Curated by Mario Kramer

With Artifact (1984) and Steptext (1985), William Forsythe made ballet postmodern. Can you think of another ballet master given to citing Foucault? Though American, Forsythe has been based in Europe for more than forty years—as a dancer for the Stuttgart Ballet, as director of Ballett Frankfurt and then of the Forsythe Company, and now as associate choreographer of the Paris Opera Ballet. In addition to choreography, Forsythe has been an innovator of dance analysis and notation, improvisation techniques, lighting design, and works for exhibition, including those he calls place-specific choreographic objects. For MMK he intends his own various efforts—among them ten such objects produced between 1997 and 2015—to enter into dialogue with select works from the museum’s collection, including those of Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, and Richard Serra. It should be instructive to see how the dance maker’s objects compare with pieces by others whose lifelong investigations of space and the body have proved so transformative.

— Douglas Crimp