Filmmaker Philip Haas Commissioned To Create Films For Kimbell Art Museum’s Summer Exhibition

Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons
Film Installations By Philip Haas
Inspired By Works In The Collection

Fort Worth, TX - The Kimbell Art Museum presents an innovative collaboration with filmmaker Philip Haas, an exhibition of five specially commissioned film installations. The installations both interpret works in the collection and stand as powerful works of art in themselves. They are shown for the first time as an exhibition this summer, after which the Museum will use them occasionally within collection displays in the galleries and in modified forms in various kinds of education and outreach. This free exhibition opens on Saturday, July 18, 2009.

At the heart of Haas’s installations are short films that give form to ideas and feelings suggested by the chosen works from the collection. Though based on deep research into the original artists and cultures, they are poetic and sensuous in approach rather than factual like a documentary. On occasion actors, dancers, and settings form themselves into an ingenious, at times uncanny re-creation of the given work, as though it were a still that magically preceded the film to which it belongs. Allusions to other, related works of art further enrich the imagery.

Between 7 and 20 minutes in length and running continuously, the films are projected on screens of various unconventional formats and configurations. All five are accompanied by original music, and three appear in elaborate architectural and sculptural sets, further immersing the viewer in the experience.    

Haas’s installations take us into the imaginative and creative world of the artist, open up new, freely imaginative ways of looking at art, and return us to familiar works with fresh eyes. They complement a full display of the Museum’s collection throughout the galleries, each installation occupying a space near the work that inspired it. The project is a new departure for the Kimbell and possibly the first such venture in any museum.     

The richly illustrated accompanying book features an essay by the British writer

A. S. Byatt, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1990 for her novel Possession. Byatt is an admirer of Haas and author of the novella on which he based his best-known film, Angels and Insects. Her most recent novel, The Children’s Book, will be published in the U.S. later this year.

Date: July 18-October 25, 2009.