PAST EXHIBITION

Themes and Variations: From the Mark to Zero

March 21, 2009—May 17, 2009

Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Themes and Variations: From the Mark to Zero, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. This exhibition draws upon the museum’s permanent collections from the early 20th century to the post World War II period, enriched by loans from other collections. It charts the progress of the pictorial mark chronologically and thematically: from typography to collage, from letters to numbers, to the iteration of gesture, of signs, eventually sublimating into monochrome, beyond which the only possible condition is the void. As a ‘variation’ of this theme, the exhibition includes a one-man show of painting Vigil by British artist Jason Martin. Martin, one of the most creative young British artists of his generation, has been invited to interpret grade zero with a series of canvases specifically created for this exhibition, a sequence of monochromes, refined in texture and luminous in tone, poised between painting and sculpture

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