NOUVEAUX REALISTES

Museo Comunale d'Arte Moderna di Ascona, May 25 – October 1, 2017

Mara Folini, the director of the Museo Comunale d'Arte Moderna di Ascona, assembled eighty pictures from the gallery of the art dealer Reto a Marca in an exhibition entitled ‘New Realists’. As Reto a Marca recalled: ‘When I found an object that convinced me, I put it forward to my collectors. Now I have tracked down works that I sold ten or fifteen or twenty years ago and I have brought them all together at the museum in Ascona. That was the idea behind the exhibition.’
The artists in the show interpret and communicate modern existence by framing and assembling objects, incorporating them within larger structures, impregnating them and rendering them unique. Examples of this can be seen in works by Arman, Klein, Raysse, and César. Other artists, such as Tinguely, Spoerri, and Niki de Saint Phalle, transform objects using industrial techniques, as if to bear witness to the metamorphosis of humanity in the modern world. Others attempt a poetic recovery of contemporary forms of advertising, from posters to mass media. These include the Décollagistes and Affichistes: Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne, Rotella, and Deschamps.

The Nouveaux Réalistes pursued a shared, collective goal: the search for ways of directly appropriating reality, enabling what Pierre Restany called the ‘poetic re-use of urban and industrial reality, and of the reality of advertising’. Around 1960, some of the Nouveaux Réalistes collaborated with the Zero Group. Ten of these works were shown in the exhibition. The movement known as the Zero Group began in Germany in 1958. The group stood opposed to realism and abstraction; instead, they insisted on the need to make a clean break with academic tradition and with the artistic experiences of the previous generation, and to start again from scratch. Essential works here included Klein's monochromes and Pine’s fire paintings; another vital aspect of their work was the use of non-artistic materials in creating artworks, for example the nails and tubes seen in the work of Tinguely and Uecker.

Works by Otto Piene were loaned to the exhibition from the collection of the Dr. Christiane Hackerodt Arts and Culture Foundation.