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Alongside an established profile in the world of fashion and magazine photography, Collier Schorr also has been working in portrait photography since the late 1980s, particularly of adolescents. She has documented portraits of teenagers across the United States, mostly of white youth, as well as social and cultural figures, performers, wrestlers, and soldiers. Her work addresses the desires and conflicts that attend an adolescent’s dawning sexuality and the construction of gender. The subjects in her photographs typically display the longing, intimacy, and alienation that accompany the formation of identity, and her titles frequently point to these issues of gender fluidity. In all her portraits, Schorr offers minimal settings and staging, focusing instead on her sitter with sharp contrasts, vivid colors and shadows, and personal encounters through the camera.

2012.17

Interested in problems of identity—particularly sexuality and gender—Collier Schorr explores the construction of masculinity in photographs of wrestlers, young soldiers, and solitary adolescent figures. Her subjects are often ambiguous in gender, an early instance of the blurring of boundaries that has become topical today. Her formal approach shows the influence of German photographers Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff.

Schorr’s portraits often relay teenagers’ coming-of-age stories, across genders and nationalities, in images that bear traces of desire and longing, fantasy and fiction. Lovely to Feel and to Touch depicts a shirtless boy leaning against a tree, posing with confidence and ease. Schorr has said of her work: “I wanted to examine bodies as forms outside of popular cultural motifs, almost nude, constantly moving in both structured and unconscious ways.”

Joining a number of portraits by Schorr in the ICA/Boston collection, this acquisition further strengthens the representation of this important contemporary photographer. It joins a strong collection of works by seminal contemporary photographers such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, and Catherine Opie.

2012.16

Collier Schorr has been making candid portraits since the late 1980s. Best known for photographs of adolescent men and women, she has recorded teenagers across Germany and the United States, in addition to making photographic series of wrestlers, young soldiers, and solitary figures. Schorr’s work addresses the desires and conflicts that attend an adolescent’s dawning sexuality, especially the social construction of gender. Her often androgynous subjects display the longing, intimacy, and alienation that accompany the formation of identity, and her titles frequently point to these issues. Schorr’s refusal of the binary logic of girl/boy extends to other social and historical oppositions, such as German nationalism and Jewish identity.

South of No North is an intimate portrait of two adolescent girls embracing in a field. One has shoulder-length hair and wears red lipstick and a thin white bra, and the other has close-cropped hair, more pronounced features, and appears to be wearing a binding bra. The intimacy of the young same-sex couple, the masculinity of the figure on the right, and the bucolic setting combine to produce a portrait of budding sexuality that interrogates conventional representations of gender and love.

The ICA/Boston holds a number of portraits by Collier Schorr in its collection, all of which explore the rich terrain of gender and sexuality. Schorr is an important contemporary photographer, whose work adds to the ICA collection’s strength in work by women.

2012.15

Thomas Ruff, along with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, is one of the contemporary artists who have most significantly transformed the medium of photography. Meeting while students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the three emerged in the late 1980s as artists who would influence a rising generation of photographers. Like Gursky and Struth, Ruff is known for exceedingly large-scale prints of digitally manipulated but seemingly realistic images.

This series of reproduced newspaper photographs confounds the notion that the print source provides fundamental information about our world. The images included in this portfolio are incongruous, ranging from the spectacular to the banal: a space shuttle launch, two suited men sitting on a park bench engaged in conversation, a bird perched on a ledge, a lively dance scene. Some are portraits, including an internationally recognizable figure such as Chairman Mao or an anonymous girl. In a 1991 article on Ruff’s well-known Portraits series and the Zeitungsphotos, Norman Bryson and Trevor Fairbrother noted that the newspaper images place “the private and the public radically out of phase,” arguing that the voyeuristic nature of these images taps into the sense of anxiety over the prevalence of surveillance in our times.

Alongside works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov, and Collier Schorr, Zeitungsphotos fleshes out an increasingly strong collection of works by important contemporary photographers held by the ICA/Boston.

2012.13

Thomas Ruff is one of a trio of artists who have transformed the medium of photography in contemporary art. He and fellow Kunstakademie Düsseldorf students Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth emerged in Germany in the late 1980s and since then have influenced a rising generation of photographers. The three are known for exceedingly large-scale pictures and impossible (though realistic) images benefiting from digital enhancement. Their work in turn emerges from the Neue Sachlichkeit, or new objectivity, a movement of the 1920s and ’30s in Germany. Photographers associated with the movement, such as August Sander and Albert Renger-Patsch, presented reality as only a camera can––that is, in a deceptively straightforward and objective way.

In the 1980s, Thomas Ruff created a series of portraits of classmates and friends from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a renowned art school led at the time by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Ruff’s portraits present each figure against a plain white background, in the manner of identification photography. While portraits are often staged to reveal aspects of a subject’s personal history, Ruff provides little beyond the person’s name as the title. This photograph is of Martin Vossing, a man we know little about. Ruff’s inexpressive approach to portraiture is in line with that of the Bechers’ work on such architectural features as water tanks.

Alongside portrait works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov, and Collier Schorr, Ruff’s Martin Vossing forms part of a strong collection of works by important contemporary photographers.

2012.14

For painter Matthew Ritchie, “the job of artists is to explore the perimeter of being,” to ask through a work of art, “How do you escape the pattern that’s imposed on you by the physical order of the universe? How do you make the imaginative leap?” His large-scale painting incorporates studies of the artistic gesture and elements of chance in freehand drawing, as well as investigations of postapocalyptic imagery and illustrations of organic matter or information pathways. The Salt Pit is an abstract composition that uses layered mark-making to depict a ceaseless cycle of activity and revelation, as though the very ground of the canvas is undone and remade with each attempt to trace its networked lines. The title refers to the code name of a classified, CIA black site prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, alluding to undertones of violence, interrogation, and force. Ritchie’s energetic brushwork flows across the painting’s surface to mimic the upheaval and frailty inherent in the effort to mine, rationalize, or understand what appears beyond our perception.

