New Realisms:1957-1962. Object strategies between readymade and s

The exhibition New Realisms: 1957-1962 illuminates a turning point in the art of the second half of the 20th century — the point of rupture in the postwar period, which created the artistic conditions for what we now know as “The Sixties.” While that decade has been codified art historically with terms such as Pop, Fluxus, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, the relatively short period that might be said to have generated its key criteria has been resistant to such naming. And, while there have been exhibitions featuring various groupings of its artists – often framed nationalistically and spanning full careers — New Realisms: 1957-1962 radically limits the time frame to their first years of invention, while opening up the field by uniting the work of European and American artists in parallel trajectories. This exhibition takes as its focus the transformative five-year period 1957-1962: beginning at the culmination of modernism, and ending at the cusp of postmodernism. It tracks the passage between the last moment of the reign of abstract painting and the subsequent critical narrowing of diverse activity with the consolidation of (American) Pop Art. The interest here, then, is neither painting nor Pop, but the developments that could be witnessed each year in between, with all the terms in flux.