicate linear forms float on the open blue that Miró associated with dreams.

With André Masson, Miró was the first to create imagery using automatic techniques 

in which forms seemed to emerge directly from the unconscious.  From this he developed

his own personal sign languate, which simplified familiar things such as stars, birds and parts

of the body.  He later revealed, for example, that the white shape in this painting

signified a horse.

International Surrealism The surrealist group were inspired by dreams and the unconscious mind. This selection includes work by members of the original Paris-based group, as well as international artists who developed their own approaches to the irrational. The poet André Breton published the First Manifesto of Surrealism in Paris in 1924 and remained at the movement's heart until his death in 1966.  Breton had been stimulated by the theories of Sigmund Freud, who suggested the existence of an unconscious mind, containing the ideas and emotions that our conscious mind refuses to acknowledge. Dreams were one of the ways in which such repressed feelings could be brought to the surface. Breton and his associates argued that artists and writers should actively seek to unlock the unconscious, releasing hidden desire and irrational love, the delirium of obsession and madness. Surrealism never became a shared artistic style.  Some artists used highly realistic means to depict the imagery of dreams.  Others made abstract works generated through 'automatic' techniques conceived without prepared themes or correction in order to avoid control of the conscicous mind.  The power of the irrational was harnessed by artists across the world. Over time, groups and individuals in Brussels, Cairo, Mexico City, Prague, Tokyo and elsewhere were drawn to the uncensored creative impulses suggested by the 'revolution of the mind'. The organisation of works in this room reflects the surrealists' own approach.   The International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 introduced the movement to London by setting dissimilar works densely against each other.  Visitors were invited to immerse themselves in  unexpected conjunctions and, in the words of artist Salvador Dalí, 'to descend to the subconscious'.

Ibaye  1950

이바예

by Wifredo Lam(람: 1902-1982)

Born Cuba, worked Spain, France, Cuba

Oil paint on canvas

purchased 1952

The Cuban artist Wifredo Lam trained in Havana before moving to Spain in 1923.

After fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War he moved to Paris in 1939,

where he joined the Surrealist movement.  When the Second World War broke out

Lam returned to Cuba, where his personal style evolved rapidly through 

a re-examination of Afro-Caribbean culture.  Ibaye relates to Lam's image of

'horse-headed' women which he associated with initiates of voudourites in Haiti

becoming possessed by a spirit.  Lam's affirmation of the significance of Afro-Carribbean

culture echoed the surrealist search for political and creative freedom of all.

La Chambre à carreaux  1935

The Tiled Room/타일로 마무리된 방

by Maria Helena Viera da Silva(다 실바: 1908-1992)

Born Portugal, worked France

Oil paint on canvas

Accepted by HM Government in lieu of tax with additional

assistance from the Themans Bequest 2014

The Tiled Room was a breakthrough work for Vieira da Silva.  It shows what the critic

Michel Seuphor described as the 'absorption in space itself' that as characteristic of her

structured paintings in the 1940s and later.  The compelling web of lines has been  associated

with the artist's feverish imaginings when suffering from jaundice.  Vieira da Silva was

haunted by memories of her lonely childhood following the death of her father and

her mother's withdrawal into mourning.  The deeper phychological charge in these

spatial illusions seems to have derived from those personal experiences.

La Toupie  c. 1937-52

Peg-Top/팽이

by Hans Bellmer (벨머: 1902-1975)

Born Poland, worked Poland, Germany, France

Oil paint on canvas

purchased 1964

This image relates to a plan for a sculpture, which Bellmer never completed.

The peg-top was intended to symbolise a woman turning the heads and hearts of men.

Bellmer was interested in ideas of fetishism, drawing out sexual associations between

 inert objects and the body.  His best-known works were a series of constructed dolls,

Bellmer joined the French surrealist group in 1938, having left his native Germany

to escape the Nazi regime.

