Book Launch: Jaleh Mansoor's "Marshall Plan Modernism"
Friday, February 24, 2017, 7PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Join us for the launch of Jaleh Mansoor's Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Post War Abstraction and the beginnings of Autonomia.
Focusing on the work of Italian artists Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Mansoor's research shows how abstract painting in post WWII Italy critiqued the economic violence of the Marshall Plan and American hegemony, broke with Fascist-associated Futurism and anticipated social unrest and anti-capitalist struggle in the Italian 1960s and 1970s.
"Possessing the great gift of being able to bring art to life through language, Jaleh Mansoor offers new and illuminating readings of artworks that are among the most compelling objects from the last seventy‑five years. She infuses the complex frameworks of recent Marxist thought with her own voice, thinking through the possibilities open to painting while deepening our understanding of postwar Italian culture and its contradictions. This book makes a powerful contribution to the discourses of art history and cultural criticism." - Rachel Haidu, author of The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976
Jaleh Mansoor is Assistant Professor of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia. She is currently working on the relationship between real and aesthetic abstraction 1888-2008. Her research is on abstract painting in the context of the miracolo Italiano and the international relations of the Marshall Plan era nested within the global dynamics of the Cold War opens up on to problems concerning the labour-to-capital relationship and its ramifications in culture and aesthetics. Her work limns the correlation between real and aesthetic abstraction.
Co-presented by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and SFU Galleries