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"Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting" (2002), the inaugural exhibition of Slought Foundation, playfully revisits Raul Ruiz's avant-garde classic film of the same name. The exhibition and documentary video featured original works--presented as a collection--by Jasper Johns, Sol Le Witt, Gerhard Richter, Alexander Calder, Oskar Kokoschka, and Josef Albers.
Through a series of interviews with noted artistics and critics, the 50 minute video presents the viewer with a composite portrait of a collector and his or her collection on the occasion of its exhibition. The primary focus of the movie is the seventh and final work in the collection, which is missing. A series of hypotheses are advanced concerning it status and identity, and these hypotheses provide unity and coherence for an otherwise disparate and incomplete collection.
Commentators in the 2002 production included Jean-Michel Rabaté, Osvaldo Romberg, Susan Stewart, Reinaldo Laddaga, and Gregory Flaxman, among others. Similarly, in Raul Ruiz's "Hypothèse du tableau volé, L'" (Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, 1979), two narrators, one seen and one unseen, discuss possible connections between a series of paintings. The on-screen narrator walks through three-dimensional reproductions of each painting, featuring real people, sometimes moving, in an effort to explain the series' significance.
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