Curated by Lorenzo Giusti under the patronage of the GAMeC, the exhibition pays homage to the novel artistic curriculum of the sculptor born in Plainfield (New Jersey, 1939), and will comprise four sections, hosted by the museum’s display areas and Palazzo della Ragione’s prestigious Sala delle Capriate, in Bergamo Alta’s Medieval heart.
Critics associated Kuehn’s work with Post-Minimalist and Process Art currents, with his participation in watershed exhibitions like the famous 1966 Eccentric Abstraction, curated by Lucy Lippard, and the 1969 When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeeman, but it escapes classification and lingers on the borders of various artistic movements. His raw, radical language developed from an initial reflection on the physicality of materials and played a significant role in the birth of a new conception of sculpture, equidistant from the subjectivism of Expressionist abstraction and the objectivity and geometric rigor of minimalism.
From a working-class family, and a manual worker himself when he was a student, Kuehn spent over five decades exploring the tension between change and deformation, his intent being to refute «the dogma of the cube», as he has repeatedly declared, and «to subvert the force of pure forms».