Joseph Beuys: Utopia At The Stag Monuments
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Ausstellung18.04.2018 - 16.06.2018
Animals are key signifiers in Beuys’ art, in particular the stag, which features across early engravings, as well as numerous drawings featured in the exhibition. In Stag Monuments, Hirsch (Stag) incorporates an ironing board that belonged to the artist’s mother, whilst Ziege (Goat) is created from a wheeled cart and pickaxe; in Beuys’ hands, simple objects become highly evocative, transforming the prosaic into the heroic. For the artist, animals represented ‘the incarnation of the soul or the earthly form of spiritual beings with access to other regions’, and his distinctive menagerie also includes swans, bees, horses and hares. The latter appears in several sculptures, including Friedenshase (Peace Hare), 1982, Coniglio (Rabbit), 1984, and Hasenstein (Hare Stone), 1982, a roughly hewn basalt stele spray- painted with a golden hare. Beuys also made the primal connection between humans and animals explicit in works like Tierfrau (Animal Woman), 1949 (cast 1984), on view in the Chapel Gallery.
The notion of generative energy was central to Beuys’ iconography, in particular to the invocation of thermal change through his use of felt, fat and copper as sculptural materials. These elements form part of an illuminating constellation of works in the Berkeley Gallery at Ely House, including Feldbett (Campaign Bed), 1982, an electrical accumulator swathed in felt blankets that formed part of the original Stag Monuments, shown alongside the copper Kleines Kraftwerk (Small Power Station), 1984, and the felt-wrapped musical instrument in Infiltration-homogen für Cello (Infiltration- homogenous for Cello), 1966-85. In the same gallery, Filzanzug (Felt Suit), 1970, formed part of Beuys’ Isolation Unit performance at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art in 1971 and would become one of the artist’s most important multiples. Felt and fat both had autobiographical significance for Beuys, inextricably linked to his origin story: he recounted being shot down over the Crimea in 1943, while serving as a pilot in the Second World War, and rescued by Tartars who wrapped him in the insulating materials that would later become central to his artistic vocabulary.
The works included in Utopia at the Stag Monuments are significant, autonomous objects in themselves and, taken together, they represent a Gesamtkunstwerk that helps to elucidate Beuys’ life and work. As Rosenthal writes in the accompanying catalogue essay, ‘contained within each work by Beuys is a miraculous fusion of past and present which also becomes a manifesto of hope for the future’.
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18.04.2018 - 16.06.2018
JOSEPH BEUYS: UTOPIA AT THE STAG MONUMENTS
Curated by Norman Rosenthal
37 Dover Street, London W1S 4NJ