Deftig Barock

From Cattelan to Zurbarán – Manifestos of the precariously vital. The word „deftig“ is itself baroque and, in its original meaning of „able, strong, powerful, solid“, leads etymologically back to the period around the seventeenth century and to the Dutch-speaking world. „Deftig“ in this exhibition is art in its directness and its closeness to life. The principle of the confrontational encounter between works from two widely separated epochs can likewise be described as „deftig“ in today’s sense of „drastic, earthy“. „Deftig Barock“ is not concerned with an illustrative short-circuiting of motifs, themes or formal analogies, but with the description of an attitude that, with an artistically sensualist intelligence, conjures up closeness to life as a notion of „life in full“ while also lamenting its loss. An attitude that, moreover, links questions about art with art itself. The Baroque is equated with dynamism, sensuous pleasure, extravagance and the theatrical, with the turning away from the calm solemnity of classical forms, but also with an epoch of instability and disintegrating orders. The Baroque has been recognised as a „culture of flux and interfaces“ or, as Erwin Panofsky saw it, as the beginning of our modernity. Exhibition and book thus recall that the art of the Baroque has enjoyed unchallenged esteem only since the beginning of the twentieth century, prompted by a generation of art historians who, out of their closeness to the art of their own day, ventured a look back at the past. With works from the Baroque, among many others by Pieter Aertsen, Monsù Desiderio or Rubens, as well as contemporary works, for instance by Maurizio Cattelan, Nathalie Djurberg, Cindy Sherman or Urs Fischer, this magnificent exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with an extensive glossary.

Exhibition:
Kunsthaus Zürich, 1/6 – 2/9/2012