Exhibition 9 October – 15 November 2021. Open daily 10am – 5pm
Two works by Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) – Rubbish Bag (1960/2021) and Dancing Tubes (2014) – will be installed at the Merz Barn, Elterwater, the site of Kurt Schwitters’ last great (unfinished) work.
Although a generation apart, both artists came to the UK as refugees from Nazi Germany. Schwitters had just turned 53 when he arrived in 1940; Metzger came on the Kindertransport in 1939, aged 13. Both their lives and work were profoundly impacted by the experience of exile, crisis and loss, and both were hugely influential in shaping the course of post-war British art.
Schwitters spent his last years in the Lake District, where he began to create what he regarded as his most important work – the Merzbarn. Although he struggled with poverty and illness during this time, it was an intensely productive period; over the course of under 3 years he created over 540 works, consolidating and refining innovative modes of working and key themes which included a deep-rooted engagement with nature as part of a holistic ‘Merz’ Weltanschauung – world view.
Gustav Metzger’s life and art reflected an equally rigorous set of artistic and ethical principles which stemmed from concerns over the (ultimately self-)destructive aspects of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Like Schwitters, whom he admired greatly, Metzger worked across disciplines, developed hybrid artforms and deployed chance or natural processes alongside the latest technology as part of an expansive, experimental envisioning of the role of art and artists in society.
This exhibition establishes a conversation between these two artists and their pioneering artistic practices. The presentation of these two particular works, which bookend the development of Metzger’s radical aesthetic theories, highlights specific confluences between the material and aesthetic sensibilities of Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters by way of opening up the rich and largely unexplored common ground between the two.
The exhibition is curated by Dr Lizzie Fisher, Leverhulme Research Fellow at Northumbria University, and supported by the Gustav Metzger Foundation, the Littoral Trust, and Westmorland Arts Trust. Presented in association with the Kurt Schwitters Autumn School 2021 and the Entartete Kunst Memorial event which takes place after the lecture at 8.45pm on Saturday 9th October 2021.
Programme
Saturday 9 October 2021
1pm The Merz Barn: Two works by Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) – Rubbish Bag (1960/2021) and Dancing Tubes (2014). Curated by Dr. Lizzie Fisher.
Shippon Gallery: large-scale wall drawing & installation by Ian Hunter and Cian Quayle, ‘Gustav Metzger – Portraits of the Artist’
6pm Official opening of Gustav Metzger at the Merz Barn, with a short introduction by Cumbrian curator and founding director of the Lake District Holocaust Project, Trevor Avery MBE.
Welcome and opening remarks from Gustav Metzger Foundation co-directors Ula Dajerling and Leanne Dymterko.
Light refreshments (Soup and bread; Wine)
7pm. Annual Kurt Schwitters lecture: Dr Lizzie Fisher ‘Gustav Metzger and Kurt Schwitters: an aesthetics of exile?’
Followed by panel/open forum discussion with Trevor Avery, Cian Quayle, Ula Dajerling and Leanne Dymterko.
8.30pm. Kurt Schwitters Ursonate – reading of an excerpt from the Ursonate by Christopher Fox, Professor of Music, Brunel University. Followed by the ‘Reading of the Names’ Entartete Kunst annual ceremony and memorial event at the Merz Barn. Honouring the memory of the artists, musicians, composers and designers who were persecuted and exiled by the Nazis.
