Eterna Danza

On Thursday, Nov. 24, 2022, a selection of works by the two 20th-century masters Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns and Wolfgang Alexander Kossuth will be on display at Paula Nora Seegy's Milan gallery ARTESPRESSIONE. The exhibition, curated by Matteo Pacini will be on view until Dec. 21, 2022, also by appointment.

Synonymous with life, rhythm and freedom, dance is present in the cults of all civilizations, a "divine gift" that has always inspired the figurative arts, worlds that have often contaminated, influenced and told each other stories. From its origins, man has been portraying dance scenes in wall paintings, in pottery, in sculpture traversing transversely the whole history of mankind, passing through the Classical Epoch, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages up to Kandinsky's theories of "movement art," Futurism, and up to contemporary and coeval times. The study of moving bodies and poses, often extreme, impose balances and twists on dancers that artists incessantly attempt to immortalize, capturing them to make eternal what by its definition is the result of the fleetingness of a moment. In the exhibition ETERNA DANZA, there will be a dialogue between the works of two great artists of German origin who belonged to different generations of the 20th century: Reinhold Roudolf Junghanns, (1884 Zwicau, 1967 Zurich) and Wolgang Alexander Kossuth (Pfronten 1947, 2009 Città della Pieve), the former a well-known draughtsman skilled in chalcographic techniques, the latter a renowned musician and later an internationally appreciated sculptor. The one in the sphere of Parisian and Swiss cabarets, in contact with the avant-garde movements that were disrupting the twentieth century, the other as an esteemed violinist and conductor first, sculptor later, they live a continuous symbiosis with music and dance, both seduced by the informal currents contemporary to them but firmly linked to figuration and academic training, grapple with the expression of movement, giving rise to a unique combination of classicism and expression in a series of precious works selected and placed in dialogue with each other, in the atmosphere of the ferment and dynamism of that strand of the twentieth century that never yielded to the overcoming of figure and form.

REINHOLD RUDOLF JUNGHANNS (1884 Zwicau, 1967 Zurich)

A noted draughtsman and expert in intaglio techniques, he came into contact with the artistic milieu of Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) in Munich in 1911, thanks to his friendship with Vasily Kandinsky, founder along with Franz Marc of the movement that opened the door to the no longer strictly figurative conception of art and consequently to abstractionism. After the outbreak of World War I, he found refuge in neutral Switzerland where, in 1916, at the famous Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, he forged a deep friendship with the bohemian Emmy Hennings, among his models certainly a favorite, and Hugo Ball, founders of the movement of rupture and renewal of bourgeois conventions around art that took the name Dadaism. Still partly tied to his academic training, and not entirely convinced by the Dadaist trend, Junghanns nevertheless knew how to draw incessant stimulation from it, yet keeping a proper distance, avoiding perdition and excesses that overwhelmed others and expressing the cultural revolution in art through drawing. In the spirit almost of a "chronicler," he witnessed the historic first contemporary dance sessions of the Cabaret Voltaire, in which the recent theories of Rudolf von Laban, among the fathers of contemporary dance, materialized, in which the dancers manifested their individual creative abilities by improvising free and extemporaneous movements. The revolution of that era came through the expression of the body in movement. "Tanzen" is the title of a series of sketches, made mostly in charcoal, representing a systematic study of the theme of dance in which Junghanns manifests all his gifts as a great draughtsman as well as an expert in intaglio techniques. Through functional line, Junghanns captures forms in space with expressionistic precision. Lightness and sensuality pervade the bodies in their movements. The stroke, heavy and light, highlights taut, dense masses of muscle. The lean, sometimes angular silhouettes twist, indulging a dramatic and theatrical interpretation of the pieces. The rhythm is felt and overwhelms.

WOLFGANG ALEXANDER KOSSUTH (Pfronten 1947, Città della Pieve 2009)

An interest in the human species, the divine proportion of the body, and the classical myth of the beauty and joy of the world in communion with nature are the sources of inspiration for Wolfgang Alexander Kossuth, a total artist who has devoted his entire life to art and has always placed the human being at the center of his compositions. He was born to music in Pfronten, Germany, and after studying at the Düsseldorf Conservatory he arrived in 1968 in Italy, in Naples, a city he would love deeply and where he would earn a diploma in Violin. Shortly thereafter he moved to Milan as winner of the international competition at La Scala, in whose orchestra he would play for four years, arriving to be its conductor in 1975, not yet 30 years old, among the youngest ever. Four years later came the decision to leave music, indulging the urge to learn about new forms of expression, since he felt he could bring nothing else to music. He took classes at the Brera Academy focusing mainly on the human figure and portraiture. His candid muses with sculptural and slender bodies, sometimes Junoesque and monumental, are mainly inspired in their forms and movements by the dancers he had pose in long anatomical study sessions. He tries to capture the moment of the movements of dance in its most expressive postures, in search of the harmony that used to be of music and sounds, now of forms, body volumes and proportions. He decided to devote himself totally to sculpture, making the figurative the keystone of his poetics, where the exaltation of classical beauty merges with a surrealism given by formal balances that the artist enjoys suddenly distorting and subverting, making them possible while not being so and destabilizing the viewer. A style, his, that "indulges and denies naturalism at the same time" in which harmony and theatricality charge his sculptures with pathos; tensions and twists, bodies that defy the laws of gravity in an explosion of energy and vigor made of improbable balances.