Beyond Preconceptions: The Sixties Experiment features works by twenty-one major international artists from four geographic centers where radical experimentation in the visual arts forced open art's forms and functions in the 1960s. Their practice, often a response to the constraints of modernism, were shaped by regional conditions and a new desire for an international avant-garde. Although the exhibition maintains a strong relationship with the vibrant conceptual art movements of the period, it also includes works that are striking for their experiments within more traditional forms of artmaking.

Through its equitable approach, the exhibition, with its selection of five or six artists for each of four regions --Eastern and Central Europe, Western Europe, South America, and North America -- introduces a new view on the burgeoning post-War internationalism which was emerging despite a general retreat into political isolationism. The four regions, each with its own distinct contribution to the discourse on experimental art of the 1960s, features a selection of exemplary artists, each of whom contributes to our grasp of the collective experience of artists working within the unique conditions of a particular region. Among the artists are Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Hanne Darboven, Eva Hesse, Ilya Kabakov, Jiri Kolár, Bruce Nauman, and Hélio Oiticica.

Some of the works in the exhibition were conceived as living organisms, social sculpture, or unknown language. They were made from cheap, ordinary and often mass-produced materials, relics and recycled elements of daily life. Traditional painting and sculpture were abandoned in favor of new aesthetic categories such as books as art, photography as art, video installation, language as sculpture, or painting as document. Some of the artists believed in art that would not be an art object exclusively but a creative activity for all (Beuys, Clark, Kolar, Mangelos, Oiticica, and Weiner). They devised new writing or new strategies for conceiving and understanding words (Broodthaers, Darboven, Nauman, Kolar, Mangelos, and Weiner) or believed in new consciousness (Kabakov, Kawara, and Krasinski) or new energy (Clark, Grippo, Latham, and Malich).

The artists included in this exhibition continued throughout their career to expand on ideas that they had introduced during the 1960s. Presenting this historically significant work in the early moments of the 21st century will further our understanding of how far-reaching these early radical experiments in the manipulation of the art object, its de-materialization, and the convergence of the art object and the everyday, have permeated our ideas about art's expansive possibilities.

Exhibition Itinerary-
Beyond Preconceptions: The Sixties Experiment

National Gallery of Prague
Prague, Czech Republic
November 2, 2000 - January 14, 2001

Zacheta-National Gallery of Contemporary Art
Warsaw Polland
February 12 - March 11, 2001

Museo de Arte Moderno
Buenos Aires, Argentina
May 31 - July 15, 2001

Paco Imperial
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
September 6- October 28, 2001

Museu de Arte Moderna
Sao Paulo, Brazil
January 23 - March 3, 2002

Freedman Gallery
Albright College Center for the Arts
Reading, PA
April 2 - April 26, 2002

Samuel P. Harn Museum
University of South Florida
June 23 - September 29, 2002

Berkeley Art Museum
University of California, Berkeley, CA
October 23 - December 29, 2002