Penelope Curtis gives a discursive review of Art on Display 1949–1969, an exhibition project she curated in 2019 at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon celebrating the work of Franco Albini and other key displays from the post war period including Carlo Scarpa, Aldo van Eyck, Alison & Peter Smithson and Lina Bo Bardi.
Art on Display recreated some of the period’s classic solutions to the display of art, contrasting the stasis and fixity of 1950s’ design with some of the more playful and immersive designs, by Aldo van Eyck and the Smithsons, which had already emerged by the time the Museum opened. This exhibition allowed the viewer to experience these different ways of looking at and being with art. It was accompanied by archival photographs and drawings, revealing display solutions conceived for the Museum.

Penelope Curtis has recently published The Pliable Plane (Mack, 2020), a review of the interaction between sculpture and architecture on the wall surface. This was a result of a professorship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. She has published widely on modern and contemporary sculpture, with titles published by Oxford University Press (1999), the Getty (2008) and Yale University Press (2017). She has worked as a curator of many exhibitions and directed the Henry Moore Institute, Tate Britain and the Gulbenkian Museum.

This talk is part of the exhibition and research project Strukturen des Zeigens / Politics of Display by Klasse Nicole Wermers and is open to all members of the Academy. The talk will be held in English.