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September 20 - November 17, 2023
Joe Tilson - Milestones
DIE GALERIE, Frankfurt am Main

With the exhibition Milestones we aim to honor the British artist Joe Tilson (*1928), one of the pioneers and main representatives of British Pop Art, and his work in the year of his 95th birthday. Works from almost all creative phases, from the early 1950s to the present day, are featured in this show with retrospective character and reflect the fundamental milestones of a life devoted to art.

 

Unique works on canvas and paper, wooden reliefs, as well as prints and multiples from various work cycles, are presented in this second exhibition of the artist at DIE GALERIE, bearing witness to his versatility both in terms of subject matter and creative approach. Whereas in the early “Pop Art years” he explored political and socially critical topics alongside the fast-paced technological progress and the world of consumerism, it was increasingly the natural world and its elements, as well as ancient legends and mythological lore, that provided him a source of inspiration in his later creative phases. Further major impulses for his oeuvre of the 1990s and 2000s can be found in Italy, as the series of the so-called „Crete Senesi“ – inspired by and executed in the Tuscan landscape – and his creations dedicated to the city of Venice strikingly illustrate. Although his art has been in a constant state of flux over the past decades and experienced countless transformations, Joe Tilson always managed to remain true to himself and to develop a style that is unmistakably unique.


Alongside the works of the British artist, the Venetian-themed tapestries of Joslyn Tilson, artist in her own right and wife of Joe Tilson, will be shown in a special cabinet exhibition.

Highlight of the month


Marino Marini
Miracolo
Bronze
132 x 65 x 51 cm

The subject of Miracolo sculptures is almost Marino Marini's horseman at his most dramatic and abstract. The first Miracolo was created around 1951 - when, during and even more after the war, the horror, and disillusionment in Marini's art became palpable. A dramatic change occurs in the nature of Marini's equine sculptures: the earlier composure shifts into an expressionistic approach, reflecting the artist's sense of apprehension for the fate of all humankind.

While the first works of this series still show the animals with their forepart of the body collapsing to the ground, and the rider tearing out diagonally backward as they fall, later Miracoli are set up vertically. The horsemen are violently thrown off of rearing horses that they can no longer control. Increasingly, the figurative becomes submerged in destructive abstraction in an extreme tension between the vertically erect body of the horse and the human body plunging backward.

 

The bronze from 1953/54 shown here depicts precisely this kind of vertical representation of horse and horseman, with the upper part of the sculpture and the soaring movement evoking many of Marini's horse depictions. The predominant part of the composition is the horse's head moving diagonally upwards. About to fall, just clinging to the horse's back with his legs, the rider can be observed, also in the diagonal, his own back against that of the rearing horse, whose hind legs stick up to the sky while it has fallen on its rear end in the fall. This outstanding sculpture of the Italian artist awaits you until February 25, 2023, in our exhibition Marino Marini!