Jackson Pollock: Mural, Energy Made Visible

Jackson Pollock, Mural. Energy Made Visible, curated by David Anfam, is a touring exhibition of Jackson Pollock‘s Mural (1943, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City) following its conservation and cleaning at the Getty Conservation Institute and exhibition first at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and then in Sioux City, Iowa.
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is the first European venue for the presentation of Jackson Pollock’s largest painting and now considered by some to be the single most important American painting of the 20th century, following its conservation. This privilege acknowledges that Mural was commissioned in the summer of 1943 by Peggy Guggenheim for her New York apartment on East 61st Street.

The painting measured around 8 by 20 feet and was Pollock’s first large-scale work completed in this manner.
Jackson Pollock’s Mural represents the break from representational painting on traditional canvases to his unique drip style, completed on canvases stretched out on the floor.
The large-scale drip paintings, which sometimes included sand or chards of glass, combined with enamel house paint, loosely dripped, squirted, and flung across the canvas or board, constitute today the most famous part of his legacy.

David Anfam has curated around Mural a loan exhibition which offers an interpretation of its subject matter and locates it both in Jackson’s career and in the evolution of mural-scale painting in New York in the 1940s.
The exhibition will travel to the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin (November 25, 2015 – April 10, 2016) and then to the Picasso Museum, Malaga.
Jackson Pollock’s Mural: Energy Made Visible is organized by The University of Iowa Museum of Art.