VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Menil Collection presents the exhibition Imaginary Spaces: Selections from The Menil Collection.

Artists and writers have long been intrigued with the idea of constructing imaginary space, from hypothetical utopian environments to invisible cities. The idea can encompass visionary architecture, the abstraction of space through text-based work, and earth art projects. Drawing from The Menil Collection’s diverse holdings of paintings and works on paper that deal with such representations of three-dimensional space, this exhibition will present a selection of Giovanni Piranesi’s 19th-century etching series, Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of alienating cityscapes, and Michael Heizer’s drawings for sculptural space in the desert from 1969, among other examples.

The premise of Imaginary Spaces is inspired by a series of exhibitions that the de Menils organized in the 1960s. They included the 1964 exhibition “Out of this World: An Exhibition of Fantastic Landscapes from the Renaissance to the Present,” and its thematic predecessor, “Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Leqeu,” which explored French 18th-century depictions of the built-environment.

Concurrently, Dominique de Menil was working on a show entitled "Dream Monuments", which dealt with cross-cultural representatives of monuments–ranging from absurb, impossible structures to icons like the Eiffel Tower. While the exhibition was never fully realized, the de Menils’ research brought about an interest in what was then the very beginning of “Earth Art” and “Land Art”. They invited Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Christo, Peter Hutchinson and Robert Smithson to Houston, to imagine projects for Texas. As a result, The Menil Collection is rich in works that deal with these hypothetical environmental projects including sketches of a tar and sulfur project Robert Smithson was planning to complete for the city.

Against this historical backdrop, this exhibition will suggest a new way to think about plans for Earth Art projects. Rather than an isolated postmodern practice of sculpture in the expanded field, positioned within a broad history of artists working with ideas of hypothetical and immaterial environments and dream architecture it becomes a part of a very traditional and rich history in the visual arts of thinking about the idea of space in the realm of the imagination. As German visionary architect Hermann Finsterlin explained in a manifesto, “architect means ‘master of the art’ which creates gardens out of deserts and towers miracles in the skies.”

This exhibition is organized by Michelle White, assistant curator.

This exhibition is generously supported in part by the City of Houston.

Pictured:  Giorgio de Chirico, Interno metafisico con biscotti (Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits), 1916. Photo: Hickey-Robertson.