Thursday, September 25, 2008

Ludwig Museum



With its next exhibition, Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art presents another oeuvre of international significance. Unmatched in its comprehensiveness by any previous European displays of the lifework, Agnes Denes's retrospective, The Art of the Third Millennium – Creating a New World View presents the highlights of an artist's oeuvre who was among the firsts to include the ecological perspective in the circle of interpretation available for contemporary art, who created the notion of eco-logic, and who established, through public actions and environmentally conscious interventions, the form of environmental art, art realized in a natural environment, in the land.

An American artist of international renown who was born in Hungary, Agnes Denes has created an oeuvre whose hallmark is the synthesis of the knowledge that is accumulated in the diverse fields of science and the free and critical spirit that distinguishes art. One of the first initiators of conceptual art, she studied natural and social sciences, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, the history of art, poetry and music, and she distilled this knowledge in unique works of art. Agnes Denes was among the first contemporary artists to examine the relationship of art and science, and her activity as a theoretician, academic and educator compares in importance with her art. It has been, ever since the 1960s, her artistic conviction that science, the treasury of centuries of universal human knowledge and experience, is, from the end of the 20th century on, mutually dependent upon art, the creation of visionary individuals, and that it is only through their cooperation and sharing of ideas that those new, globally relevant suggestions for change may emerge which can avert the ecological catastrophe that threatens mankind and can guarantee the conditions for global survival.

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