Celebes  1921

(셀레베스/술라웨시/인도네시아의 다른 이름)

by Max Ernst (언스트: 1891-1976)

born Germany, worked Germany, France, USA

oil paint on canvas

purchased 1975

The central rotund shape in this painting derives from a photograph of Sudanese corn-bin,

which Ernst has transformed into a sinister mechanical monster.  Ernst often re-used found 

images, and either added or removed elements in order to create new realities, all the more

disturbing for being drawn from the known world.  The work's title comes from

a childish German rhyme that begins: 'The elephant from Celebes has sticky, yellow

bottom grease'.  The painting's inexplicable combinations, such as the headless female

figure and the elephant-like creature, suggest images from a dream and the

Freudian technique of free association.

Some Roses and Their Phantoms  1952

장미와 장미의 유령

by Dorothea Tanning (태닝: 1910-2012)

born USA, worked USA, France

oil paint on canvas

presented by the Tate Collectors Forum 2003

Everything is in a state of change in this still-life scene.  Some roses and a rampant

insect from have become half-animal and half-metallic.  A rose - or a phantom rose? -

appears to grow through the white tablecloth.  Others begin to push through the wall,

now a treacherously thin and insubstantial membrane.  Tanning's paintings suggest

hidden and indescribable forces at work in our daily world, challenging our beliefs

and expectations.

Une Étoile caresse le sein dune négresse(peinture-poème)

A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (Painting Poem) 1938

여인의 가슴을 어루만지는 별(그림-시)

by Joan Miró (미로: 1893-1983)

Born and worked Spain

Oil paint on canvas

purchased 1983

Miró's painting-poems combine painted and written elements.  This work was built around

the first line of an erotic poem, balancing words and signs.  The two touching triangles

represent a woman in Miró's language of signs, and the bulbous outline with hairs relates

to his usual sign for the female sex.  The star appears only as a work, although the ladder

alludes to the desires to reach for the stars.  This exemplifies Miró's ability to combine

simple imagery with ancient symbolism and make contact with deeply held instincts.

Waterfall  1943

폭포

by Arshile Gorky (고르키: 1904-1948)

born Armenia, worked USA

Oil paint on canvas

purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1971

Gorky's early work was strongly influenced by Pablo Picasso and other European painters,

even before he met the surrealists in New York in 1939-40.  In the summer of 1942,

he made drawings in the countryside in Connecticut which evoked memories of his 

Armenian childhood and this was one of the paintings that followed. He poured

 diluted paint down the canvas, the drips suggesting the fluidity of a waterfall.

Schiffe im Dunklen  1927

Ships in the Dark/어둠 속의 배

Paul Klee (클레: 1879-1940)

born Switzerland, worked Switzerland, Germany

A series of interlocking trangles from the sails of a troupe of boats strung across the canvas

in an undulating line that suggests a gently rocking, wave-like motion.  This rhythmic

composition recalls a diagram charted by Klee in the notes from his lectures at the 

Bauhaus, showing 'an active line, limited in its movement by fixed points'. The nautical

imagery also seems to draw upon Klee's recent trip to the south of France and Corsica.  

A Symposium  1936

심포지움

by Julian Trevelyan(트레빌리언: 1910-1988)

Born and worked Britain

Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1966

Trevelyan became interested in Surrealilsm while at Cambridge, and came to know many of the

movement's leading artists when he lived in Paris in 1931-4.  Influenced by Klee and encouraged

by his friendship with Miro and Calder, he gradually developed his own mode of abstract Sirrealism.

In A Symposium Trevelyan combined painting and carving and attached parts to the wooden panel.  

Black Virtue  1943

검은 미덕

by Matta(마타: 1911-2002)

born Chile, worked, Chile, France, Spain, USA, Italy

Oil paint on canvas

Purchased 1970

Matta joined the French surrealist group in 1937 before moving to New York two years later.

His paintings appear abstract but are based on drawings of erotic and violent scenes.

In the two side panels of this triptych the imagery has a mechanistic, science fiction quality.

But in the centre the forms are organic, suggesting references to sexual parts.  Matta was

concerned with capturing the inner world of the mind. Black Virtue evokes a mental landscape

in an extreme combination of eroticism and violence.

