For more than fifty years, Eleanor Antin (1935, New York) has been a distinctive voice in American contemporary art, most notably for the connections she has built between conceptual art and feminist movements, between the art scenes of New York and California and between art, literature and performance. This exhibition is the first retrospective of the artist in twenty-five years and the first ever presented in Europe. Spread over two floors of the museum, it brings together a large number of the artist’s most important works, from her early conceptual projects to her recent photographseries. It includes works she created in the 1970s and 1980s examining multiple identities through fictional characters that she embodied and her films and installations of the 1990s recognising different historical moments, including Jewish history, in connection to her personal roots. The exhibition and its accompanying publication highlight the importance of Antin’s work to younger generations of artists as well as her major contribution to emancipating the body politic and questioning gender norms, both artistic and social. ‘I’m a passionate feminist and a feminist artist, but I am also a conceptual artist, a performance artist, a video artist’, says Antin. ‘Remember those were the days when we were inventing the new world of art, liberating it from the standard painting-and-sculpture designations. And feminist artists were in the front lines.’

Biography

Eleanor Antin (1935, New York) has had solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019); the Henry Moore Foundation (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2014); the San Diego Art Museum (2008); the Mead Gallery, Warwick (2001); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1997) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973). Her workhas been shown in group exhibitions at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Vienna; the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2023); K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2020) and the British Museum, London (2019). Her work is also included in the collections of institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Whitney Museum, New York; Museion, Bolzano; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York and SFMOMA, San Francisco. Eleanor Antin lives and works in San Diego.