This is a focused exhibition devoted exclusively to Motherwell’s papiers collés and related works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s. It will re-examine the origins of the artist’s style and his revelatory encounter with the papiers collé technique that he described in 1944 as “the greatest of our [art] discoveries.” Motherwell produced both abstracted figural collages and pure abstractions throughout the 1940s. However, by 1955 the Surrealist influences prevalent in these first works had given way to his distinctive mature style firmly rooted in Abstract Expressionism. Robert Motherwell: Early Collages will feature a compelling group of approximately 40 works drawn from the holdings of institutions and private collections in the United States and abroad. A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will offer a vital reassessment of Motherwell’s work in the collage medium. The exhibition will be presented subsequently at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York.
[more info]

Robert Motherwell, Personage (Autoportrait), 1943. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

In agreement with the Sandro Rumney, Art of The Next Century, and the Galerie Löhrl. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is exhibiting Big Head-Column (2013) by Stephan Balkenhol (b. Fritzlar, Germany, 1957), on the Grand Canal Terrace. Balkenhol’s carved wood figures appeared first in 1983 in reaction to abstract formalism and conceptual art, and with the intention of reintroducing the human body in contemporary art imagery. Balkenhol lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Meisenthal, France. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington D.C. (1995), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Saatchi Collection in London (1996), and the Arts Club of Chicago (1998), among many other museums and galleries.

The celebrated Gianni Mattioli collection of 26 works of the early 20th century Italian avant-garde have been on deposit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection since 1997. The collection is presently installed in its entirety in the new wing exhibition galleries of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, as a tribute to this great Italian collector.

The Schulhof Collection of 80 works of postwar European and American painting and sculpture was donated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 2012. A selection of works from the Schulhof donation is now a permanent part of the Venice museum’s offering to its visitors. For a period of sixteen weeks this summer the entire collection will be on view, making manifest the generosity of the donor, the late Hannelore B. Schulhof, and the high quality of the collection that she and her husband Rudolph brought together in the last third of the 20th century.