KÖNIG, WALTHER Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture

The rediscovery of a still underappreciated artist who, along with Auguste Rodin, revolutionised sculpture in the 19th century. Artist and artisan, art theorist and proto-installation artist, master of high publicity performances and rival of Auguste Rodin – Medardo Rosso was one of the great pioneers of Modernism, and a figure as extraordinary as he was eccentric. This catalogue presents a comprehensive retrospective of the artist with more than fifty sculptures and a large selection of photographs, photocollages and drawings. It follows the relational thinking of Medardo Rosso, who frequently exhibited his output in ‘conversation’ with comparable works, and contextualizes his oeuvre with selected works by about fifty artists – among them Francis Bacon, Nairy Baghramian, Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Constantin Brancusi, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris and Andy Warhol – who resonate directly or indirectly with Rosso. One hundred and twenty years after his last presentation in Vienna, Medardo Rosso takes the principle of comparative viewing as a starting point to show the artist’s work in the spirit of an expanded retrospective in the larger context of the artistic developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In select juxtapositions with more than eighty works by artists from a variety of international collections, Rosso’s experimental approach emerges as one that has continued to shape the artistic landscape.