Displaying items by tag: power station of art

Few knew what to expect of the Power Station of Art when it blew onto the contemporary art scene here in 2012. Just one year earlier, the Power Station — the first state-owned contemporary art museum in China — had been but a half-baked idea in the minds of local government officials intent on transforming Shanghai into an international cultural capital.

By the time the Power Station was set to make its debut by playing host to the ninth Shanghai Biennale, construction workers and artists alike were hurrying until the final hours to prepare the space, a colossal decommissioned electrical power plant, for the show. Despite last-minute efforts, the hastily assembled biennale — with its roughly installed artwork, missing or misprinted wall labels and poorly trained staff — made for a lackluster start, leaving many with questions about the museum’s sustainability.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris sent a number of French masterpieces to Shanghai’s Power Station of Art for the exhibition Electric Fields: Surrealism and Beyond – La Collection du Centre Pompidou, which opened on December 16. The show marks the first collaboration between the Pompidou, a leading museum of modern and contemporary art, and a Chinese institution.

The exhibition, which is part of the Shanghai Biennale, features approximately 100 works from the Pompidou’s collection including works by Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Andreas Gursky (b. 1955), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), and Ed Ruscha (b. 1937). The show is divided into six categories that explore various Surrealist themes and includes paintings, sculpture, video and manuscripts.

The show’s title is a combination of two influences – the name of the venue, a former electric power station, and Andre Breton (1896-1966) and Philippe Soupault’s (1897-1990) seminal piece of Surrealist literature, The Magnetic Fields (1919). The exhibition runs through March 15, 2013 in Shanghai.