Modernism as Ruin

Subtitled “An Archeology of the Present” and featuring approximately forty works—including installation, sculpture, film, drawing, and books—this group exhibition takes up a recurrent curatorial fascination with entropy, decay, and the aesthetics of aftermath as potential sources for renewal and innovation. Manifested here by the formal skepticism of late Modernism, including works drawn from the Generali’s own signature collection by Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Isa Genzken, the exhibition’s purview expands to encompass a subsequent generation of artists interested in mining the failed utopian models of the twentieth century for recuperative possibilities, including Giuseppe Gabellone, Cyprien Gaillard, Florian Pumhösl, Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, and Rob Voerman. The catalogue is to include essays by Philip Ursprung, Kai Vöckler, and the curator, in addition to close considerations of each of the selected works.