On the Road

Andy Warhol, Catherine Opie, Allen Ruppersberg

Exhibition: May 13 – Sep 5, 2010



On the Road takes its title from the legendary book by American poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, who recounts his eventful road trips across the United States in the late 1940s. The exhibition investigates the mythology of the American motoring adventure as it began to develop in the early 1920s, with the advent of immense expansions of the highway system, particularly in the West of the country. Featuring two interrelated components, the first part of the exhibition presents the practices of artists whose images and works have long been associated with the exploration of the West by way of the automobile. The second part is the result of a recent two-week excursion through Texas by the curator, during which a number of artifacts and documents were collected for display. Beyond looking at the road trip from a nostalgic point of view, On the Road explores the idea of such a drive as a rite of passage, a journey toward emancipation on the way to a destination that may be largely unknown but which holds the promise of liberating self-discovery.

Artist

Andy Warhol

New York, New York, USA

Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Died in New York, NY in 1987.

Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression “15 minutes of fame”. In the late 1960s he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine.

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Artist

Catherine Opie

Los Angeles, California, USA

Catherine Opie was born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio and received her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1988. Her work was included in notable exhibitions throughout the 1990s, including: The American Century (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1999 ); Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997 (The Lousiana Museum, Denmark, 1997); Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photograpghy (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1997); Persona (Renaissance Society, Chicago, 1996); In a Different Light (University Art Museum at Berkeley, 1995); among others. In 1997 she was awarded the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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Artist

Allen Ruppersberg

New York, New York, USA

Allen Ruppersberg is an internationally-known conceptual artist whose humorous installations, sculptures and actions blend popular culture with art history and literary references.
Ruppersberg was born in 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio and received his B.F.A. from the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles. Since the late 1960s, his work has been the subject of over sixty solo exhibitions and nearly 200 group shows. Career highlights include participation in the Whitney Biennials (1970, 1975, 1991), Documenta V (1972), Lyon Biennale (1997), and Sculpture Project Munster (1998). In 1985, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles organized a major exhibition of Ruppersberg’s work. Recent exhibitions include Frac Limousin, Limoges, France (1999); Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1998); and Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany (1997). Ruppersberg lives and works in New York, NY.

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Curator

Jens Hoffmann

San Francisco, California, USA

Jens Hoffmann was appointed Director of the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco in 2006. Before assuming his position at the CCA Wattis Institute, Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. At the ICA he organized several group exhibitions, including Alien Nation (2006); 100 Artists See God (2004-5); and Artists’ Favorite (2004). He has curated solo exhibitions for John Bock, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tino Sehgal, Jonathan Monk and Martha Rosler. Hoffmann has worked for institutions and exhibitions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Dia Center for the Arts, New York, NY; Documenta X, Kassel, Germany; and Portikus Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, among others. Recent publications include Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture (Phaidon, 2007), co-authored with nine other curators; The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist (Revolver, 2004); and Perform (Thames & Hudson, 2005), co-authored with Joan Jonas.
 

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