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One of the most influential artists of the last century, Louise Bourgeois has produced a distinctive oeuvre over her seventy-year career, combining abstraction and figuration and a wide array of media to explore sexuality, the body, everyday life, and trauma.

Cell (Hands and Mirror) is from a series of large-scale sculptures Bourgeois made when she was in her eighties. Each “cell” is a room that viewers are prompted to peer into, where they discover highly symbolic arrangements of sculptures and found objects. In Cell (Hands and Mirror), the interior walls are painted blue, and two realistically sculpted arms rest on a piece of marble and press into each one another. The color, forms, and inclusion of mirrors imply a clinical and inhospitable environment, in which the dismembered body parts are submitted to scrutiny and voyeurism.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA/Boston has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show titled Bourgeois in Boston. This work joins the ICA’s rich collection of sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and adds to the holdings of figurative sculptures by such artists as Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith. It can also be seen as a precursor to contemporary installation-based work, represented in the ICA collection by such artists as Hito Steyerl.

2015.13

Based in London, over the past thirty years Palestinian Mona Hatoum has frequently used the body, including her own, in photographic, filmic, and performative work that explores issues related to identity. Since the 1990s, she has also transformed common household objects—rugs, cots, and kitchen utensils—into threatening large-scale sculptures. Items from the domestic territory become ambiguous and potentially dangerous, evoking themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

In Van Gogh’s Back, the conversion of the ordinary (hair) into the extraordinary (art) is uncharacteristically playful. Throughout her career, Hatoum has used and referenced hair, applying strands to paper as a form of drawing and integrating the material into sculptural work. While hair is often associated with femininity and sensuality, once removed from the body it takes on an abject quality. In Van Gogh’s Back, Hatoum uses the biomaterial in yet another way. With what appears to be soap, the long hairs on a man’s back have been shaped into curls that reprise Vincent van Gogh’s signature thick, swirling brushstrokes in his seminal Starry Night, 1889. As in Hatoum’s early performance work, the human body functions as canvas and sculpture, here to amusing effect.

Van Gogh’s Back is a valuable contribution to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of Hatoum’s work and makes a valuable contribution to the expanding collection of photography. In its humor and art-historical referencing it complements collection works by Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman.

2014.24

London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum has long associated the familiar with the uncanny in an arresting and visceral oeuvre. In the 1980s, she made video and performance works that explore political, ethnic, and personal identity through the body, often her own. At the end of the 1980s, she began to focus on common domestic objects—including kitchen utensils and house furnishings—that she transmogrified into hostile large-scale sculptures. The domestic interior is no longer a place of protection and safety but the locus of ambiguous and foreboding mutation. In metaphorical terms, the transformation of the known into the threatening replicates the psychological effects of displacement, exile, and violence.

Perhaps the most defining feature of Hatoum’s work is her generation of multiple readings by means of simple transformative gestures. This is the case with T42, a pair of teacups fused together at the rim to create one drinking reservoir. The conjoining of the cups brings to mind the civility associated with tea drinking along with an image of the forced collaboration involved in sharing a vessel. In more political terms, the form can be construed as a metaphor of egalitarianism, a social condition in which resources are equally distributed and cooperation is demanded. But the twin-handled cup also conjures a possible battle over limited resources, a tug-of-war in which the contents of the vessel go to the victor.

T42 takes its place among works in the ICA/Boston’s growing sculpture collection that probe complex emotional and psychological states through simple forms. It also accompanies a number of other collection works by Mona Hatoum, as well as by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura that explore themes related to psychological as well as physical violence.

2014.23

In her work over the past three decades, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum has often employed elements from the fragmented or eviscerated human body to elicit instinctual responses from viewers, creating jarring effects through suggestive textural and visual associations. In the 1980s, she used her own body in video and performance work to explore national, political, and psychological identity. During the following decade, she began to transform commonplace household objects into large-scale sculptures that in scale and material construction resemble instruments of torture. In these works, domestic territory is no longer a place of protection and safety, but one of foreboding and confusion. The implicit themes in the transformation of objects that remind one of “home” but have turned ominous are national and ethnic exile, displacement, and conflict.