Téléphone - Homard  1936

Lobster Telephone/바닷가재 전화기

by Salvador Dalí (달리: 1904-1989)

Born Spain, worked Spain, France, USA

Steel, plaster, rubber, resin and paper

Purchased 1981

In the early 1930s, Dalí promoted the idea of the surrealist object, of which this is

a classic example. The surrealists valued the mysterious and provocative effect of such

unexpected conjunctions.  Dalí, in particular, believed that his objects could reveal the

the secrets desires of the unconscious.  Lobsters and telephones had strong sexual connotations

for him, and he drew a close analogy between food and sex.  He made Lobster Telephone

for Edward James, the British collector who was the most active patron of surrealist artists

in the 1930s.

L'Annonciation  1930

The Annunciation/성수태 고지

by René Magritte (마그리트: 1898-1967)

born Belgium, worked Belgium, France

Oil paint on canvas

purchased 1986

The Autobiography of an Embryo  1933-4

수정란의 자서전

by Eileen Agar (아가르: 1899-1991)

born Argentina, worked Britain, France

Oil paint on board

Purchased 1987

Agar saw reproduction, or 'womb magic', as an important component of the feminine

imagination.  In this work she evoked the development of an embryo.  Each of the four

sections mixes symbols of lie and death, and images of marine plants and animals.

Examples of so-called primitive and ancient arts allude to the beginning of culture.

As these elements are embedded within the sense layers of the painting, they seem 

to suggest memories of collective experience that the embryo carries into the world.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus  1937

나르시스의 탈바꿈

by Salvador Dalí (달리: 1904-1989)

Born Spain, worked Spain, France, USA

Oil paint on canvas

purchased 1979

According to Greek mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool.

Unable to embrace the watery image, he pined away, and the gods immortalized him 

as a flower.  Dalí shows this metamorphosis by doubling a crouching figure by the lake

with a hand clutching an egg, from which the narcissus flower sprouts.  When this painting

was first exhibited it was accompanied by a long poem by Dalí.  Together, the words and 

image suggest a range of emothions triggered by the theme of metamrphosis,

including anxiety, disgust and desire.

L'Homme au journal  1928

Man with a Newspaper/신문을 든 남자

by René Magritte(마그리트: 1898-1967)

born Belgium, worked Belgium, France

Oil paint on canvas

Presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1964

Magritte's disconcertingly deadpan style is seen clearly in these four simply painted scenes,

which seem to be indistinguishable  apart from the disappearance of the man of the title

They were based on an illustration in a popular health manual.  There are slight changes

of perspective between the four panels which add to the disquieting effect, and may relate to

the displacement of iages in ear 3-D viewing devices.  This subtle undermining of the everyday 

was characteristic of Magritte and his Belgian Surrealist colleagues, who perferred quiet

subservison to overt public action.

Untitled  c. 1933-8

무제

by Lionel Wendt (웬트:  1900-1944)

born and worked Sri Lanka

Photographs, gelatin silver print on paper

purchased 2013

Wendt is considered  one of Asia's earliest modern photographers.  He was born in Colombo,

Sri Lanka to a prominent family.  Travelling to Europe in 1919 to study law, he encountered

experimental music, visual art and literature.  He kept up-to-art  -  including surrealism -

on his return to Colombo in 1924.  But instead of reproducing momdernist conventions 

in his photographs, Wendt used what he had gained in Europe to convery the richness of

Sri Lankan contemporary life and traditions.

Eluhim  1960

히브리어로 신

by Leonora Carrington (캐링턴:  1917-2011)

born Britain, worked France, Mexico

oil paint on canvas

Lent from a private collection 2009

'In everybody, there is an inner bestiary', Carrington remarked.  Her paintings often

incorporate fantastical creatures, and she particularly identified with hyenas and horses.

She saw her interest in surrealism as being rooted in the Irish folktales told by her nanny

and in the imaginative world of her mother, whom she described as a 'complete mythologist'.

