Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture

(Hardback)

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The rediscovery of a still underappreciated artist who, along with Auguste Rodin, revolutionised sculpture in the 19th century.

Artist and artisan, art theorist and proto-installation artist, master of high publicity performances and rival of Auguste Rodin - Medardo Ross was one of the great pioneers of Modernism. The catalogue presents a comprehensive retrospective of the artist with more than fifty sculptures and a large selection of photographs, photocollages, and drawings. It follows the relational thinking of Medardo Rosso, who frequently exhibited his output with comparable works, and contextualizes his oeuvre with selected works by about fifty artists - among them Francis Bacon, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, and Andy Warhol - who resonate directly or indirectly with Rosso.

Author Bio

Medardo Rosso, b. 1858 in Turin, d. 1928 in Milan, was a resident of Paris from 1889 on. There, he befriended Auguste Rodin, whose collaborator and later rival he became. Both artists sought to radically redefine the ostensibly unmodern medium of sculpture, which had been stuck in the confines of the monumental. Designed in the spirit of a fluid idea of modernism and shaped by the philosopher Henri Bergson's revolutionary concept of space and time, Rosso's sculptures overcame classical characteristics such as solidity and durability in favor of modern phenomena of the transitory and immaterial.

Texts by: Jo Applin, Birgit Brunk, Georges Didi-Huberman, Heike Eipeldauer, Elena Filipovic, Ines Gebetsroither, Francesco Guzzetti, Karola Kraus, Lisa LeFeuvre, Megan R. Luke, Esmee Postma, Florian Pumhosl, Nina Schallenberg, Francesco Stocchi, Matthew S. Witkovsky.