Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible
This exhibition addresses a subject critical to artistic practice: the question of when a work of art is finished. Beginning with the Renaissance masters, this scholarly and innovative exhibition examines the term "unfinished" in its broadest possible sense, including works left incomplete by their makers, which often give insight into the process of their creation, but also those that partake of a non finito鈥攊ntentionally unfinished鈥攁esthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended. Some of history's greatest artists explored such an aesthetic, among them Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and 颁茅锄补苍苍别.
The unfinished has been taken in entirely new directions by modern and contemporary artists, among them Janine Antoni, Lygia Clark, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg, who alternately blurred the distinction between making and un-making, extended the boundaries of art into both space and time, and recruited viewers to complete the objects they had begun.
Comprising 197 works dating from the Renaissance to the present鈥攁pproximately forty percent of which are drawn from the Museum's own collection, enhanced by major national and international loans鈥攖his exhibition demonstrates The Met's unique capacity to mine its rich collection and scholarly resources to present modern and contemporary art within a deep historical context.
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This exhibition addresses a subject critical to artistic practice: the question of when a work of art is finished. Beginning with the Renaissance masters, this scholarly and innovative exhibition examines the term "unfinished" in its broadest possible sense, including works left incomplete by their makers, which often give insight into the process of their creation, but also those that partake of a non finito鈥攊ntentionally unfinished鈥攁esthetic that embraces the unresolved and open-ended. Some of history's greatest artists explored such an aesthetic, among them Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and 颁茅锄补苍苍别.
The unfinished has been taken in entirely new directions by modern and contemporary artists, among them Janine Antoni, Lygia Clark, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg, who alternately blurred the distinction between making and un-making, extended the boundaries of art into both space and time, and recruited viewers to complete the objects they had begun.
Comprising 197 works dating from the Renaissance to the present鈥攁pproximately forty percent of which are drawn from the Museum's own collection, enhanced by major national and international loans鈥攖his exhibition demonstrates The Met's unique capacity to mine its rich collection and scholarly resources to present modern and contemporary art within a deep historical context.
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I realize that I鈥檓 coming late to the party with Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, one of the three debut exhibitions of the Met Breuer, and I have little to add to the conversation about the fundamental problem with the show, which Eric Gibson in The Wall Street Journal...
How does an artist know when a work is finished? Sometimes it's a deliberate decision. Other times, the decision is made by fate or circumstance. Now, an extensive exhibition at The Met Breuer Museum in Manhattan is exploring great works of unfinished art.
For its inaugural show, The Met Breuer reflects upon broad philosophical questions that have consumed artists for centuries: When is a work of art really 鈥渇inished?鈥� Beyond that, does it even need to be? The ambitious exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible assembles a...
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