Sergei Eisenstein, drawing op paper, 1931
3 April – 21 June 2009
Opening Thursday 2 April
Sergei Eisenstein (1898 – 1948) was a seminal modern artist and legendary pioneer of cinema. The director of masterpieces such as Battleship Potemkin (1927) and Ivan the Terrible (1941), he was also a major art theorist, whose ideas on 'intellectual montage', for instance, have become a milestone in the theory of cinema and in revolutionary art. Eisenstein also made intensive use throughout his life, of the medium of drawing, often in close connection with, or literally as part of, his theoretical reflections.
Yet despite Eisenstein's enormous influence on 20th century culture, many of his texts have not yet been translated from Russian into other languages, and large parts of his vast body of writings have to date remained unpublished. Similarly, his extensive oeuvre of drawings has only been presented on rare occasions.
This exhibition draws on various sources to bring together an extensive selection of drawings made by Eisenstein during his visit to Mexico in 1931/32, many of them never shown before. In Mexico, Eisenstein developed his drawings in a parallel manner to the Surrealists' Ecriture Automatique, producing a large number of variations on recurring motifs, merging archaic and modern myths, exploring obscenity, violence, and forms of ecstasy, through a single, amorphous line.
These drawings will be presented next to excerpts from his monumental, uncompleted 1700-page book, "Method", which will form a backdrop for lectures and discussions during the course of the exhibition. Eisenstein conceived of this work as a three-dimensional book, which he imagined to take the form of a sphere rather than being linear. This intention is being reflected in an online publishing platform, created in conjunction with this exhibition, through which important excerpts of the book are made available on a website for the first time. The format, like no other, comes close to Eisenstein's initial ideas of a non-linear text full of references, correspondences and 'hyperlinks'.
The material presented in this exposé, as a whole, presents Eisenstein as a major artist, thinker, and animist conceiving a set of aesthetic and psychological principles inherent to both archaic thought and modern culture.
The exhibition is a collaboration between Extra City and MuHKA.
Curated by Anselm Franke and Oksana Bulgakowa.