May 19 – December 31 2016
Curated by Germano Celant
The work of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz is by now so deeply ingrained in the contemporary art world’s collective consciousness that it’s easy to forget just how profoundly strange and unrelentingly thorny it is. Riotous, excoriating, and often brutally blunt, the Kienholzes’ oeuvre—comprising everything from scabrous riffs on racism, sexism, and militarism to more subdued takes on loneliness and ennui—remains surprisingly, and lamentably, as relevant to American culture today as it did at the time of its initial conception.This show will bring more than two dozen of the artists’ installations, drawings, and assemblages made between the late 1950s and early 1990s to foreign shores when it opens this spring at three locations within the Fondazione Prada’s Milan complex.
– Jeffrey Kastner
IMAGES: (clockwise from the top) Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969-1972, mixed media installation, Collection of Fondazione Prada; Edward & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Bronze Pinball Machine with Woman Affixed Also, 1980, mixed media assemblage, Private Collection; Edward & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Merry-Go-World or Begat By Chance and the Wonder Horse Trigger, 1988-1992; Edward & Nancy Reddin Kienholz, The Twilight Home, 1983, mixed media assemblage, Private Collection