Major

7/17/08 - 9/21/08

After Nature


Unfolding as a visual novel, “After Nature” depicts a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. It is a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture—an epic of humanity coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters.

This exhibition brings together an international and multigenerational group of contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders, many of whom are showing in a New York museum for the first time.
 
Part dystopian fantasy, part ethnographic museum of a lost civilization that eerily resembles our own, “After Nature” brings together artists and artworks that possess a strange, prophetic intensity. Departing from the fictional documentaries of filmmaker Werner Herzog, the exhibition is an anthology of visions and epiphanies—a hallucinated panorama of a world on the verge of disappearance.

The exhibition includes work by Allora and Calzadilla, Pawel Althamer, Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, William Christenberry, Roberto Cuoghi, Bill Daniel, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Nathalie Djurberg, Reverend Howard Finster, Nancy Graves, Werner Herzog, Robert Kusmirowski, Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Erik van Lieshout, Diego Perrone, Thomas Schütte, Dana Schutz, Tino Sehgal, August Strindberg, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Arthur Zmijewski.

Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, the show spans three floors and includes over ninety works.

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Images TOP

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Pawel Althamer, Self-portrait, 1993.
Mixed media, grass, hemp fiber, animal intestine, wax, and hair, 74.4 x 29.9 x 27.6 in (189 x 76 x 70 cm).
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino.
Installation view Fondazione Nicola Trus

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Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2007.
Taxidermied horse skin, fiberglass resin, 118 1/8 x 66 7/8 x 31 1/2 in (300 x 168.5 x 80 cm).
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

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William Christenberry, Kudzu with Storm Cloud, near Akron, Alabama, 1981.
Chromogenic color print, 16 x 22 in (40.6 x 55.9 cm).
Courtesy Pace/MacGill, New York

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Nancy Graves, still from 200 Stills at 60 Frames, 1970.
16mm film, color, silent, 8 min.
Courtesy the Nancy Graves Foundation, New York

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Werner Herzog, still from Lessons of Darkness, 1992
16 mm film, sound, color, 52 min
Courtesy Werner Herzog Film GmbH, Munich

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Dana Schutz, Man Eating His Own Chest, 2005.
Oil on canvas, 54 x 42 in (137.2 x 106.7 cm).
Courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery, New York