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Dennis Hopper at the Hermitage The Hopper exhibition in the Winter Palace (Halls Nr 28-32, near the Saltykov Entrance) is Russia's first showing of works by one of Hollywood's legendary actors and it is the most complete public display of his works (80 items) in fifty years. The exhibition has been jointly organized by the State Hermitage and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (New York), together with the RI Group, with the support of the General Consulate of the USA in St Petersburg and with sponsorship assistance from Vladimir Kekhman, General Director of the M.P. Mussorgsky St Petersburg State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet. Dennis Hopper (born 1936) is a world renowned American actor and cinema director who created cult films and unforgettable images of actors. The exhibition in the Hermitage will familiarize visitors with the less well known side of his work, introducing the Russian audience to Hopper the photographer, painter and sculptor. The exhibition includes works that were chosen by the artist himself: black and white photographs from the 1960s, color photos of the city, assemblages, excerpts from films and large-format billboards, some of which are being shown for the first time. Among the well known personalities whom Hopper photographed during the 1960s were Jasper Jones, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Newman and David Hockney and Irving Bloom. During these years, in Hopper's words, photography was the only form of creativity for him. Hopper's billboards of recent years reflect the exaggerated role of duplicated images and the exaggerated importance of celebrities: his photographs dating back 40 years have grown to the dimensions of an advertising panel and his personal archive literally becomes a monument for general review. Aside from the transformation of the personal into the public, the billboards show by their scale the high status of Hopper as an artist. For a Hollywood actor to receive recognition in another field is always complicated. But the case of Hopper and fine arts is special. His multifaceted artistic work is rich material for analyzing the evolution of the visual arts over the last half century. The curator of the exhibition is Andrey Naslednikov, curator of photographs within the State Hermitage's Department of Western European Fine Arts, and Stacy Hauger, Creative Director of Easy Rider Productions, USA. An illustrated scholarly catalogue of the exhibition has been prepared and carries an introductory article by Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, and Thomas Krentz, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. It has 104 pages in total and was published under the overall editorial supervision of Nikolai Molok, editor-in-chief of the magazine Artkhronika. The author of the text is Brian Droitcour, an American critic. Nicholas Iline of the Solomon R. Guggenheim provided the idea and concept of the catalogue. After showing in the Hermitage, the exhibition will be presented in Moscow. |
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