Joep van Lieshout Gives Lecture At The Art Institute of Chicago

Mon, Mar 7 - Mon, Mar 7  2016

Artist Joep van Lieshout will give a lecture at the Art Insitute of Chicago on March 7, at 6 PM.

About Joep van Lieshout

Dutch sculptor and visionary Joep van Lieshout was accepted into the Rotterdam Academy of the Arts at the age of 16. After graduation, he quickly rose to fame with functional sculptures that raise questions about society at large and the nature of art.

In 1995 Van Lieshout founded his studio Atelier Van Lieshout, and since then he has worked under the studio’s name to undermine the myth of the artistic genius. Throughout the past two decades, Atelier Van Lieshout has produced a veritable cornucopia of works that straddle art, design, and architecture, such as sculpture and installations; buildings and furniture; and utopias and dystopias. What these works have in common are a number of recurring themes, motives, and obsessions: systems, power, autarky, life, sex, and death. The works explore the human individual in the face of the greater whole.

Atelier Van Lieshout has exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Additionally, the studio has worked on numerous commissions for both public and private clients. He produced works that straddle art, design, and architecture such as sculpture, installations, buildings, furniture, utopias and dystopias.

For additional information click here.

About the Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago was founded as both a museum and school for the fine arts in 1879, a critical era in the history of Chicago as civic energies were devoted to rebuilding the metropolis that had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1871. Its first collections consisting primarily of plaster casts, the Art Institute found its permanent home in 1893, when it moved into a building, constructed jointly with the city of Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition, at the intersection of Michigan Avenue and Adams Street. That building, its entry flanked by the two famous bronze lions, remains the “front door” of the museum even today. In keeping with the academic origins of the institution, a research library was constructed in 1901; eight major expansions for gallery and administrative space have followed, with the latest being the Modern Wing, which opened in 2009. The permanent collection has grown from plaster casts to nearly 300,000 works of art in fields ranging from Chinese bronzes to contemporary design and from textiles to installation art. Together, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the museum of the Art Institute of Chicago are now internationally recognized as two of the leading fine-arts institutions in the United States.