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The figurative sculptures of Marisol (born Marisol Escobar) are as distinctive as they are visually eclectic and psychologically probing. Marisol combines many influences and materials in her work, from the angular and rough forms of folk art and pre-Columbian art to the distortions of cubism and the color of pop art, the movement with which she is most closely associated.

First exhibited in Marisol’s 1966 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Couple No. 1 presents a pair of illustrated figures contained within a wooden block. The bright crimson top and the white fabric cone, which extends six feet into space with the help of a motor, distinguishes the figure on the left from the more spectral, carefully rendered, and feminine figure on the right. Shaded three-dimensional elements contrast with two-dimensional blocks of color, and the white-cone face contrasts with the more detailed face beside it, suggesting the duality of anonymity and individualization embodied not only by two people, and two genders, as the title might imply, but also by any single person. With remarkably minimal means, Marisol communicates an element of pathos in her rendering of the couple, which speaks to her skill and insight in representing the human condition.

This work is one among a number of figurative sculptures in the ICA/Boston collection, including works by Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith. Couple No. 1 also reflects the ICA’s commitment to women artists and to figures who may have been historically under-recognized.

2015.27

Louise Lawler explores the changing context in which works of art are viewed and circulated. Since the late 1970s she has worked primarily in photography and has become best known for shooting art objects in collectors’ homes, museums, auction houses, commercial galleries, and corporate offices, whether installed above copier machines or piled on loading docks and in storage closets. In these sites, she frames the strategies of display—from the works’ labels to their location—to bring attention to the ways spaces shape the meaning and reception of art after it leaves the studio. Her work is often associated with institutional critique for its exposure of art world machinations, and with the so-called Pictures Generation, a group of artists that includes Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others, known for their strategies of appropriation. Witty and trenchant, Lawler’s photographs are more than mirrors in which the art world sees itself; they reposition the viewer to engage critically and affectively with art’s presentation and dissemination.

Grieving Mothers (Attachment) is part of a series in which Lawler documents casts of antiquities held by various international institutions. It depicts plaster casts of the wings of the Nike of Samothrace, c. 190 BCE, perhaps one of the most recognizable objects of Hellenic sculpture, in the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. To further complicate the idea of originality and reproduction, the original marble has missing portions filled in with plaster. Lawler shows the wings detached from the figure’s torso, the mechanism of attachment visible. Due to the close cropping and angled framing, the viewer can perceive the wings as sculptural objects divorced from their grand and dynamic referent. In such pieces, Lawler complicates our perception of authenticity and its relationship to form.

Lawler’s Grieving Mothers (Attachment) builds on the ICA/Boston’s holdings of work by contemporary photographers, especially those who came of age artistically in the 1980s, such as Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Moreover, it adds to the group of works by younger photographers who explore the ways three-dimensional forms can be captured through photography, such as Roe Ethridge, Erin Shirreff, and Sara VanDerBeek, many of whom consider Lawler a key figure in the development of their practices.

2015.16

Sherrie Levine is a multimedia artist who works in photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, among other materials, to create pieces that challenge deeply rooted notions of artistic authenticity, originality, autonomy, the purity of medium, and immutability.

Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) is one of Levine’s series of knot paintings (the name is a pun on “not painting”). Each of these works uses the common building material of plywood, which is composed of many thin layers of wood glued together. Plywood is often used to build crates for artworks, though here the everyday material becomes the material support of a painting. Levine paints in gold over the naturally occurring knots within the wood, a process that again conflates high and low culture, granting a seemingly banal material aesthetic relevance and material worth.

Though fitting in with her oeuvre at large in its critique of modernist concepts, such as the end of painting, Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) complements the other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection by providing a modification of her signature strategy of appropriation. This piece is also an important reference for works by other artists in the collection, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, artists who, like Levine, are considered part of the so-called Pictures Generation, known for their appropriation of images and critical examination of popular culture and consumerism.

2015.19

Sherrie Levine is known for appropriating the work of canonical male artists in order to deconstruct accepted art-historical concepts like originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium and suggest their inherent mutability.

