Energy made visible, curated by David Anfam, Senior Consulting Curator of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, an eminent expert on Abstract Expressionism. It is a traveling exhibition dedicated to the monumental Mural (1943, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City) which Jackson Pollock created for the New York apartment of Peggy Guggenheim, commissioner of the work, between the summer and autumn of 1943. After an important conservation and cleaning intervention at the Getty Conservation Institute, which lasted 18 months, the Mural arrived in Italy for the first time, for the exhibition in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni.
At 6 meters in length, the Mural is the largest work Pollock ever made and exerted a seismic impact on American art of the time, right up to the present day. With its monumental dimensions, it introduced a new concept of scale and audacity into American Abstract Expressionism, anticipating the more “classical” abstractions, rendered through the dripping technique, that Pollock would represent four years later. The context within which the Mural will be inserted includes the work Alchemy, also the result of a recent conservation intervention at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, as well as works by artists such as Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife, David Smith and Robert Motherwell.
Furthermore, the exhibition sheds fundamental new light on the relationship between Pollock and the action photography practiced by a group of photographers such as Herbert Matter, Barbara Morgan, Aaron Siskind and Gjon Mili. After the Venetian stage, the Mural will be exhibited at the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle in Berlin and subsequently at the Picasso Museum in Malaga. The exhibition is organized byUniversity of Iowa Museum of Art.
The Jackson Pollock Exhibition, Mural. Energy made visible will be accompanied by an exhaustive publication by David Anfam, published by Thames & Hudson in Italian and English.
