BRUSSELS.- For the first time, in cooperation with the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the ZKM in Karlsruhe, BOZAR presents a survey of the artistic trends that flourished in Eastern and Western Europe after the Second World War. Despite the political tensions and the background of the Cold War, artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain experimented with similar art forms such as media art, action painting, conceptual art, and sound art.

Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–68 sheds light on a vibrant period in the recent history of art via 200 works by 150 artists from 18 European countries, including the former Soviet Union.

This exceptionally wide-ranging overview includes key works by, among others, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, Max Beckmann, Hannah Höch, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Vladimir Tatlin, Ossip Zadkine, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wróblewski, Karel Appel, Armando, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Marcel Broodthaers, Victor Vasarely, Jean Tinguely, Christo, Nam June Paik, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud, Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, and Joseph Beuys.

In a series of exhibitions in 2016, BOZAR is exploring the significance and effects of the avantgarde. In Facing the Future, BOZAR looks at the resurgence of avant-garde movements in Europe after Nazism had branded modern art as "entartet" (degenerate) and the Second World War had claimed an unprecedented number of victims.

The exhibition examines the crucial impact of the Second World War on the development of art in Europe. Artists are often the first to sense major changes in society and to break with taboos. In the early post-war years, art mainly gave expression to mourning, memory, and coping with the trauma. Both on the "losing" and on the "winning" side, artists sought to come to terms with the unthinkable events that had taken place by looking back. Many works of art of that time are pervaded by the war and are characterised by dark colours, ashen faces, and grim motifs.

Starting in the 1950s, scope emerged for a new perspective on the future. The development of new technologies such as nuclear power and space travel and the rise of the consumer society led to the dominance of an idealistic faith in the future. New artistic movements such as ZERO, nouveau réalisme, pop art, and kinetic art came into being. The exhibition ends, symbolically, in 1968: a key year, in which utopian thinking came to an end with widespread student revolts and the Invasion of the Warsaw Pact Armies after the Prague Spring.

Facing the Future brings together, for the first time, art from Eastern and Western Europe, thereby throwing new light on the history of art. For a long time, it was assumed that the only art in Eastern Europe was totalitarian state art and that there were no avant-garde movements there, and that post-war Western Europe was mainly subject to dominant influences from the US. Facing the Future corrects that picture.

It is clear now that Europe was by no means as artistically divided as had been thought and that there was actually considerable interchange between artists. In Eastern Europe, too, avant-garde arts flourished, but underground. On both sides of the Wall, similar artistic trends developed, such as pop art, conceptual art, action art, sound art, kinetic art, and new-media arts (using photography, film, TV, video, and computers). In artworks of the time, one finds shared values, despite the Cold War and the prevailing context of hostility. This is something that is still relevant, certainly in the present context of increased tension between Europe and Russia.

The exhibition is presented chronologically and is made up of six chapters: [1] Prologue and end of the war, [2] Mourning and memory, [3] The Cold War, [4] New idealisms, [5] New realisms, and [6] 1968: The end of utopias?. Facing the Future includes works on loan from museums throughout Europe and Russia, including Tate Modern (London), the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Nationalgalerie (Berlin), the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow), and the Hermitage (St Petersburg), as well as less well-known and private collections in Hungary, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere.

Facing the Future includes key works such as Ossip Zadkine's Destroyed City, Max Beckmann's Transporting the Sphinxes, Gerhard Richter's Uncle Rudi, Henry Moore's Falling Warrior, Karel Appel's Pair, Fernand Léger's Builders, and The Black Flag by Marcel Broodthaers. A number of the works of art and artists, moreover, are being seen for the first time in Brussels – a revelation for the public.

Facing the Future is a travelling exhibition and, true to the spirit behind its conception, will be seen in both Europe and Russia. After BOZAR, it can be seen during the Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Book Fair) at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (21 October 2016 – 29 January 2017) and at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (6 March – 28 May 2017).