More than 300 photographs from the early days of photography to the present are collected. The works come from over 100 renowned photographers and style-defining plastic artists. They show how photography influenced the concept of sculpture and defined it anew in a creative way. After the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Kunsthaus Zurich is the only other station of the exhibition.
The exhibition "The Official Copy" is the first survey exhibition where the change in the concept of sculpture takes centre stage through photography. It offers the visitor a critical examination of the aesthetic and theoretical intersections of these two very different genres.
The sculpture was among the first subjects of photography. Thanks to experimental sections, selective focus, variable optics, extreme close-up and targeted lighting, thanks to the techniques of collage, montage and assemblage as well as with manipulations in the darkroom, photographers not only interpreted the sculptures they captured, they have also brought forth amazing new creations.
Particular attention is due to the question of how one medium is involved in the creative interpretation of the other, and how photographs shape and challenge our understanding of sculpture. The exhibition, designed by Roxana Marcoci, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and supervised in Zurich by Tobia Bezzola delves into 170 years' worth of experience in ten chapters:
Exhibition in 10 Chapters from Eugène Atget to Fischli/Weiss
"Sculpture in the Age of Photography"
"Eugène Atget: the Marvelous in the Everyday"
"Auguste Rodin: the Sculptor and the Photographic Enterprise"
"Constantin Brancusi: the Studio as Groupe Mobile"
"Marcel Duchamp: the Readymade as Reproduction"
"Cultural and Political Icons"
"Studio Without Walls: Sculpture in the Expanded Field"
"The Pygmalion Complex: Animate and Inanimate Figures"
"The Performing Body as Sculptural Object"
"Daguerre’s Souo: What is Sculpture?"
A catalog accompanies the exhibition (Hatje Cantz Verlag), CHF 49.-.
25 February until 15 May 2011
Kunsthaus Zürich, Heimplatz 1, 8001 Zürich (CH)