Over a decade after she began reproducing works by famous male artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Walker Evans, and Willem de Kooning, Levine created a cast bronze replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, one of the first readymade sculptures, a commercially manufactured urinal that Duchamp removed from a functional context and presented as a work of art. In Levine’s Fountain (Buddha), she recasts Duchamp’s work in a critical light, challenging the nearly universal acceptance and celebration of Duchamp’s early twentieth-century radicalism. Levine subverts the everyday quality of Duchamp’s readymade by casting the work in bronze, a valuable material with strong currency in the history of sculpture. Levine collapses multiple associations within this work, as the low-culture urinal is presented as a bronze masterwork. The title points to the visual similarity of the upturned urinal with Buddhist reliquary sculptures, offering many pathways for reconsidering the original work.

Fountain (Buddha) is one of several works in the ICA/Boston collection that critique accepted notions of artistic creativity, the authenticity and commodification of the art object, and the nature of the art-historical canon.

2015.18

An important female artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of what was later dubbed the Pictures Generation, Sherrie Levine is known for her appropriation of canonical work by male artists. In the words of Douglas Crimp, Levine’s layered works draw from “pictures whose status is that of cultural myth,” as the artist “steals them away from their usual place in our culture and subverts their mythology.”

In 1983, Levine began to re-create printed reproductions of works by male modernists, raising questions of originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium. Chair Seat: 7 binds together the flatness of modernist painting, such as Frank Stella’s “stripe paintings,” with a readymade material—here a store-bought chair seat—creating an awkward combination of high and low culture, the abstract and the everyday. While modernist painting aspired to visual flatness and disdained decoration, Levine undermines both principles by overlaying abstract painting on a three-dimensional surface intended for bodily use.

Chair Seat: 7 joins other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection to represent the breadth of this influential artist’s oeuvre in terms of media and technique. This piece also complements works by other female artists of the so-called Pictures Generation, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman.

2015.17

Sherrie Levine is known for her strategy of naked appropriation. Since 1983, she has used photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture to reproduce in full the work of canonical male modernists. A member of the so-called Pictures Generation, Levine employs what Douglas Crimp called “processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging” in layered works emblematic of a critical style of postmodernism.

In After Henri Matisse, one of many similar works made from the eponymous artist’s work, Levine constructs her re-creation with ink and graphite. Here, the contours of a woman’s face, abstracted by Matisse, are copied exactly by Levine, the repetition bringing the work into a new context to illustrate how art accumulates meanings and interpretations over time.

Though Levine is best known for her photographs and multimedia pieces, this work on paper adds a dimension to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of her oeuvre. Taken together with works in the collection by Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, Levine’s works are representative of a late 20th-century paradigm in artistic production that has both historical and contemporary relevance.

2015.20

Over the past two decades, Ellen Gallagher has built a body of work that confronts the history of black representation. Gallagher rose to prominence as a painter of minimal paintings that toe the line between figuration and abstraction, works with which she sought to subtly undermine the perceived narrative limits of abstraction. Since the late 1990s, she has pivoted toward a more appropriative methodology, using historical vernacular imagery to explore how a history of representation manifests itself in the lived condition of blackness in America.

DeLuxe is a piercing visual investigation of the multivalent and complex role that hair, as both object and stand-in for the body, occupies in black culture. In this suite of sixty prints, Gallagher employs a panoply of mediums, techniques, and processes to alter magazine prints, incorporating collaged elements from popular black culture magazines such as Ebony and Black Digest dating from the 1930s to the 1970s. The images are sourced primarily from advertisements promoting cosmetic “improvements,” such as wigs, skin-whitening creams, hair straighteners, and hair pomades, that support the agenda of modifying black bodies to conform to white archetypes of beauty. Gallagher alters the form and content of these images through a laborious process that involves drawing and redrawing, cutting and layering, and the addition of exaggerated features, text, and non-art materials such as modeling clay, glitter, toy eyeballs, and coconut oil. These manipulations reveal the elusiveness and misguided purposes of the advertisements.

One of the most ambitious works by this important artist, DeLuxe is a central piece in the ICA/Boston’s collection of works on paper and is in dialogue with collage-based works by artists such as Arturo Herrera, Gilbert and George, and Wangechi Mutu. Moreover, it accompanies others by such artists as Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, and Lorna Simpson in the ICA’s ever-growing collection of works that directly acknowledge and investigate the history of race in America.

