On the tour of this spring’s exhibitions blind and partially sighted visitors will be transported to the Soviet sixties and Andy Warhol’s Factory, become part of kinetic installations by artists from Eastern Europe and Latin America and learn about the work of Andro Wekua.
The tour will begin with a visit to the exhibition If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties. Soviet philosopher and art historian Mikhail Lifshitz was a harsh critic of modern and contemporary art, however, paradoxically, his books were very popular among the artists of the Soviet underground, as they were among the very few available sources on new artistic practices.
The exhibition is organized as a sequence of interiors, each connected to the philosopher’s life and research. These reconstructed spaces include The Cubist House presented at the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1912, and Andy Warhol’s famous Factory.
Tactile models provided will allow visitors to explore the works of Soviet realist art, pop art and cubism featured or discussed in the exhibition.
The show ends with a sterile white cube—the default contemporary exhibition space, which leads to another spring exhibition, The Other Trans-Atlantic. Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s–1970s.
If Lifshitz saw Western contemporary art movements and the Russian Avant-Garde of the early twentieth century as signs of a crisis in art, many of his contemporaries envisaged the same phenomena as a promise of a brighter future. As humanity travelled beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and tamed the atom, artists tried to change the way we think of art. In the spirit of the time, they often turned to science in order to understand how humans perceive the world around them or make works that spectators could interact with.
The tour finishes with Dolphin in the Fountain, an exhibition by Georgian-born artist Andro Wekua. His works (videos, painting and sculpture) testify to the fact that contemporary art has found a solution to the contradictions it was facing in the twentieth century in absolute artistic freedom that allows people to express their ideas. Wekua’s works combine realistic elements with the use of new materials and technology, bringing together the past and the present.
The tour includes audio description of works as well as exploration of tactile models.
The tour has been developed by Garage’s Inclusive Programs Manager Galina Novotortseva.