Press Release
Le Mouvement 1955
October 1, 2024 - January 24, 2025
Yaacov Agam, Carmelo Arden Quin, Martha Boto, Robert Breer, Pol Bury, Alexander Calder, Omar Carreño, Narciso Debourg, Marcel Duchamp, María Freire, Carmen Herrera, Robert Jacobsen, Nikolai Kasak, Gyula Kosice, Julio Le Parc, Antonio Llorens, Vera Molnár, Lygia Pape, Raúl Pavlotzky, Jesús Rafael Soto, Grete Stern, Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely
ANOTHER SPACE is pleased to announce the opening of Le Mouvement 1955, a critical re-examination of the eponymous exhibition at the Galerie Denise René in Paris in 1955. A pivotal moment in the history of Kinetic Art, Le Mouvement featured a group of eight international artists whose works explored the relationship between art and motion - established figures Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and Victor Vasarely, alongside five then lesser-known artists Yaacov Agam, Robert Breer, Pol Bury, Robert Jacobsen and Jean Tinguely.
Nearly seven decades after this landmark exhibition, ANOTHER SPACE’s expanded iteration reconsiders these artists’ ground-breaking innovations in the fields of movement and perception. Challenging the pervasive understanding of Kinetic art, the exhibition highlights the political and utopian dimension of these artists’ work as well as their pioneering embrace of technological innovations and new industrial materials, such as neon, plastics and acrylic paint.
Curated by Estrellita Brodsky and based on her doctoral research, Le Mouvement 1955 features works by the eight participants in the original Paris exhibition, alongside other artists exploring similar ideas at the time, such as Carmen Herrera and Vera Molnar, female artists who were absent from the seminal all-male exhibition. The show further examines the origins and legacy of the Kinetic art movement across Europe and Latin America, as well as its complicated reception in the United States.
Le Mouvement 1955 emphasizes the pivotal role of the Madí, a group founded in Argentina in 1946, which explored concepts of movement and viewer participation. The Madí group, which stood for Materialismo Dialéctico (Dialectic Materialism), significantly influenced many Paris-based artists through their shared participation in various editions of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. While most critics tend to trace the origins of Kinetic Art to Vasarely and an earlier generation of European-based Bauhaus and Constructivists, this exhibition highlights the foundational role that Madí played in the exploration of movement in art. As early as 1968, French critic Jean Clay underscored the overlooked importance of Madí's influence on the 1955 Le Mouvement Kinetic exhibition.
Estrellita Brodsky states: "Since writing my dissertation on Latin American artists in postwar Paris, it has been my dream to re-stage Le Mouvement, a primary catalyst for the Kinetic art movement and, in my opinion, among the most important exhibitions of the 20th century. I believe it is also an exhibition that deserves greater recognition, particularly in the United States, where Kinetic art has been largely misunderstood as contrived or superficial. What made the Kinetic movement so powerful, however, was its playfulness and inherent optimism. Many of its members, and certainly those from Latin America, proposed a utopian belief that engaging the public more directly would drive social change, a radical idea in a period marked by the Cold War and rising authoritarianism. As we face similar challenges today, with growing threats to democracy and the constant fear of conflict, we need art that brings hope and joy, encourages participation, and unites people—core themes of Kinetic art and I believe the reason these works continue to be of significance today."
ANOTHER SPACE is a not-for-profit program established by the Daniel and Estrellita B. Brodsky Family Foundation. Founded by art historian and collector Estrellita B. Brodsky, the program is dedicated to building recognition and international awareness of artists from Latin America and its diaspora within a global context.