PROOF:
FRANCISCO GOYA
SERGEI EISENSTEIN
ROBERT LONGO

With works by FRANCISCO GOYA (1746–1828), SERGEI EISENSTEIN (1898–1948), and ROBERT LONGO (1953), the exhibition PROOF offers insights into the particular positions from which artists reflect on the social, cultural, and political complexities of their times. From the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries across three continents, these three artists experienced the turbulence of a turn of the century as well as the seismic effects of revolution, civil rights movements, and war.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Goya chose the medium of printmaking for his socially critical series of works and haunting images of war. Beginning in the 1920s, Eisenstein dealt with Russian history in classic films such as »The Battleship Potemkin« (1925) and »Ivan the Terrible« (1945). The New York-based artist Robert Longo explores burning contemporary issues such as terrorism, refugee movements, modern warfare, and symbols of power in his drawings ranging up to 7.5 meters in size.

Curated by Kate Fowle in collaboration with Robert Longo, the exhibition PROOF includes more than forty sketches by Eisenstein along with a selection of his films, which will be shown in large, slow-motion projections so that every single image can be experienced in its individuality.

Over 50 aquatint etchings from all four series by Goya will be on loan from the Morat-Institut in Freiburg, along with 43 works by Sergei Eisenstein from the Russian State Archive of Literature and 28 of Longo’s large-scale drawings from the past seven years from international collections.

PROOF is initiated by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; curated by Garage chief curator, Kate Fowle in collaboration with Robert Longo. The exhibition in Hamburg has been organiszed in collaboration with Deichtorhallen Hamburg.