This highly unusual and major show is devoted to a generation of artists formed in Chicago in the aftermath of World War II. The curator Germano Celant has brought together a mass of figurative and political works generated in Chicago’s art schools but rejected by mainstream New Yorkers obsessed with action painting, abstract expressionism and minimalism.
The most shocking of those on show here in the Nord and Sud galleries are the huge acrylics by Golub denouncing the brutality of war, racism, torture and violence. Westermann, a highly influential sculptor and printmaker who excoriated militarism and materialism, became a key figure for later artists from Chicago, the most notorious being Jeff Koons, a one year wonder at the Art Institute of Chicago. Koons, a notorious ‘borrower’, appropriated figures from Westermann’s print Dance of Death for one of his own bizarre works, Elvis.
Horace Clifford Westermann, Swingin’ Red King, 1961
Courtesy Collection of KAWS
Until January 5th at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy
www.fondazioneprada.org