2015.24.1–60

Born in 1900, Alice Neel reacted against the traditional expectations of gender in her turn-of-the-century upbringing. She is perhaps best known for her bold, unsentimental, yet empathetic portraits of the people in her social circle during a period of diminishing interest in figurative painting––the late 1960s and early ’70s. Employing humor and insight to create portraits that are both tender and unromanticizing, Neel carved out a space for feminist engagement with a genre whose history is often defined by the male gaze.

Between 1964 and 1978, Neel painted a series of seven pregnant nudes, a subject previously avoided in Western art. When asked about the subject, Neel responded: “People out of false modesty, or being sissies, never showed it, but it’s a basic fact of life… . Something the primitives did, but modern painters have shied away from because women were always done as sex objects. A pregnant woman has a claim staked out; she is not for sale.” Margaret Evans Pregnant depicts the wife of artist John Evans sitting uncomfortably on a small stool. Her figure, altered by pregnancy, is further distorted in the mirror behind her. Neel’s portrayal of Evans captures the transformative experience and physical demands of childbearing. It reorients the eroticism of the female nude, asserting the female body as a site of multiple, even conflicting, accounts of sexual identity.

This portrait buoys the ICA/Boston’s holdings by female painters engaged in expressive figuration, including Marlene Dumas, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Lisa Yuskavage. Together with Neel’s Vera Beckerhoff, 1972, and other works of the period by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Ree Morton, Faith Ringgold, and Cindy Sherman, Margaret Evans Pregnant adds to a robust account of art history’s intersections with second-wave feminism.

2015.22

Though a product of the early twentieth century, Alice Neel defined herself in opposition to the traditional expectations of her gender at that time. The honest and intimate representations of women she produced throughout her career carved out a space for feminist engagement with a genre that is often defined by the male gaze. In her works, she openly displays her empathy for her subjects, often people in her social circle, creating portraits that are tender, humorous, and frank.

Vera Beckerhoff belongs to a series of portraits that document the lively community of artists and activists with whom Neel consorted during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Beckerhoff, an artist who settled in Vermont, possesses a self-assured pose, deadpan facial expression, and direct gaze, all of which suggest confidence and a comfortable relationship with the portraitist. Beckerhoff’s manner of dress and self-presentation epitomize the bold unconventionality that emerged during the period.

Vera Beckerhoff contributes to the ICA/Boston’s holdings of works by female painters who employ expressive figuration, such as Marlene Dumas, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Lisa Yuskavage. In addition, this work forms part of the ICA’s collection of work by female artists responding to second-wave feminism, such as Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Ree Morton, Faith Wilding, and Cindy Sherman.

2015.21

Cady Noland’s work engages the iconography of what could be described as the American underbelly. She draws inspiration from mass-media images, particularly advertisements, pairing them with a sculptural practice that repurposes the detritus of a uniquely American commercial landscape. Noland’s stark and provocative body of work questions America’s self-image as a place of unity, justice, and democratic freedom. Her work is often compared with that of artists such as Robert Gober, David Hammonds, Mike Kelley, and Richard Prince, all of whom are interested in the American psyche and its fascination with celebrity, violence, and wealth.

In Untitled, Noland silkscreens on an aluminum panel three dramatically contrasting images of femininity appropriated from the mass media. In the upper right is a group of young women adorned with flowers; at the lower left, a doubled and mirrored image of a shotgun-wielding couple walking astride; and at the lower right, the infamous newspaper heiress-turned-guerilla Patty Hearst posed, rifle in hand, in front of the seven-headed-cobra symbol of her “captors,” the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). The three images Noland juxtaposes offer three distinct constructions of identity formulated in relation to circulated images of idealized feminine subjectivity: the chastity and virtue of the young girls, the conservative domesticity of the couple, and the fallen antihero embodied by Patti Hearst’s transformation from debutante to revolutionary. The polished aluminum onto which the images have been silkscreened reflects the viewers’ presence, transposing their own image into this triumvirate of female archetypes.

Noland’s provocative exploration of the more nefarious aspects of American culture, and more specifically her unique approach to mass-media images and repurposing of vernacular objects, paved the way for a generation of artists who also use these methods in their pointed critique.

2015.23