Ubu Gallery presented a retrospective view of the landmark Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, which premiered at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris (January 1938). The 1938 exhibition was the culminating avant-garde celebration in Europe before the devastating events leading to World War II. Included at Ubu Gallery were representative works by the major participants, photographs of the decorated mannequins, the installation …
Joseph Beuys: Signed Posters + Multiples
An artist, teacher, and advocate for his many causes, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) is considered not only the most charismatic figure of postwar German art, but also a radical pioneer of contemporary sculpture. Through his innovative art and involvement in successive social movements Beuys expressed his deep belief in society’s need for creativity to penetrate and mold its social and political …
Interventions: Four Approaches to Contemporary Photography
This exhibition presented four contemporary artists who “intervene” in the traditional notion of the photographic process. In doing so, the artists addressed a variety of issues, including those relating to the tension between appropriation and originality; photography and the so-called “fine arts”—painting and sculpture; the hand-made and the reproduction; as well as documentation and decoration. ARTISTS Gary Brotmeyer, Carl Goldhagen, …
The Box: From Duchamp to Horn
Ubu Gallery presented a selection of artists’ boxes in a variety of manifestations and approaches. Through this exhibition the artists provided a means to express “the box” as a container of objects (as in Marcel Duchamp’s Boite en Valise); as a personal world (Joseph Cornell); as an entity of aggression and danger (Lucas Samaras); as an aesthetic object addressing the …
Jindřich Štyrský: On the Needles of These Days. Photographs, 1934–1935
This — the inaugural exhibition of Ubu Gallery — consisted of a rare group of photographs by the Czech avant-garde artist, Jindřich Štyrský (1899–1942). These photographs were the basis for the artist’s surrealist masterpiece, On the Needles of These Days, published clandestinely in 1941 with original photographs and more widely in 1945 with gravure reproductions. The photographs in this exhibition …