2013.02

In her moving-image work, Pipilotti Rist creates visually charged environments characterized by lush color and distorted, fragmented imagery. Building narrative through layers of video and sound, Rist blurs the boundaries between visual art and popular culture. Everyday images become strange and unfamiliar. According to Rist, “Art’s task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities and destroy clichés and prejudices.”

Remake of the Weekend (Stills) is essentially an excerpt from a 1998 video installation of the same name. The work references a 1967 film by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend, which examines the collapse of French bourgeois society through the story of a weekend trip that turns into a nightmare of revolution, cannibalism, and murder. The stills capture Rist’s expansive and seductive use of color and perspective. While one image is an abstracted surface of unrecognizable bright red, pink, and purple forms, another shows a naked male running down the street in the rain.

Rist’s work exemplifies the ways in which video as a medium has been manipulated to the point of abstraction. The addition of Remake of the Weekend (Stills) to the ICA/Boston collection has expanded the museum’s strong holdings in photography. Alongside work in the collection by Paul Chan, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, and Cindy Sherman, Rist’s images help illustrate the vitality of contemporary photography and video today.

2012.12

R. H. Quaytman grew up in a family of artists. Although she came of age in an era when painting was considered suspect, generally eclipsed by video, performance, and minimalist sculpture, Quaytman’s pursuit of the medium has been passionate and unswerving since the late 1980s and early ’90s. As a young artist, she began a reconsideration of painterly perspective and the use of photography in painting. She sees three important organizational elements in her paintings: their physical aspect, their subject matter, and their relationship with viewers passing in front of and by them.

Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 [white diamond dust arrow pattern] is a signature work by Quaytman. It has a strong physical presence, intensified by the diamond dust that covers its surface to create a seductive, sparkling galaxy, while frustrating attempts by the eye or mind to formulate a single vision or interpretation of the work as a whole. This is characteristic of Quaytman’s paintings, whether featuring optical illusions, fluorescent color, or light sources captured by photography—light sources that often, paradoxically, create blind spots. The subject matter, in this case the image of an arrow, is closely tied to her interest in the viewer’s relation to the work as well as to the context in which the work is encountered. Quaytman frequently uses the arrow for its strong visual draw, both attracting the viewer’s attention and directing it beyond the painting. Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 [white diamond dust arrow pattern] also has a special significance in relation to the ICA/Boston, as the arrow in this painting references an archival image Quaytman came across at the museum: the photograph documents a 1965 ICA exhibition that included an op art painting of an arrow, attributed in the archive to an artist identified as “T. Priest.”

In 2009, the ICA hosted Quaytman’s first solo museum exhibition; the acquisition of Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 [white diamond dust arrow pattern] thus marks the museum’s early interest in this important contemporary artist. In her mobilization of significant visual attention through minimal means, Quaytman enters into dialogue with Taylor Davis and Tara Donovan, both represented in the collection.

800.10.2

Damián Ortega is one of the most influential artists to emerge from the circle of contemporary artists working alongside Gabriel Orozco in Mexico City in the 1990s. His art exposes the underlying mechanisms and systems that make up familiar objects in the manmade and natural worlds. Ortega often disassembles and rearranges everyday objects in order to consider their elements, setting them out for scrutiny like a scientific diagram of the atoms in a molecule. His untraditional materials—tortillas, pennies, and used furniture—subvert traditional notions of sculpture.

Olympus references other works in Ortega’s oeuvre, such as the hanging installations of a disassembled Volkswagen Beetle (Cosmic Thing, 2003) and a grouping of hand tools (Controller of the Universe, 2007). In these installations, Ortega deconstructs a useful, familiar object—a common car and a toolkit—reinterpreting the way one can understand its parts and thus revealing a new relationship to the whole. In Olympus, Ortega takes apart a 35mm Olympus camera and suspends its component parts, secured within twenty-six clear plastic sheets, so that they appear to float in a row inside two cases. Ortega is fascinated by the study of vision and optics, and the relationships between seeing and technology. In Olympus, he deconstructs the mechanics of photography, stretching the camera’s zoom lens to absurd lengths as he tests the camera’s capacity for capturing an image from afar.

Olympus enhances the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of sculpture by important international artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker.

2010.1

Julian Opie explores time-honored artistic subject matter, such as landscape, the figure, and portraiture, and renders these in contemporary media, including digitally enhanced drawing, photography, and animation, to impart an updated feel to these traditional subjects. In addition to exhibitions in galleries and museums, he has created dozens of projects for public and commercial settings, including airports, hospitals, shopping centers, and public parks. Opie has also collaborated with unusual partners for some projects, including the rock bands Blur and U2 and the Formula One race-car team.

Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt is from a body of Julian Opie’s work that bears a close relationship to two works commissioned and exhibited through the ICA/Boston’s Vita Brevis program, a series of temporary outdoor art projects launched in 1998. In October 2005, the ICA unveiled two walking portraits by Opie on the Northern Avenue Bridge—Julian Walking and Suzanne Walking—which served as unofficial “ambassadors” for the new ICA building, located a short distance away. Suzanne Walking in Leather Skirt depicts a continuous computer animation of a stylized figure walking in an endless looped cycle. The highly simplified figure possesses a lyrical and lifelike movement, forming a jarring combination of the artificial and the natural.

The addition of this work introduces a new artist into the ICA’s collection and a new genre of moving-image work, one that complements Paul Chan’s animation work 1st Light while building on the museum’s strength in portraiture.

2006.15