It is our aim to curate an exhibition highlighting the richness and range of post-war modern art at least once a year. The emphasis lies on artworks from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. We present acclaimed names in a combination that reveals unexpected and exciting interconnections. It is a challenge to arrange the objects in a way that opens new perspectives and deepens existing ones.

This edition of First Choice features two artists: Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007) and Jannis Kounellis (1936 – 2017). To all appearances, the strict methodical work of the American minimalist LeWitt has little in common with Kounellis’s melancholy and associative approach. However, especially when they are juxtaposed, these propositions turn out to be more fluid than one might presume. LeWitt’s colorful work shows that the neo-avant-garde takes full advantage of unprecedented freedoms and is less dogmatic than is commonly assumed. Despite its often serial character and concise visual language, the possibilities are endless and result in a wide range of variations, colors and ambiguities. Kounellis’s associative, muted constructions, whose use of cheap earthy materials reveal a deep-rooted romantic sensitivity, have that same capacity. Both artists are not concerned with profundities, only with the endless possibilities and opportunities that art has to offer. As a spectator you are drawn in and challenged at the same time.

In this configuration of First Choice there is also room for other subtle radical forms like those of Ad Dekkers (1938 – 1974) and Alan Charlton (1948), artists who have little affinity with rigorous conceptual statements. Rather, they engage their unbounded curiosity to achieve a pure, effective and compelling starkness. And if one thing is certain, it is that their dialogue with the works of LeWitt and Kounellis will provide new insights.