What’s On this Spring at The San Diego Museum of Art
Ladan Akbarnia
Spring has sprung at The San Diego Museum of Art, with a rare opportunity to view a private collection of Impressionist paintings and an exciting new installation by contemporary artist Shadi Yousefian on loan from Advocartsy in the Museum’s Arts of Iran gallery. The extraordinary works in Monet to Matisse: Impressionist Masterpieces from the Bemberg Foundation were collected by Georges Bemberg (1915–2011), the Argentine-French writer and pianist who bought his first painting—a Pissarro—while studying at Harvard University. The selection, which rarely leaves its permanent home in Toulouse, France, includes works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot, while Pierre Bonnard is represented by over fifteen remarkable examples. Impressionism, and the movements it inspired, such as Pointillism and Fauvism, paved the way for Modernism, as illustrated by the early works of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse in the exhibition.
Shadi Yousefian. Fading Memories Negatives 2, Lightbox 2, and Lightbox 4, 2021. Original negative collages in lightbox. ©Shadi Yousefian
Shadi Yousefian. Fading Memories 1, Edition 2/2, 2019. Archival prints of 20 individual negative collages. ©Shadi Yousefian
Monet to Matisse ends at the entrance to SDMA’s Arts of Iran gallery, where visitors will be greeted with works of different media made in Iran and the Iranian diaspora over the last several centuries. Every 6-12 months, the Museum will feature new examples of Iranian contemporary art, some of them acquisitions to the permanent collection and others featured on loan. This spring, SDMA is delighted to feature three works from the Fading Memories series by San Francisco-based artist Shadi Yousefian. Yousefian’s work addresses issues of loss, dislocation, cultural identity, and memory—all of which stem from her personal experiences as an Iranian immigrant. Her artistic practice includes mixed media, combining photographic prints and other materials. In Fading Memories, the artist explores memory as both fragmented and willfully reclaimed. Cutting up negatives of old photographs collected from albums of family and friends, Yousefian then rearranges the fragmented strips into “negative collage” prints. The destructive act of cutting negatives and detaching the pictured subjects from their original environments resembles the breaking down and distortion of memories of people, places, experiences, and attachments over time. The meticulous reconstruction of the strips into collaged prints, however, illustrates the power to reclaim fading memories and connections by rebuilding and re-viewing them.
Claude Monet. Boats on the Beach at Etretat, 1883.Oil on canvas Bemberg Foundation. ©Bemberg Foundation
On loan from the Los Angeles gallery Advocartsy, Fading Memories will be on display at SDMA through September 2022, while Monet to Matisse is on view until August 7, 2022. Please visit www.sdmart.org for times and tickets.
Ladan Akbarnia, PhD, is curator of South Asian and Islamic Arts at San Diego Museum of Art.
