The Fondazione Prada in Milan will present a survey of work by Betye Saar from September 15, 2016 to January 8, 2017. “Uneasy Dancer” will be the first exhibition in Italy of the American artist, who is best known for challenging stereotypes of race and culture through her evocative assemblages of found objects and personal memorabilia.Saar has described her work as moving in a “creative spiral,” with concepts like crossroads, passage, death, rebirth, and the underlying aspects of gender and race. “It was really about evolution rather than revolution, about evolving the consciousness in another way and seeing black people as human beings instead of the caricatures or the derogatory images,” she has said.“Uneasy Dancer” brings together more than 80 works created between 1966 and 2016, including assemblages, installations, collages, and sculpture. According to the Fondazione Prada, the exhibition will expand on key aspects of Saar’s practice such as mysticism, metaphysics, memory, and the creation of sociopolitical identifiers.Highlights of the exhibition include the early assemblages “Record for Hattie,” 1975 and “Calling Card,” 1976; sculptural cage works such as “Domestic Life,” 2007 and “Rhythm and Blues,” 2010; as well as the artist’s seminal circular installation “The Alpha and The Omega (The Beginning and The End),” 2013-2016, which was created especially for “Uneasy Dancer.”Exhibition curator Elvira Dyangani Ose describes Saar’s work as blurring the boundaries “between art and life, between physical and metaphysical,” adding that the spirituality in her work not only resides in the works themselves, but also “in the artistic exercise of transforming common material in a sort of evocative new imagery, involving the viewer in reminiscent fabulations of the real.” “Uneasy Dancer” runs from September 15, 2016 through January 8, 2017 at Fondazione Prada.
↧