ASPEN, CO.- Aspen Art Museum is presenting its Winter 2023 program, bringing together a host of ambitious exhibitions and new commissions by leading international contemporary artists. Highlights include a major survey of the late, renowned sculptor John Chamberlain, curated by artist Urs Fischer; an experimental film and immersive installation by Cauleen Smith; a new museum rooftop commission by German sculptor Lena Henke; and the museum’s rolling series of artist-led presentations continues with new work by painter Issy Wood in A Lover’s Discourse.
John Chamberlain: THE TIGHTER THEY’RE WOUND, THE HARDER THEY UNRAVEL is the first institutional survey devoted to artist John Chamberlain (1927-2011) in over a decade, opening on December 15 and running through April 7, 2024. Curated by artist Urs Fischer and developed in collaboration with Dia Art Foundation, the exhibition spans Chamberlain’s career, extending over six decades. Arranged across three floors of the museum in an evocative, cross- temporal mise-en-scène, the exhibition adopts Chamberlain’s embrace of discovery and intuitive approach to scale, fit, and attachment.
Chamberlain is widely recognized for sculptures made from crushed automobile parts; materials the artist continually revisited throughout his career, though other bodies of work, ranging in scale from monumental to miniature, are composed of foam, foil, resin, paper, air ducts and dismantled appliances, amongst others. These varied experiments in squeezing, folding, and compressing populate the galleries of the Aspen Art Museum. Devoted to towering late works placed in dialogue with some of Chamberlain’s rarely exhibited earliest sculptures, the museum’s second floor gallery merges a practice’s beginning and end. Across the ground floor, works primarily on loan from Dia Art Foundation mingle along East Hyman Avenue in a surreal street scene. Chamberlain’s foam works, considered a radical departure when first exhibited in 1965, congregate in an adjacent gallery. In the museum’s Lower Level, visitors are encouraged to immerse themselves in projections of Chamberlain’s psychedelic Wide-Lux photographs, leading to a gallery devoted to Chamberlain’s miniatures, providing a bird’s-eye view of the artist’s material manipulations.
The exhibition is curated by Urs Fischer, in collaboration with Nicola Lees, Nancy and Bob Magoon Director, and Daniel Merritt, Director of Curatorial Affairs. To accompany the exhibition, Fischer has produced a new artist book titled John Chamberlain Against the World, which will be made available in the galleries. The book is a torrent of images that expands Chamberlain’s artistic lineage and legacy, bridging archival imagery of Chamberlain with that of Baroque sculpture, advertisements, peers, and artists who might be “descendants.”
Mines to Caves is a new experimental film and immersive installation at Aspen Art Museum by artist and film-maker Cauleen Smith, running from December 15 through April 7, 2024. Humanity’s ephemeral presence on earth and our imaginings of a better present and future are central themes in Smith’s practice. In Mines to Caves, Smith foregrounds how traditional capitalist structures like overconsumption and land development affect our relationships to each other and the environment. The exhibition evolves out of the artist’s previous film program, GIMME SHELTER CINEGLYPHS that premiered in September 2022 inside Aspen’s Smuggler Mine, the oldest operating silver mine in the region. At the museum, the gallery emulates Smuggler Mine’s darkened, cave-like interior, where Smith presents a reimagined edit of her animated cinematic hieroglyphs first projected on the mine walls. These moving images of animals and topographies reference cave paintings, the earliest known art. The experimental film reflects on Smith’s desire to return the mine to the mountain and to reorient towards an alternative relationship with the planet.
Also unveiled on December 15 is a new outdoor commission, You and your vim by New York–based artist Lena Henke, which crowns the rooftop of the Aspen Art Museum. Lena Henke has long studied the relationship between figure and environment, initiating sculptural and psychological explorations of bodies as they relate to the built world. The central sculpture, a towering bronze outline of a woman, can be pushed and set in motion, circling like the hands of a clock or the searching needle of a compass. Its vibrant red hue stands in luminous contrast to the alpine backdrop. The jocular female protagonist of You and your vim is a riff on a drawing by French illustrator and author Tomi Ungerer, and first appeared in Henke’s 2017 exhibition, THEMOVE. At the Aspen Art Museum, a new iteration of Henke’s heroine confronts the American West, set before Aspen Mountain.
The fifth presentation of the ongoing series, A Lover’s Discourse features a new painting by London-based artist Issy Wood, exhibited alongside Fernando Botero’s oil on canvas Lovers from 1982, from December 14 – February 4, 2024. Wood’s new work, Tasting it all, shows a larger-than-life can of Diet Coke resting on its side. Lively and seemingly content on its horizontal plane, this stretched object takes up the full canvas and locks our gaze in close. Interested in the semiotics of Botero’s unabashedly massive bodily forms, Wood chooses to juxtapose Lovers with a depiction of the popular sugar-free drink, perhaps one of America’s most successful attempts at generating—and dealing with—both pleasure and guilt.
The rolling series of artist-led presentations is inspired by the unexpected dialogues that can emerge by exhibiting artworks from different generations of artists side-by-side, juxtaposing recent works by emerging contemporary painters with pieces borrowed from private collections in the Aspen community, selected by each featured artist. A Lover’s Discourse is curated by Stella Bottai, Aspen Art Museum Curator at Large.
