Yoko Ono, Voice Piece for Soprano. Performed by the Yoko Ono, 1961 © Courtesy of Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono

Grapefruit

6.6 2012 – 16.9 2012

Stockholm

By the late 1950s, Yoko Ono had already begun creating poetic works in which text, music, performance and experimental painting merge. The exhibition has its starting point in Grapefruit, which Yoko Ono (born 1933) published in 1964. This book contains ideas and sketches for painting, events, films, dance, music, painting, objects and architecture that the viewer can choose to carry out in reality, or simply in their own minds, if they like.

Yoko Ono moved from Japan to the USA with her family in the 1940s, and soon became a leading voice in New York’s most interesting artist circles, which worked with happenings, sound art, poetry and film. Alongside colleagues including George Maciunas, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage and others, Yoko Ono developed totally new modes of expression that questioned the artworld’s increasingly commercial preoccupations, and which left heroic high modernism behind.

The Grapefruit exhibition will include a selection of Yoko Ono’s ‘instruction pieces’, which invite us into imaginative ways of looking at existence and at the making of art. A number of experimental films and pivotal early works show Yoko to be a pioneer of conceptual art and the international fluxus movement, and also reflect the artist’s lifelong struggle for peace and love.

Search for the Fountain

For the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Yoko Ono has written a new instruction, Search for the Fountain. The text has been sent to some 20 artists who have been invited to respond to, and comment on, the text in various ways.

Search for the Fountain

Fullmoon night at Djurgården in Stockholm

Yoko Ono’s works Evening till Dawn (1964) and Secret Piece (1953) on the night between 4 and 5 June 2012 on Djurgården in Stockholm. The event consists of two parts: Evening till Dawn and the second part, Secret Piece, in which a few musicians improvise in the grove to the first sounds of the dawn.

Fullmoon night

Curator: Cecilia Widenheim

The exhibition has been produced by Moderna Museet.

Images

Yoko Ono
Grapefruit, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1970
© Yoko Ono. Orginally published in 1964.
Yoko Ono
Performance på Moderna Museet, 2012
© Yoko Ono. Foto: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
Yoko Ono
Performance på Moderna Museet, 2012
© Yoko Ono. Foto: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet
Yoko Ono
Performance på Moderna Museet, 2012
© Yoko Ono. Foto: Albin Dahlström/Moderna Museet

More about this exhibition