Uwe Fleckner is professor of art history at the University of Hamburg and at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he directs the Advanced School of Art and Humanities. He is one of the directors of the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg and co-editor of Carl Einstein’s and Aby Warburg’s complete works. Fleckner was vice-director of the Centre allemand d’histoire de l‘art in Paris, worked as guest professor at Stanford University and at Peking University and was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, as well as a co-director of the Bilderfahrzeuge – Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology international research network. Fleckner is founder and director of the Research Center on “Degenerate Art” at the University of Hamburg and author of numerous books and articles on 18th to 21st century art history, with French and German art and art theory and political iconography as his main fields.
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BOMBA, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
In November 2024, Dag Erik Elgin will present an exhibition intervention at Kunstnernes Hus. BOMBA will engage the presence of Pablo Picasso's seminal Guernica at Kunstnernes Hus in 1938, just one year after the painting was completed. At the top center of Picasso's painting depicting the terror of the aerial bombing during the Spanish Civil War, a light bulb surrounded by a lampshade emits sharp, cone-shaped rays of light. In the painting, the lamp is surrounded by twisted bodies, and it ambiguously exists both as an ordinary electric light source and as a bomb at the moment it explodes. The Spanish word BOMBA refers to this ambiguity, referring both to the bomb and to the light bulb (in Spanish, bombilla eléctrica is a diminutive of bomba).
Taking as its point of departure this pivotal moment in the exhibition history of Kunstnernes Hus, Elgin's intervention will reflect on the complex legacy of modernity and modernism, the technological and artistic innovations of these eras, and the continuation of war into the present.
Uwe Fleckner will present the lecture "A Picture goes around the World. Guernica and the (shattered) Power of a Masterpiece" at Kunstnernes Hus Wednesday December 11, at 6pm.