Having been involved with the surrealists in Paris before the Second World War, she settled in 

Mexico in 1942, initiating a new visionary stage in her work.  The title of this work is the

Hebrew word for 'God' or 'gods'

Mille Fois  1933

천번

by Yves Tanguy (탕기:  1900-1955)

born France, worked France, USA

Oil paint on canvas

Bequeathed by Eugene and Penelope Rosenbert 2015

Due to the precision of his techque, Tanguy worked very slowly.  A Thousand Times is one of the

more substantial canvases from a year in which he only completed about ten paintings. 

It was a period of poverty which forced him to give up his studio.  The threatening atmosphere

of the painting may  reflect these personal circumstances, as well as the bleak economic

and political climate of Europe in the early 1930s.

Marathon  1948

마라톤

by Nicolas de Staël (드 스타엘: 1914-1955)

born Russia, worked Belgium, France, Morocco, Algeria

oil paint on canvas

purchased 1957

De Staël's paintings emphasis the physical nature of their surfaces and his typically 

energetic work is seen at its most explosive here.  The title Marathon may reflect 

the struggle that the painter experienced in having his art accepted.  

L'Echiquier, grand, plâtre orginal peit  1959

Chessboard, Large Version (Original Painted Plaster)/체스보드

by Germaine Richier (리시에:  1902-1959)

born France, worked France, Switzerland

Plaster and metal

Presented by the artist's estate 2000

These five fitures represent the principal pieces in a game of chess: the King, Queen,

Knight, Castle and Bishop.  Rather than the elegant designs of traditional chessmen, these

are grotesque hybrid figures.  The knight has a horse's head, while the Bishop (known in

France as the Fool) resembles a hunchbacked jester.  Richier used distorted animal and

partly human figures to reflect the anxieties and despair of post-war Europe.  

'It seems to me that in violent works there is just as much sensibility as in poetic ones',

she said.  'There can be just as much wisdom in violence as in gentleness'.

말 머리로 연출된 체스판의 기사(Knight)

L'Echiquier, grand, plâtre orginal peit  1959

Chessboard, Large Version (Original Painted Plaster)/체스보드

by Germaine Richier (리시에:  1902-1959)

born France, worked France, Switzerland

Plaster and metal

Presented by the artist's estate 2000

L'Echiquier, grand, plâtre orginal peit  1959

Chessboard, Large Version (Original Painted Plaster)/체스보드

by Germaine Richier (리시에:  1902-1959)

born France, worked France, Switzerland

Plaster and metal

Presented by the artist's estate 2000

L'Echiquier, grand, plâtre orginal peit  1959

Chessboard, Large Version (Original Painted Plaster)/체스보드

by Germaine Richier (리시에:  1902-1959)

born France, worked France, Switzerland

Plaster and metal

Presented by the artist's estate 2000

Baal Guerrier  1953

Baal the Warrior/전투의 신 바알

by Jean-Michel Atlan (아틀랑: 1913-1960)

born Algeria, worked Algeria, France

Oil paint on canvas

Presented byy Mr. Mrs. Alexander Margulies 1959

As a Jew and a member of the Resistance, Atlan had been arrested by the Nazis

during the Second World War.  Feigning madness, he was committed to a psychiatric

hospital from which he emerged when Paris was liberated.  He was in contact with

Asger Jorn and exhibited with CoBrA in 1948-9.

His subsequent work combined abstraction with figurative elements.  The title of 

this work refers to Baal, a Middle Eastern fertility deity, whose cult was regarded 

in the Judeo-Christiantradition as exemplifying the worship of false gods.

Composition   c. 1957-8

구성

by Shafic Abbud (아부드:  1926-2004)

born Lebanon, worked Lebanon, France

Oil paint on hardboard

Purchased with funds provided by the Middle East N. Africa Acquisitions Committee 2014

Composition is characteristic of Abboud's abstract work of the 1950s for which he used

thick paint, here applied with a palette knife, to establish an intense sense of movement. 

