07.12 — 09.02.2013
Curator: Florencia Battiti
Fifteen years after the death of Argentine artist Kenneth Kemble (Buenos Aires, 1923–1998), Malba – Fundación Costantini inaugurates Kemble por Kemble, an anthological exhibition featuring nearly 30 works produced between 1953 and 1995, which aims to highlight the decisions and selections that Kemble himself made regarding his work, based on a study of his writings.
Included are paintings, unpublished collages —historical pieces that have never been exhibited until now— assemblages, objects, and a video with a documentary record of the exhibition Destructive Art, Collective Experience held at the Lirolay Gallery in 1961, with the original soundtrack.
The works come from the artist's personal collection and from private and public collections, such as the paintings Totempicololo (1993) from the Palais de Glace, grand prize acquisition of the LXXXIII National Salon of 1994, and La auténtica esencia de la naranja (1995), from the Dr. Pedro E. Martínez Provincial Museum of Fine Arts, Entre Ríos.
The exhibition is part of an editorial project on Kemble's work, which focuses on the artist's perspective, positioning, and various modes of intervention, as reflected in his art criticism articles, as well as in the prologues, presentations, and texts he himself wrote about his work.
With the background of the exhibitions Retrospectiva 1950-1995, held in 1995 at the Palais de Glace, and La Gran Ruptura. Obras 1956-1963>, curated by Marcelo E. Pacheco in 1998 at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, the specific objective of this exhibition is to reconstruct a new exhibition hypothesis based on the study of Kemble's own texts. To this end, a working platform was developed that highlights Kemble's tendency to periodize his work, carrying out constant mappings that involve a historiographical position strongly marked by a distinctive polemical interest.
In the words of Florencia Battiti: “Kemble poured into his artistic language some of the premises that his readings recommended to him in order to increase the development of creativity: appealing to unexpected associations, seeking the conjunction of unconnected realities, implementing abrupt breaks in the usual logic of thought, destroying the supposed naturalness of a sequence of reasoning.”
A conceptual project
El proyecto Kemble por Kemble contempla tres instancias que funcionan como piezas de un mismo engranaje conceptual: la edición de dos libros que reúnen escritos de Kemble y la realización de la presente exposición. Así, en abril de 2012, fueron publicados Entre el pincel y la Underwood. Kenneth Kemble, crítico de arte del Buenos Aires Herald, a cargo de Florencia Battiti y Kenneth Kemble, y Escritos. Prólogos, artículos, entrevistas 1961-1998, recopilados por Justo Pastor Mellado. Este último contó con el apoyo del fondo editorial de Malba.
“The exhibition is one of the parts of a set of editorial actions; in that it is an expanded editorial field, whose mere realization implies the investment of a new theoretical possibility of approaching the work,” explains Battiti.
As part of the exhibition, Malba published a catalog with texts by Florencia Battiti and Justo Pastor Mellado, which address various graphic, methodological, and aesthetic aspects of Kemble's artistic production. The book includes reproductions of all the works featured in the exhibition.
