Every act of destruction is also an act of creation. To destroy is to open up a space, to clear a path for something new.
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1968
This group exhibition presents a conversation between postwar artists
who challenged the conventions of form, material, and perception, highlighting the evolution of their practices. On view from April 2 through May 31, the installation gathers defining works by Walter De Maria, Lucio Fontana, Donald Judd, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol.
These works reveal how repetition in art can redefine perceptual and formal possibilities, examining how artists have employed seriality, variation, and accumulation to destabilize conventional patterns of sight and thought. Picasso’s declaration “In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions” resonates with the thinking of Gilles Deleuze. Parallelling the philosopher’s inquiries into differentiation and iteration is Serra’s credo that “Repetition is the ritual of obsession.”
Picasso’s turn to sculpture, Judd’s modular and serial structures, Serra’s insistence on process and his relentless exploration of materiality, and De Maria’s durational works and sculptures demonstrate that repetition is never static, but rather a force of renewal. Fontana’s Concetto spaziale works are pierced, opening the picture plane up to infinite space, while Manzoni’s Achrome series negates color, representation, and allusion to emphasize material presence. Rauschenberg and Merz radically reconfigure everyday objects in their art, whereas Warhol’s multiplication of images displaces their received meanings in favor of new interpretations. Together they offer a timely reflection on the cyclical nature of artistic innovation and the shifting relationships between past and present.
