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Cornelia Parker is known for her poetic transformation of existing materials, which she achieves through processes that are both physical and conceptual. With an elegant sculptural hand she constructs works that function as richly evocative metaphors.

Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) is an outstanding example of Parker’s suspended sculptures. This major installation piece is constructed from the charred residue of an actual case of suspected arson. Here, Parker uses the materials as found, without transforming their physical nature. Yet in her hands, they constitute a spectacular explosion of form in space as the once-glowing, now-blackened embers are precisely hung to create a forest of charcoal fragments. Parker’s sculpture can be considered formally in relation to the rich tradition of recent British sculpture, by artists ranging from Richard Long to Tony Cragg. It also captures the forensic fascination evident in so much of Parker’s work, evoking through its title the malicious intent of an arsonist, making her sculpture the perfect vehicle for both dazzling visual experience and vivid imaginings.

Cornelia Parker’s major ICA/Boston show in 2000 proved to be a landmark exhibition for both the artist and the institution. Parker’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, it won critical accolades and popular attention in Boston and reached still wider audiences on a national tour. Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) marks this important moment in the ICA’s history.

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Performance and photography are fused in Cindy Sherman’s now-signature “self-portraits.” Since the mid-1970s, she has photographed herself in theatrically staged environments, transforming her appearance with cosmetics, costumes, and wigs. After finishing the black-and-white Untitled Film Stills in 1980, Sherman turned to color, focusing her work as actor/director/photographer on issues of women and celebrity, fashion photography, and advertising. She and cohorts Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo came to be known as the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of images from consumer and media culture.

While the subjects in the Untitled Film Stills are generic types, in Untitled Sherman mimics a specific actress: Marilyn Monroe. Sherman’s recreation of the American idol relies on many small details—from the blond hair and red lipstick to the hairline and parted lips. Seated on the floor against a backdrop (the rolled bottom of which is visible), the female figure is dressed in rustic clothing: a tan button-down shirt, blue pants, and leather booties. Though no corresponding photograph of Monroe has been identified, the reference is so persuasive that Sherman’s identity becomes subsumed by Monroe’s, an effect that distinguishes the image from the wholly invented, “simulacral” (art historian Rosalind Krauss’s term) stills of the Untitled Film Stills. Sherman thereby expands and complicates the possibilities that portraiture offers in her exploration of the mutability of identity. As the artist describes her own experience: “I feel I’m anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.”

The addition of Untitled to the ICA/Boston’s collection of prints from Sherman’s early Untitled Film Stills shows where the artist would next go in her work. It also enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by contemporary photographers, such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works likewise interrogate the staged portrait.

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Cindy Sherman is known for fusing performance and photography in identity-morphing “self-portraits.” Since the mid-1970s, she has photographed herself as various female character types in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, and wigs. The sixty-nine black-and-white images in Untitled Film Stills construct and reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity, and were Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature photographic practice. She began the series in 1977, shortly after moving to New York City, and continued it until, as she says, she “ran out of clichés” in 1980. Sherman and her New York cohort in the 1980s, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, came to be known as the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of images from consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #63 depicts a young woman on the stairs of a building, wearing a dress, trench coat, and heavy boots. Stopped in her ascent, she turns back, gazing over her left shoulder toward the camera. Something has caught her attention and she turns to look at it, bringing her hand to her chin to hold back her hair. Her expression conveys a sense of concentration or perhaps consternation at what she sees. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, because the image evokes the familiar narrative tropes of Hollywood, the viewer is encouraged to fill in the next frame and imaginatively complete the narrative.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding set of prints from the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #63 enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by important contemporary photographers, such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works likewise generate questions about the ambiguities of the staged photograph.

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The series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80, marks Cindy Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature photographic practice. Reimagining the genre of portraiture, she plays the roles of both actor and director, transforming her persona with simple props and costumes, makeup, and wigs to mimic filmic stereotypes of postwar femininity. Though invented, the scenes in Untitled Film Stills appear disarmingly familiar. After producing sixty-nine black-and-white photographs, Sherman “ran out of clichés,” and ended the series. In New York City in the 1980s, she and her cohort, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation,” artists who critically appropriated images from consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #54 portrays a woman walking down a street at night toward the viewer, pulling the collar of her trench-coat to her neck. Resembling Marilyn Monroe in her facial features and blond bouffant, the figure is starkly lit by the flash of a camera in the surrounding darkness. Her pose is one of self-concealment and protection, as if she were being accosted on a nighttime walk by a paparazzo. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, the evocation of Hollywood movies encourages the viewer to anticipate the storyline’s possible outcomes.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding set of examples from the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #54 enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by the important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, who are also interested in the staged mise-en-scène.

