Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith

Exhibition 19.12.03 – 29.02.04

In the exhibition "Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith" the artist, born in 1946 in Chicago, presents her drawings, which she has been producing, along with her poems, since the early 1960’s.

"Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith" presents more than 100 works on paper, including a new series of large-scale drawings. In addition, original manuscripts, recent photographs and the video clip, "Summer Cannibals", by the photographer Robert Frank will be on view. Smith’s latest series of large-scale drawings was inspired by her reaction to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. A newspaper photograph of the destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center reminded her of Peter Brueghel’s "The Tower of Babel" (1563) and provided the starting point for these drawings. In her book of poems "Babel", published in 1978, she had already dealt with this biblical story, a description of man’s hubris. In her drawings smith frequently combines pictures and words to form an impressive pictorial script and weaves together passages from the peace gospel of the Essenes, the Koran and other sources and allows the letters to dissolve into her drawings.

Although Smith became famous mainly for her music and poetry, her drawings were already in many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. What is special about her drawings, which are inspired by William Blake and Antonin Artaud among others, is the thin, hard line and the soft coloring. Smith uses a thin, delicate stroke, but one that at the same time is so sharp that it seems to injure the figures. She frequently incorporates extracts from her own poems or from other authors in her drawings and compares the act of artistic creation with a catharsis.

The exhibition will be complemented by a homage to the artist in the form of works by the fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester. The original photographs used as the "models" for the well-known Smith portraits by Franz Gertsch and Dan Graham’s video documentation "Rock my Religion" are also on view. One of the aims of the exhibition is to reflect the various sides of the vibrant and eccentric personality of the artist Smith and to illuminate her work from different vantage points.

The exhibition is in cooperation with The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, one of four Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh.