Dancing with Myself

On Sunday 8 April the collective exhibition ‘Dancing with Myself’ opens at Punta della Dogana. Curated by Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner, it stems from the collaboration between the Pinault Collection and the Folkwang Museum in Essen. The exhibition, presented in a first version in 2016 in Essen, proposes a revisited path with over 56 artworks not featured in the German museum.

‘Dancing with Myself’ faces the primordial importance of the artist’s role as actor and material of his own creations, from the 1970s to today. The exhibition brings together a great range of artistic practices and languages (photography, video, painting, sculpture, installation…), cultures, geographic origins, generations and experiences, to establish a tension between extremely different artistic approaches: melancholy of vanity, ironic play with identity, political biography and existential questioning, the body as sculpture, effigy or fragment of its symbolic substitute.

Approximately 100 works from the Pinault Collection – from Claude Cahun to LaToya Ruby Frazier, from Gilbert & George to Cindy Sherman, and from Alighiero Boetti to Maurizio Cattelan – are on display alongside a selection of works on loan from the Folkwang Museum. The show is greatly rethought for Punta della Dogana and includes 45 works that did not feature in the version presented in Essen.

The exhibition revolves around four themes – Melancholia, Identity Games, Political Autobiographies, Raw Material - that develop evenly through the spaces of Punta della Dogana with 145 works. Over 100 works from the Pinault Collection, of which more than 80 have never been exhibited in Venice, establish a dialogue with a selection of works from the Folkwang Museum in Essen.