Carolee Schneemann | Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann | Muzeum Susch | Temporarily Closed

Hales is pleased to announce the inclusion of Carolee Schneemann in the exhibition Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann at Muzeum Susch. Curated by Sabine Breitwieser, the exhibition takes the influential work of the late American artist Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) as a point of departure, illuminating how Schneemann’s artistic legacy resonates in the work of generations of artists succeeding her.

Schneemann worked across various medias ranging from painting, assemblage, to performance, film, video and photography but primarily understood herself as a painter. She created new forms of art that emerged as paintings literally set in motion. Using her own body, the artist’s expansive choreographies and installations evolved into what she coined ‘kinetic theatre’. In addition to her experimental and multidisciplinary approach to artistic media, Schneemann explored how she “can be image and image-maker” and created experimental photographs and films also featuring herself. She examined her role in society, and struggle for recognition as a woman artist and emancipated and re-determined the representation of women in art through reclaiming the image of the female body. The title of the exhibition is taken from one of her seminal pieces, Up to and Including Her Limits (1973-1976), a work she performed several times before it became transformed into a video installation. By introducing personal subjects, in particular sex and lust from a woman’s perspective, like in her film Fuses (1964-1967), Schneemann challenged traditional and patriarchal attitudes towards nudity and sexuality.

Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann is curated by Sabine Breitwieser, former Director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, where she originated the 2015 exhibition ‘Carolee Schneemann, Kinetic Painting’, which toured to the Museum für Moderne Kunst MMK, Frankfurt am Main and MoMA PS1, New York. Breitwieser explains: “This exhibition is driven by limits, both in media and society: how they can be overcome, transformed and transgressed through time. While Carolee’s goal was to extend visual principles off the canvas and into life, this exhibition also considers the new challenges and limits our society is confronted with. We are exploring how and in which forms the expansive and innovative use of artistic media further emerge in works of the generation ‘after Carolee Schneemann’ and what kind of questions in regards to the body are at stake.”

Carolee Schneemann

Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann
Muzeum Susch
Sur Punt 78
7542 Zernez, Switzerland