Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs Published by New Museum. Edited by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Massimiliano Gioni. Foreword by Lisa Phillips. Text by Mathieu Copeland, Paul McCarthy. Interview by Gary Carrion-Murayari. Gustav Metzger: Historic Photographs was published for the first US solo exhibition of the influential artist and activist Gustav Metzger (born 1926). As a survivor of the Holocaust, Metzger has first-hand experience of displacement and destruction. The exhibition at the New Museum featured the most complete installation to date of Metzger’s series of sculptural installations titled Historic Photographs. This series confronts the viewer with some of the most powerful and tragic images of twentieth-century history, which Metzger has enlarged, obscured or hidden in a variety of ways. Historic Photographs spans a range of historical events including the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, the Oklahoma City bombing and environmental destruction in contemporary England.
Raised as a child in Nazi Germany, Gustav Metzger (born 10 April 1926) is an activist political artist who founded the auto-destructive art movement and called for an Art Strike in the late 1970s to protest art's engagement with capitalism. |