Euskaraz irakurri: Kokoschka “errebeldearen” atzera begirako erakusketa, Guggenheim museum

The Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka stars in the first major retrospective of the year at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which will show his anti-war activism after fighting in the First World War and being persecuted by Nazism in the Second.

The exhibition “Oskar Kokoschka: A Rebel from Vienna” It has been organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris; It is made up of 140 works, including paintings, drawings, lithographs, posters and postcards, on loan from different European collections; and is curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer.

The exhibition, according to the general director of the Bilbao museum, Juan Ignacio Vidarte, offers “a complete vision of his artistic career” and an “extensive and in-depth review” of the different stages he went through in his long career that covered almost the entire century. XX, since it began in the first decade of the century and concluded at the end of the 70s.

‘Time gentleman please’ © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, 2023, VEGAP, Bilbao

Although he is considered a versatile artist, his career was dominated by portraiture, both of people and of landscapes and animals, in which he reached such a psychological depth that his scholars have described him as a “painter of souls”.

The self-portraits that the artist took throughout his career, especially after fighting in the First Great European War and during his stay in the German city of Dresden, are another facet that distinguishes the Austrian creator.

Kokoschka’s career was marked by a nomadic life, in which he traveled through different countries, both voluntarily, seeking his own pictorial style, and involuntarily, forced by the persecution suffered by the Nazi regime, which included him on its list of “degenerate artists” when he lived in Prague, a city from which he fled on the last plane that left for London, where he lived in exile.

The “clear denunciation”, in Buchhart’s opinion, in his works of the wars that devastated Europe in the first half of the 20th century earned him the label of political activist.

Within this firmly anti-war facet of Kokoschka are the two posters painted by the Austrian artist denouncing the bombing of Gernika by the Nazi aviation allied with Franco in the Spanish Civil War, which are owned by the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum and are have included in this exhibition.

The exhibition will star in the spring and summer season of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, where it can be visited from tomorrow, March 17, to September 3.

Source: Eitb

Bruce

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