Attracted by the glistening surface of Rubber Mat, we see on closer inspection that the spongy silicone has been molded to resemble coiled intestines. Although a welcome mat typically serves as an invitation to enter a home, Hatoum’s bizarre version invites only to repel. The artist fuses the pliant silicone and vivid bodily image to activate and conflate our sense of touch and feelings of disgust.

Rubber Mat forms part of a significant representation of works by Hatoum in the ICA/Boston’s strong and expanding sculpture collection, and joins works that address themes of the body by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, and Nick Cave.

2014.22

Over the past three decades, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum has focused on the narrow divide between the familiar and the uncanny. In the 1980s, she made video and performance work that position her body as the locus for an exploration of political and psychological identities. During the 1990s, she began to transform commonplace household objects—rugs, cots, or kitchen utensils—into large-scale sculptures that resemble threatening and monstrous instruments of torture. With these sculptures, Hatoum envisions a domestic territory that is not a place of protection and safety, but one of ambiguity and foreboding, suggesting themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Hatoum made Pom Pom City while living in Mexico as she was preparing for exhibitions in Mexico City and Oaxaca. During two month-long periods, she created works that draw on local curiosities, Mexican folklore, and traditional craftsmanship. Pom Pom City is made with natural wool from artisan weavers in Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, an area known for its hand-woven rugs. Hatoum’s piece is an oversized rug, exhibited directly on the gallery floor. At the sculpture’s center is an interlocking grid of fibers, a reference to the tightly gridded plan of central Mexico City. Long strands of wool radiate from this point like rivers, roads, or tentacles, representing the chaos and growth surrounding the city. Each strand ends in a pom pom, calling to mind kitschy souvenir sombreros or other tourist trinkets. Like many of Hatoum’s sculptures, Pom Pom City plays with scale: in other works she has vastly enlarged a baby crib, a cheese grater, and the colorful birdcage exhibited in the ICA/Boston’s Made in Mexico (2004).

This work is one of several works by Mona Hatoum owned by the ICA, and resonates with the many works in fiber in the collection by such artists as Sheila Hicks, Alexandre da Cunha, and Josh Faught.

2006.7

Mona Hatoum belongs to a group of artists that also includes Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, and Rachel Whiteread, whose works defamiliarize everyday forms, transforming them into minimalist, conceptual, and often performative objects. Working across a variety of mediums, Hatoum often extricates the familiar forms of the domestic landscape—an armoire, chaise, or rug—from their normal context. Through the juxtaposition of contradictory materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of uncharacteristic elements, she infuses the familiar with an element of danger, references to violence, or the capability of producing bodily harm. By employing these transformative gestures, Hatoum engages viewers’ tactile imagination—her sculptures, photographs, and videos provoke viewers to imagine their own bodies in relation to these unruly objects. The myriad and often conflicting allusions simultaneously speak to the history of violence in the artist’s Palestinian homeland and the safety provided by the domestic realm.

Hatoum has created a series of “carpets” that refer to the minimalist floor sculptures of artists such as Carl Andre, traditional Muslim prayer rugs, and functional carpets. Pin Rug is composed of thousands of straight pins pushed through a needlepoint canvas. The combination of the dark support and the glistening pins gives the visual effect of a soft, lush surface. Though evoking an inviting carpet, like many of Hatoum’s sculptures, the object would cause pain if one were to stand or sit on it. Pin Rug subtly illustrates the dualities that mark Hatoum’s work: seduction and repulsion, pain and pleasure, religion and belief.

A compelling element in the ICA/Boston’s increasingly strong collection of sculpture, a cluster of works by Hatoum that includes Pin Rug forms part of a concentration of objects that investigate themes of war and violence by such artists as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.20

Over the course of her thirty-year career, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum has produced a powerfully visceral body of work. She came to notice in the 1980s for video and performance work in which her body served as the vehicle for an exploration of political and personal identity. During the 1990s, she turned her focus to ordinary household objects such as furnishings and tools, transforming them into monumental sculptures that arouse a sense of threat. With these uncanny sculptures, Hatoum divests domestic territory of its comfort and safety. As the objects that initially evoke “home” become ominous, the process inspires reflection on the global themes of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Natura Morta (Edwardian Vitrine) consists of beautifully crafted, colorful Murano glass objects arranged inside an Edwardian wooden cabinet. At first glance, the seductive mirrored-glass objects resemble crystal fruits—a pomegranate, a pineapple, or perhaps a lemon. However, these jewel-colored objects are blown and hand-shaped to resemble hand grenades, small bombs that disperse lethal fragments on detonation. By using a particularly seductive mirrored glass as the objects’ material and placing them inside a common domestic cabinet, Hatoum converts the appealing and familiar into the threatening and deadly. Her alienating treatment of the home arouses feelings of displacement that respond to the reality of many who live in the midst of constant war and violence.

