Image courtesy of Fondazione Prada

Fondazione Prada  presents “Kienholz: Five Car Stud”

Fondazione Prada is presenting “Kienholz: Five Car Stud,” open to the public in Milan from 19 May through 31 December 2016 and curated by Germano Celant. The exhibition brings together a selection of artworks realized between 1959 to 1994 by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, including the well-known installation that gives the show its title.

Image courtesy of Fondazione Prada

Five Car Stud was created by Edward Kienholz from 1969 to 1972, and first exhibited at documenta 5 in Kassel, curated by Harald Szeemann. A life-sized reproduction of a scene of racial violence, Five Car Stud is considered one of the American artist’s most significant works. Despite the controversy and attention that it earned from critics right from its debut, the piece remained hidden from view in the storage of a Japanese collector for almost forty years.

Image courtesy of Fondazione Prada

The artwork was only presented once again to the viewing public in 2011 and 2012 following restoration, first at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Today the artwork is part of the Prada Collection, and is being shown for the first time ever in Italy, where it forms the central nucleus of an exhibition path that runs from the Sud gallery to the Deposito, and extends into an external space, presenting 25 artworks including sculpture, assemblages and tableaux realized by the Kienholzes from 1959 to 1994, as well as documentation material on the history and making of Five Car Stud.

Image courtesy of Fondazione Prada

Five Car Stud catapults the viewer into a nightmarish situation, immersing him and her in a dimension – either removed or forgotten – of extreme violence. More than forty years after it was first created, the artwork’s expressive force, its powerful symbolic charge and the lucidity of the accusation against racial persecution retain their original strength. Among the other tableaux, assemblages and sculptures by Ed and Nancy Kienholz included in the exhibition are The Merry-Go-World or Begat by Chance and The Wonder Horse Trigger (1991–1994), a carousel which conceals an empathetic contemplation on the random determinism of birth; The Bronze Pinball Machine with Woman Affixed Also (1980), which reduces the female body to an object of pure sexual entertainment; Jody, Jody, Jody (1994), a tableau evoking a deplorable instance of child abuse.

Fondazione Prada, Milan
19 May – 31 Dec 2016

more. fondazioneprada.org