Gustav Metzger: And Then Came the Environment
Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles
September 13, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Text Source: https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/gustav-metzger-and-then-came-the-environment-fall2024/
‘The future of the world is what we are after. We start with the young and then when the young are twelve, fifteen, and then twenty-one, they can enter politics, and if they have got this initiation/introduction to key issues … it will make an enormous difference to the future of the world.’
—Gustav Metzger
’Gustav Metzger. And Then Came the Environment’ is curated by Curatorial Senior Director, Kate Fowle and is presented in conjunction with the Getty Museum’s citywide PST ART initiative, ‘Art & Science Collide.’
‘And Then Came the Environment’ presents a range of Gustav Metzger’s scientific works merging art and science from 1961 onward, highlighting his advocacy for environmental awareness and the possibilities for the transformation of society, as well as his latest experimental works, created in 2014. The exhibition title comes from Metzger’s groundbreaking 1992 essay ‘Nature Demised’ wherein he proclaims an urgent need to redefine our understanding of nature in relation to the environment. Metzger explains that the politicized term ‘environment’ creates a disconnect from the natural world, manipulating public perception to obscure pollution and exploitation caused by wars and industrialization, and that it should be renamed ‘Damaged Nature.’
Gustav Metzger (1926-2017) was born in Nuremberg to Polish-Jewish parents, fleeing Nazi Germany via the Kindertransport to England when he was 12. There, while working as a gardener, he began his art studies in Cambridge in 1945, a time and place marked by scientific experimentation as the Atomic Age dawned. By the late 1950s, Metzger was deeply involved in anti-nuclear protests and developing his manifestos on 'Auto-Destruction' and 'Auto-Creation'—which he said were aimed at “the integration of art with the advances of science and technology”—gaining recognition in Europe through exhibitions, lecture-demonstrations, and writings.