This powerful work, along with others by Mona Hatoum, complements holdings in the ICA/Boston’s growing sculpture collection and in works that investigate themes of conflict and violence by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.19

For thirty years, London-based Palestinian Mona Hatoum has produced work that treads the line between the familiar and the uncanny via the body and the objects it comes into contact with. During the late 1980s, she moved from performance and video to large-scale sculptures and installations in which household items—kitchen utensils, rugs, cots, and tools—become threatening and aggressive. Objects that initially remind one of the comforts of “home” turn ominous, an alienation evoking the experience of exile, displacement, and conflict.

Do unto others… is a polished metal boomerang put on formal display in the gallery context. The boomerang originated in Australia as a tool for hunting as well as sport and entertainment. Hatoum’s gleaming sculpture eschews the warm organic wood typical of boomerangs in favor of surgical stainless steel, a material change that lends the object the appearance of a blade, scalpel, or scythe. The title refers to the golden rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” When thrown, a boomerang performs the operation detailed by the maxim by returning to the thrower’s hand. However, to catch this blade-like version of the boomerang would undoubtedly cause harm to the wielder. With Do unto others… Hatoum seems to suggest a negative invocation of the “golden rule,” a reading more akin to “an eye for an eye,” in which violent acts, and not good deeds, are reciprocated.

This work forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong and growing collection of sculpture, as well as the constellation of works that investigate themes of war and violence, including examples by artists such as Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.18

Working in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, Louise Bourgeois—one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists—has explored themes such as trauma, sexuality, and everyday life. Beautiful Night is a nine-color lithograph depicting a boldly colored landscape of pink, orange, and red hills. Printed on music paper, the print is a buoyant and hopeful image, especially for an artist best known for delving into the darker aspects of life. This print retains Bourgeois’s graphic style. Here we see her signature mark-making, as in the mountains formed by her spiraling, obsessive lines and repeated strokes. The landscape is dotted with two leafless trees and a full moon. Bourgeois said of this work: “The trees symbolize a couple on their first date. It’s a beautiful moonlit night that they will remember forever.” This quote relates to what Bourgeois has referred to as the toi et moi (you and me), a theme in her work that speaks to the intricacies of human interaction or relationships. As curator Deborah Wye points out in her catalogue essay for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1994 exhibition The Prints of Louise Bourgeois, it is a topic that the artist repeatedly returns to in her prints.

This print was made as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMart program, a fundraising initiative that offers works donated by visual artists. The addition of Beautiful Night to the ICA/Boston collection expands the museum’s Bourgeois holdings to include a work on paper, increasing the ICA’s ability to showcase the many dimensions of this eminent artist.

2008.3

Although a brain tumor ended the life of Eva Hesse at age thirty-four, the style of postminimalism she developed during her abbreviated career has made her one of the most influential artists of the postwar period. Hesse blended the industrial materials and hard, geometric shapes of minimalism with softer, more organic forms to create work that suggests both human pain and mechanical indifference. While the work for which she has received the most recognition is sculptural, drawings and collage are an important part of her oeuvre. The artist’s first solo exhibition, at Allan Stone Gallery in March 1963, consisted of works on paper, and she continued making drawings after she began to create sculpture in 1964–65.

In 1959, Hesse graduated from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, where she studied color theory and advanced painting with Josef Albers, and gained a reputation as a talented colorist. Untitled shows the artist experimenting with various color combinations, as well as with black-and-white forms. After leaving Yale, Hesse worked as a textile designer in New York. The gridded composition of Untitled, in which each rectangle bears a distinct design, is reminiscent of a woven piece of fabric or a quilt, and also anticipates Hesse’s later use of the grid in her three-dimensional work.

Hesse is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Untitled is representative of an important early moment in her career, before she turned to sculpture. This piece strengthens the ICA/Boston’s holdings of works by important female artists, and complements the pivotal Hesse sculptures in the collection.

2014.25