The Endless Renaissance

In her book Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal argues that when an artist reference aspects of earlier work in their own, they irrevocably change the way in which we look at the quoted work. One of the most famous acts of this kind was executed by Marcel Duchamp in 1919, when he drew a moustache and goatee on a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa, and titled it L.H.O.O.Q. Since then, generations of art students have been unable to see the Mona Lisa without also grinning (at least to themselves) as they remember Duchamp’s’ cheek. Duchampian subversion aside, however, the ‘quoting’ of earlier work is not new to art and while Bal’s book is an articulate presentation of the implications of quotation for art historians and theorists, her book is hardly news to artists themselves who, for centuries, have taken it as a given that what is old is new and vice versa. The Endless Renaissance is an exhibition that, on one hand, looks at how contemporary artists continue to quote and invoke the work of earlier artwork, and on the other hand, shows how the way that we experience the art of the past is anything but stable or predictable.

The Endless Renaissance
Kurator: Steven Holmes

Künstler: Joseph Beuys, Joe Coleman, Gregory Crewdson, Eugène Delacroix, Thierry Delva, Wim Delvoye, Nicole Eisenman, Peter Friedl, Francisco de Goya, John Hoppner, Pieter Hugo, Byron Kim. Charles LeDray, Sol Le Witt, Kelly Mark, Jonathan Monk, Martin Puryear, Sharron Quasius, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Bert Rodriguez, Peter Paul Rubens, Chemi Rosado Seijo, Thomas Struth, Huang Yongping