Although made in Paris the limited blue and greys seem to carry memories of the light

and color of the artist's native Lebannon.  There may even be suggestions of an aerial view

or rural landscape.  In his later notebooks, he wrote:  "It is very hard to explain, but

I like pursuing the work p to the abstract picture without letting go of the real origin'.

Untitled 1957

무제

by Ernest Mancoba (만코바: 1904-2002)

born South Africa, worked South Africa, France

Oil paint on canvas

Purchased with funds provided by the Africa Acquisitions Committee 2015

Strongly influenced by traditional Africa art, Mancoba stated: 'What I am concerned with

is whether the strongest effect and by the lightest means possible, the being which has been

in me and aspires to ｅxpression.'  Mancoba left South Africa in 1938 and settled in Paris.

After the Second World War he travelled to Copenhagen and associated with the CpBrA artists

who shared an interest in spontaneity and freedom of ｅxpression.  From 1952 until his death

Moncoba lived in Paris creating works in which the central form is simultaneously figurative

and abstract.

Hiep, hiep, horea!  1949

Hip, Hip, Hoorah!/힙, 힙, 후레이(만세!!)

by Karel Apprel 1921-2006 (압펠: 1921-2006)

born Netherlands, worked Netherlands, France, USA

Oil paint on canvas

Purchased with assistance from Evelyn, Lady Downshire's Trust fund 1988

The title of Hip, Hip, Hoorah! was intended to celebrate the artistic freedom achieved

by the CoBrA movement (1948-1951), a group of artists active in Copenhagen,

Brussels  and Amsterdam who sought to reinvigorate post-war culture.

The figures combine human attributes with animal or bird-like features.  Appel thought of them

as 'people of the night', and so gave them a dark background.  The bright colours and child-like

imagery are typical of CpBrA.  Appel often took inspiration from children's drawings, believing

that 'the child in man is all that's strongest, most receptive, most open and unpredictable'.

Tribal Mark II  1961

by Aubrey Williams (윌리엄즈:1926-1990)

born Guyana, worked Guyana, Britain, USA, Jamaica

Oil paint on canvas

Purchased 2011

Williams' paintings engage with the visual language of American and European abstraction,

while also drawing upon Guyanese cultural history,  His use of tribal glyph marks relates

to the calligraphic motifs of other abstract artists.  However, he first  encountered these

signs in the 1940s when he was working as an agricultural field officer in Guyana

and spent time with the Warrau tribe.  He described the glyph as 'a strange, very tense,

slightly violent shape coming in somewhere.  It has haunted me all my life and I don't

understand it; a subsconscious thing coming out'.

Aprés Nous La Liberté  1949

After Us, Liberty/우리 다음에, 자유

by Constant(콘스탄트: 1920-2005)

born and worked Netherlands

Oil paint on canvas

Purchased 1983

Constant originally titled this work To Us, Liberty, believing that it encapsulated the

spirit of creative freedom that accompanied the founding of the CoBrA group in 1948.

The prominent use of red, white and blue allude to the French tricolor flag, and its

revolutionary values of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood.  Several years later, after the

collapse of CoBrA, Constant re-titled the work to reflect his disillusionment: ' I changed

the title to express my doubts about the possibility of 'free art' in an unfree society,

and, at the same time, my hopes for the freedom all men are looking for'.

The Sculptor  1953

조각가

by William Gear (기어: 1915-1997)

born Britain, worked Britain and France

Oil paint on canvas

Purchased 1991

Gear was primarily a painter, but was working on ideas for sculpture while painting this.

He often gave his works titles in retrospect, seeing them as useful tools that 'can sometimes

set the tone of a work of art or give a lead to the spectator'.  The  arrangement of forms can be

read as a figure, with legs rising vertically from the lower edge and an insect-like head in the

top right.  The critic David Sylvester heralded Gear's work for revealing 'the fertility of that

no-man's land between the trenches of the abstract and the representational'.

Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I  1961-5

유년시절의 꿈의 소리 재탄생

by Ibrahim El-Salahi (엘-살라히: 1930 - )

born Sudan, works Sudan, Qatar, Britain

Enamel paint and oil paint on cotton

Purchased from the artist with assistance from the Acquisitions Committee, 2013

El-Salahi studied painting in Khartoum in the late 1940s, before completing his studies 

in London.  Returning to Khatoum in 1957, he realized that Sudan - a newly independent

country in the midst of a civil  war - required a different approach.  As one of the founders

of the Khartoum School, he developed a new visual vocabulary comprising simple forms,

strong lines and sombre colours inspired by his environment and rooted in Arabic and African

forms and iconography.  In this work El-Salahi captures the fleeting, and often dramatic, moments

when memory and dreams, past and present collide.

Monsieur Plume plis au pantalon(Portrait d'Henri Michaux)  1947

Monsieur Plume with Creases in his Trousers/

주름잡힌 바지를 입은 플류메씨 (앙리 미쇼의 초상화)

by Jean Dubuffet (듀뷰페:  1901-1985)

born and worked France

Oil paint and grit on canvas

Purchased 1980

In this work the outline of the figure is roughly gouged into the thick paint, the face and body

scarred and crumpled.  The title identifies it as a caricature of the poet-painter Henri Michaux,

whose writings featured 'Monsieur Plume', a semi-autobiographical comic character.  It belongs

to a group of unconventional portraits of Dubuffet's artistic and literary friends.

The series was exhibited underr the title 'Portraits with extracted Likeness, with Likeness cooked

 and confected in the Memory, with Likeness exploded in the Memory of Mr Jean Dubuffet'.

Number 14    1951

by Jackson Pollock (폴락:  1912-1956)

born and worked USA

Oil paint on canvas

Purchased with assistance from the American Fellows 

of the Tate Gallery Foundation 1988

By 1951, Pollock had achieved considerable  success with his dripped and poured abstract

painting, and was widely regarded as the leading young American artist.  Perhaps fearing 

that that he was reaching a dead-end in his work, he embarked on a series of black and 

white paintings in which figures emerge, as they had in his early works.  After rolling the

canvas out on the floor, he would apply the paint - usually industrial enamel paint - 

with sticks and basting syringes, which he wielded 'like a giant fountain pen', according to

his wife, Lee Krasner.

Painting, 23 May 1953    1953

그림, 1953년 5월 23일

by Pierre Soulages(술라제: 1919 - )

Oil paint on canvas

purchased 1953

The title of this painting refers to the date of its completion. 

Soulages began experimenting with abstraction in 1947, using heavy brushstrokes 

of black paint against a light background. This calligraphic style was to become increasingly 

vigorous and gestural throughout the 1950s. Soulages has said that for him abstraction is 

a means of exploring his imagination and inner experience. In 1950 he explained: 

'I work, guided by inner impulse, a longing for certain forms, colours and materials, 

and it is not until they are on the canvas that they tell me what I want'.

'I work, guided by inner impulse, a longing for certain forms, colors and materials',

A Mi-Voix  1958

낮은 목소리로

 

by Dorothea Tanning (태닝: 1910-2012)

born USA, worked USA, France

Oil paint on canvas

Presented by William N. Copley 1959

This painting was made in oil on canvas by the American artist Dorothea Tanning in 1958, 

when she was living in France. To make it Tanning blended thinly applied shades of black 

and white to varying intensities. Dark lines were added to the patches of paint 

to demarcate the edges of the table and the vague outlines of the figures. 

The brown ground of the canvas is visible through the paint, adding a warmer tone 

and providing underlying colour to a largely black and white image. In January 1960 

in places Tanning sent a letter to Tate stating that her approach to this work was to

 ‘paint a white and gray picture that would still have color in its veins 

as we have blood under our winter-white skin.

