The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Los Carpinteros. Frío Estudio del Desastre, 2005. Cinder blocks, concrete, fishing nylon. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Photo credit: Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

April 4 - July 5, 2009

“The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection” opens at The Mori Art Museum from April 4 to July 5, 2009. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, the Vienna-based foundation, renowned for its excellence in contemporary art.

“The Kaleidoscopic Eye” brings together a selection of works by leading contemporary artists with international reputation, such as Janet Cardiff, Do Ho Suh, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, and Matthew Ritchie. The exhibition explores the disruption of perceptual habits and challenges the ways we experience visual representation and sensations through art. The many large-scale works in the exhibition multiply and interweave, in amazingly evocative ways, the registers in which imagination, memory, light, reflection, and sound are stimulated in a playful and interactive experience.

Using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, the exhibition interrogates the limits of visibility through artworks that fully engage perception, never allowing the senses to rest. Rather than sharpening vision, the kaleidoscope tends to disorganize and diffuse it, recomposing the perceived images of our surroundings by reflecting arbitrary patterns and rotational symmetries. The selection of works includes video, sculpture, film, painting, but the core of the exhibition is installations, especially site-specific interventions, a particular strength of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary collection.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (T-B A21) was founded in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg, daughter of the Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen- Bornemisza and founder of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and is committed to supporting the production of contemporary art, actively commissioning and collecting unconventional projects that defy traditional disciplinary boundaries. The more than 450 pieces in its collection include paintings, photographs, installations, and video works.

For further information visit,  www.mori.art.museum