Kienholz: The Hoerengracht
Sunley Room, National Gallery, until 21 February 2010
The first time I saw Ed Kienholz’s work was at his 1996 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. I was completely overwhelmed — there was something so powerful and so disturbing about his huge stage-set-size installations which covered subjects such as brothels, mental hospitals and abortion.
Kienholz was a pioneer of assemblage art in the Fifties and Sixties, using objects he found in flea markets and elsewhere to make up his ‘tableaux’. He died in 1994; but from the early Seventies he and Nancy Reddin, the photographer whom he married in 1972, worked together as a team, travelling between their studios in Idaho and Berlin. And it is their joint work ‘The Hoerengracht’ (‘Whores Canal’), 1983–8, which has been assembled — with just inches to spare — in the Sunley Room: it is the Kienholzes’ largest construction.
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