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Since the mid-1970s, Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, and wigs. She began the series Untitled Film Stills in 1977 and continued it until 1980, by which time it comprised sixty-nine black-and-white photographic images that construct and reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity. The series marks Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature practice, in which she reimagines the genre of portraiture by playing the roles of actor, director, and photographer herself. Sherman and her cohort in New York in the 1980s, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of images of consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #48 shows a woman standing at the roadside with a suitcase beside her, presumably waiting for a car to round the bend and pick her up. The scene is infused with foreboding. Turned away from the camera with her arms crossed behind her back, dressed in a plaid skirt and sneakers, the woman exudes a schoolgirl innocence and naiveté that only heightens the uncertainty about her fate. A network of unseen gazes––the subject’s, the photographer’s, and the viewer’s––all situate the female figure as passive object. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, here Sherman exploits a host of narrative tropes familiar from Hollywood movies to trigger the viewer’s imagination.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding selection from the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #48 enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works likewise generate questions about the meaning of the staged portrait.

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Cindy Sherman is known for identity-morphing “self-portraits” that explore female character types. Since her days as a student in Buffalo in the mid-1970s, Sherman has been taking increasingly flamboyant photographs of herself in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, wigs, and props. She began the black-and-white photographic series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80, shortly after moving to New York City. Ultimately comprising sixty-nine images, Untitled Film Stills presents images that reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity. In this reimagining of the genre of portraiture, Sherman plays the dual roles of director and actor, viewer and viewed, maker and subject. In the 1980s, Sherman and her cohort in New York, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of everyday images of consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #44 shows a woman standing expectantly on the platform of a train station. Leaning against a wall with her head turned over her right shoulder, she appears to be awaiting the arrival of a train and its passengers. She is smartly dressed in a pencil skirt and a scarf, an outfit that recalls, as does the train station, a previous era. One quickly envisions the person she awaits and what will come of their reunion. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s use of familiar narrative tropes from Hollywood movies leads the viewer to complete the narrative as if filling in the next frame of a film.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding set of examples of the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #44 enhances the museum’s holdings of work by the most important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works continue to generate questions about the truth of the staged portrait.

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Joan Semmel’s Erotic Series (or “fuck paintings”) of the 1970s, subsequent nude self-portraits, and recent unflinching depictions of her aging body establish her as one of the most important feminist painters of her generation. Over a fifty-year career, Semmel has practiced a radically self-possessed painterly project concerned with charged eroticism and frank, corporeal self-portraiture. Her practice has presciently combined photography’s unique subject/artist relationship and image cropping with painting’s viscous material capacity to describe and emulate flesh. In the 1970s, her work constituted a near-singular painterly investigation into desire and heterosexual sex from a woman’s vantage point.

In many ways, Green Heart is a key work in the development of the artist’s oeuvre. From 1963 to 1970, while living in Spain and South America, Semmel explored the potential of form, color, and composition in an abstract expressionist idiom. Moving back to New York in 1970, she began to bring her expressionist approach to the depiction of female and male figures tangled together in erotic embrace. In preparation for Green Heart, as with all paintings of the subject, Semmel asked a couple to have sex while she photographed them from above. Images of sex, so often depicted from a male perspective––whether for overtly pornographic purposes or with greater prurience in the high art context––are in Semmel’s work reconfigured from her perspective as a woman witnessing, capturing, and interpreting the act.

Semmel’s near-decade of experience with abstract painting informs Green Heart’s urgent paint handling, expressive color, and push-and-pull composition. Immediately compelling for its subject and formal decisions such as cropping and frontality, Green Heart shows the direction her paintings would take in the 1970s: carefully descriptive, cool, colorful depictions of sex and naked bodies, sourced by the disembodied camera, but reinterpreted in paint by the artist.

