Deftig Barock

The word "deftig" is itself baroque and has it etymological roots in the seventeenth century with its original meaning "diligent, strong, coarse, crude". The art in this exhibition is indeed "deftig" in its directness and proximity to life. The current sense of "deftig", i.e. "extreme, hearty, robust", is itself a good description for the principle of the confrontational encounter between works from two temporally remote epochs. Yet "Riotous Barocque" is not about the illustrative hot-wiring of motifs, themes or formal analogies, but describes an attitude, which, as the idea of "full to bursting life" in its deployment of a sensually artistic intelligence, invokes both that closeness to life as well as lamenting its loss. An attitude which, over and above this, also links questions relating to art per se. The Baroque is equated with dynamism, sensory pleasure, extravagance, theatricality and a departure from the peaceful solemnity of classical forms, but also with an epoch of instability and disintegrating social order. A "fluid culture of the interface" has been identified in the Baroque, or, in Erwin Panofsky's view, the beginnings of modernism. In this way both the exhibition and the book recall the fact that baroque art actually only received undisputed appreciation since the beginning of the twentieth century, motivated by a generation of art historians who dared to look back to the past from their very proximity to the art of the new century. This magnificent exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue boasting an abundance of rich, illustrative material and an extensive glossary, featuring works from the Baroque, among many others by Pieter Aertsen, Monsù Desiderio or Rubens, as well as contemporary works for example by Maurizio Cattelan, Nathalie Djurberg, Urs Fischer or Cindy Sherman.

Exhibition: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1/6 - 2/9/2012