Kienholz: Five Car Stud

“Kienholz: Five Car Stud”, an exhibition curated by Germano Celant, brings together a selection of artworks by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, including the well-known installation that gives the show its title. 
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. 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 as part of this exhibition, 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 26 artworks including drawings, 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.
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.
An autodidact and artist from Washington State, Edward Kienholz (1927–1994) founded Ferus Gallery with Walter Hopps in Los Angeles in 1957. In 1961, after his first solo show, curated by Hopps, at Pasadena Art Museum in California, Kienholz, along with other West Coast artists, was selected for the William Seitz- curated exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at MoMA in New York, where his work was displayed alongside Picasso, Schwitters, Duchamp and Cornell. Thanks to this event, he started to gain international recognition and acclaim from European critics and curators such as Pontus Hulten, who devoted him the exhibition “11+11 Tableaux”, presented in 1970 in Stockholm, Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Paris, Zürich and London.
Right from his earliest works, the artist drew upon a realistic, quotidian and unequivocal imagination to create “an art of repulsion,” in direct opposition to a narcissistic component present in Abstract Expressionism, or the fetishism of industrial merchandise and materials typical of Pop Art and Minimalism.
As Germano Celant explains, “Kienholz does not tend to sublimate the lowness and tragedy of life, the conditions of solitude and triviality, but rather uses them as tools that can highlight the low, popular universe, a place where the emaciated and filthy, the perverse and lurid, represent a new, surprising beauty.”
“Kienholz: Five Car Stud” is completed by an illustrated publication, which is part of Fondazione Prada’s Quaderni series, including an essay by the curator and in-depth documentation exploring the artworks on display.

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