Green Heart adds to the ICA/Boston’s recently expanding collection of paintings. It joins works by Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, and Lisa Yuskavage that examine and undermine art-historical representations of women.

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Dana Schutz paints abstracted figures in the midst of outlandish, gruesome, or humiliating situations. She begins by visualizing an absurd or impossible event––figures eating their own faces, carving shapes into their necks, or attempting to smoke cigarettes while swimming underwater––and proceeds to ask herself questions about the theoretical incident. Through these questions, Schutz imagines not only how the given situation might materialize visually, but also the feelings that would be associated with it. The resulting images are imaginative, humorous, and borderline sadistic in the treatment of their subjects. In its bright colors and loose brushstrokes, Schutz’s work recalls cartoons or children’s book illustrations, generating a strange contrast with the sinister circumstances it depicts.

Sneeze shows a graphic illustration of a physical event most sitters would prefer not to have immortalized in a portrait. Mucus from a woman’s nose, portrayed in exaggerated strokes of yellow, green, and blue paint, has sprayed several inches before ricocheting off her open palms. The painting might be called an “anti-portrait”; instead of presenting the sitter as dignified, it shows her at her most unappealing. The painting also departs from traditional portraits by capturing a momentary and involuntary pose that a subject would not have been able to hold long enough to have it documented.

Dana Schutz is an accomplished painter whose canvases have been seen in the tradition of the grotesque represented by artists from Francisco Goya to Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. Sneeze joins works by other important quasi-representational contemporary painters in the ICA/Boston collection, including Ree Morton, Joan Semmel, and Amy Sillman.

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Since the mid-1980s, Doris Salcedo has addressed the effects of criminal and political violence through sculptural works and installations that bear witness to death, loss, and pain. Collecting testimonies from individuals living in rural Colombia, she both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently invisible nature of trauma.

In many of her works, Salcedo employs an uncomfortable combination of domestic furniture and building materials such as concrete and steel. Instead of engaging the traditional methods of sculpture, such as carving or molding, she makes her work through acts of physical and symbolic violence: filing, scratching, bending, beating, fusing, melting, and burying. In Untitled, an armoire’s interior has been filled with cement. The gray cement surface appears perfectly smooth except for the wooden chair that has been turned on its side and embedded in the lower right-hand corner. Salcedo’s careful application of cement elicits both fullness and emptiness. The material weight of the wood and cement suggest fullness, while there is a literal emptiness in what is missing—clothing and personal belongings—and a visual emptiness in the opacity of the gray cement. Variations of light and dark waver across the surface, creating the illusion that the cement is shifting. The small empty space almost hidden behind the back of the chair offers a momentary break in the solidity of the sculpture. With this subtle void, Salcedo furthers the tension and heightens the lingering sense of loss. By distorting the familiar, her work transforms our perception of home from a space of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation.

Untitled forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture, as well as holdings that investigate themes of war and violence. It joins works by Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura that visualize social and political violence.

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Since the mid-1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has addressed the themes of loss and mourning in works that evoke criminal and political violence. Her sculptures and installations are informed by her research and fieldwork in rural communities in Colombia, particularly the testimonies she collects from survivors of political abduction who were presumed dead, as well as the families of those who did not return. Her work both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently unspoken results of trauma.

In 1989, Salcedo began to make works in which she buried, covered, brushed, and fused domestic wooden furniture with cement. By distorting the familiar, she transforms our perception of home from a place of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation. In Untitled, a chair has been almost entirely encased in a block of cement, with only its wooden frame and hints of red cushion peeking through. Metal spikes pierce the object, acting as both a form of support and an instrument of violence. When pouring the cement, Salcedo took care to preserve its rough and haphazard surface. Combining the impenetrable materials of cement and metal and the humble delicacy of the chair, Salcedo creates a strong sense of physical tension. Typically, we arrange wooden chairs in relation to a table or desk, but here the sculpture faces the wall, and at an uncomfortably close distance. For Salcedo, the installation of the work is as important as the materials from which it is made. The placement of the chair suggests confinement and punishment, both for the viewer, who cannot neither sit down nor fully view the sculpture, and for an imaginary detainee undergoing interrogation.

This work adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture, and of works in all mediums by artists who explore the subjects of war and sociopolitical violence, including Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura.

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