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Wolf Vostell: Environments, Paintings, Happenings, Drawings, Videos from 1958 to 1978
Environments, paintings, happenings and videos by Wolf Vostell at the Fundació Joan Miró
On 4 January, a Wolf Vostell exhibition opened at the Fundació Joan Miró (Montjuïc Park) that includes one hundred and thirty-seven works, including environments, paintings, photographs and documentation of happenings, as well as video tapes screened on TV monitors. The show is a retrospective of the artist’s work from 1958 to 1978.
Wolf Vostell, the most prominent German artist to emerge after the Second World War, was the first European to create an environment at Cologne’s Buttermarkt in 1961, and his first happenings came shortly after the first ones organised by Allan Kaprow in the United States. The elements presented here are three installations, one object and five paintings.
The exhibition at the Fundació Joan Miró presents five environments: Electronic Space (1968), Car Fever (150 m2, 1972), Energy (40 m2, 1974), Fandango (120 m2, 1975) and Endogene Depression (140 m2, 1976), with corresponding series of analogue works (paintings and drawings with collages). In all cases, Vostell creates settings of great hallucinatory power in which objects are presented to us out of their everyday context, in unexpected combinations that make us think. As Vostell himself says: ‘It’s the things you don’t know that will change your lives.’ Josep Lluís Sert’s architecture is a particularly suitable setting for the presentation of an exhibition based on the use of new media, as it allows for maximum clarity in understanding this type of installation and the use of terraces and outdoor spaces.
The Wolf Vostell exhibition will run until 4 February. A 112-page catalogue with over 200 illustrations has been published to accompany the exhibition.