 Junctions  1962

교차점

 by Tsuyoshi Maekawa (마에카와:  1936)

born and works Japan

oil paint and burlap on canvas

Purchased with funds provided the Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee  2015

Maekawa was a prominent member of the Gutai Art Association, a group of artists working

in Japan from 1954-1972 in Japan who utilized industrial and everyday materials and shared

an interest in the performative nature of painting.  To create Two Junctions, Maekawa placed

piees of burlap, a textile used to make jute rice bags, onto a canvas, then cut, sewed and folded

the material.  He then poured and dripped colored enamel paint over the textured surface,

producing an abstract image that transcends the flatness traditionally associated with painting.

Cathedral  1950

대성당

by Norman Lewis (루이스: 1909-1979)

born and worked USA

Lent by the American Foundation 2015

Cathedral is an oil painting on canvas that was made in 1950 by the American abstract ｅxpressionist 

Norman Lewis (1908–2003). It is one of a small number of colourful, densely packed abstract 

compositions Lewis made which have titles that refer to the architecture of Harlem, New York City, 

where he lived and worked. Cathedral was displayed in the exhibition American Artists Paint the City 

in the US pavilion at the 1956 Venice Biennale, where it was hung with other abstract works 

by Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Lyonel Feininger. This was the first show at the Biennale 

to include works by African American artists since its founding in 1895.

Guano  1958-62

조류 배설퇴적물

by Judit Reigl (라이글: 1923 - )

born Hungary, works Hungary, Italy, France

oil paint on canvas

Presented by Winfred Miller and Cecilia Kerr 2006

Guano belongs to a group of works formed by a build-up of paint falling from other works

onto a canvas laid on the studio floor.  Accumulated and compacted by chance, these paintings

developed an extraordinary crust resembling the excrement of seabirds and bats, from which

they take their name.  on reviewing these surfaces.  Long furrows mark the surface.

The textures evoke urban surfaces, from pavements to ancient walls and by extension,

a sense of an embedded history.

Cuba Si  1961

쿠바 시

by Farid Belkahia (벨카이아: 1934-2014)

born Morocco, worked Morocco, France, Czech Republic

Oil paint on paper mounted on board

Belkahia's early ｅxpressionistic and overtly political works such as Cuba Si are

product of the artist's cosmopolitan existence that bridged Arab and European traditions.

Although Belkahia only lived in Prague for three years, the experience of living under

a communist regime had a lasting impact.  The work's title, Cuba Si references the

so-called "Bay of Pigs' crisis, when the US unsuccessfully attempted to invade

Cuba in 1961, the same year this work was made.

Purchased from the artist's estate 2015

Defeat   1963

승리

by Hamed Abdalla (압달라: 1917-1985)

born Egypt, worked Egypt, France, Denmark

Silver, aluminium, tar and oil paint on-board

Presented by the artis;s estate 2015

Defeat is characteristic of Abdalla's experimental approach to unconventional materials and 

techniques.  Although he relocated to Copenhagen in 1957 and later lived in Paris,

he remained engaged with political developments in his native Egypt and much of

his work reflects in political failure and the impact of conflict.

Rockery, 1963     1962-3

암석 정원

by Prunella Clough (클로프: 1919-1999)

born and worked Britain

Oil paint on canvas

purchased 1964

Clough's early work depicted people at work and the urban landscape.

Later she became regarded largely as an abstract painter, but her work always

kept a figurative base, as if observation and experience had been filtered 

through memory.  She wasfascinated by the 'edginess' of form, the sudden

intrusion of hard shaped into softer areas.

Death of Sun   1964

태양의 죽음

by Ku-lim Kim (김구림: 1936)

Born South Korea, works South Korea, USA

Oil paint and plastic on plywood

Purchased from the artist with funds provided 

by the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2016

At the centre of this work is a shape reminiscent of the sun, but its surface is filled with 

charred cracks that the artist made by burning the plastic.  It was created in 1964,

immediately after Kim completed his military service in Korea:

'The work is based on my experience of death.  I spent some time

in the military hospital... where I saw many young men losing their lives.  With the lack of 

medicine and proper medical care, so many lives were being lost, and I felt that 

human existence was extremely insignificant.'

to be continued....