Private/Corporate II
A Dialogue of Two Contemporary Collections Ileana Sonnabend, New York, and Daimler Art Collection
Aus der Sonnabend Collection
Bernd und Hilla Becher, Ashley Bickerton, Mel Bochner, Clay Ketter, Jef Koons, John McCracken, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Rhona Pondick, Haim Steinbach, Andy Warhol, Mathew Weinstein
Aus der Daimler Kunst Sammlung
Georg Herold, Silke Radenhausen, Eva-Maria Reiner, Andreas Reiter Raabe, Haim Steinbach, Franz Erhard Walther
Daimler Contemporary
3 September 2003
- 12 April 2004
exhibition information
Ileana Sonnabend
Opening inHaus Huth:
Dr. Manfred Gentz; Board of Management DaimlerDr. Renate Wiehager, Ileana Sonnabend
Ileana Sonnabend is undoubtedly one of the key personalities in the international art world. She started up her New York gallery in 1954, first working with Leo Castelli. She can take the credit for having discovered and promoted Pop Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns at an early stage.
Jeff Koons
Hoover
Ileana Sonnabend Collection
When she moved to Paris in 1962, Ileana Sonnabend and her second husband Michael Sonnabend established Pop Art Américaine in Europe. This was the title of her show for Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenbourg, Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, John Chamberlain and Tom Wesselmann in 1963.
Pop
Art success story and
European and American developments
But rather than dedicating herself solely to the Pop Art success story, she became passionately interested in Minimalism, Process Art and Arte Povera: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari and Gilberto Zorio were shown in her Paris gallery, along with Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Mel Bochner, Christian Boltanski and Vito Acconci, to name but a few.
So the Sonnabend Collection is correspondingly wide-ranging: it provides an interface for the mutual areas of influence of European and American developments with its fondness for and interest in conceptual art, object art and installative works.
So Ileana Sonnabend conquered Europe for her American artists in the 1960s. Then, when she returned to New York via Geneva in 1971, European art acquired an effective platform in America. She moved into an old paper factory in downtown New York with gallery-owners Castelli, Weber and Emmerich, thus making SoHo the hub of the international art world for several decades.
She ran her Paris gallery in parallel until 1960, and so American and European concepts, schools, common features and clashes remained the precise, undistorted focus for her collecting and exhibiting activities: in the next few years she showed Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gilbert & George, Piero Manzoni, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Marcia Hafif, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz and Hamish Fulton in New York.
Haim Steinbach
ultra red no1; 1986
Ileana Sonnabend Collection
in the eighties
The discursive nature of Ileana and Michael Sonnabend's intensive promotion of ideas and their acquisition of art has remained consistent down to the present day. The history of the gallery followed the same pattern, and the two collectors expanded their holdings in the eighties by adding "Neoconceptualist" artists who were known as enfants terribles on the scene like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Peter Halley and Mayer Vaisman, all of whom Ileana presented first, in a show that was very controversial at the time.
The Sonnabend Collection is still widening its range with works by artists including Haim Steinbach, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Clay Ketter, Matthew Weinstein, Rona Pondick and Wim Delvoye.
The collection uses its outstanding exhibits to reveal some relevant patterns in 20th century art history: the triumphal history of the ready-made, the extraordinary conflict about the postulate of Minimalism, and self-questioning and self-reflection by artists in their social role, which is critically considered and also happily exploited.
As a contemporary witness of many of the last century's "isms", Ileana Sonnabend, as her collection seismically suggests, has never lost her grip on art's principal route, or its detours. As an American in Europe or a European in New York she has set standards and made art history.
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external links:
>> www.sonnabendgallery.com
>> Sonnabend Gallery at artdealers.org