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Philip Taaffe (Born 1955 in Elizabeth, NJ) has forged an unorthodox approach to painting, employing linocuts, paint, and canvas to produce exotic and compelling images that bring to mind Matisse’s cutouts or Synthetic Cubist collage. Emerging during the 1980s alongside such painters as Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Lari Pittman, Taaffe was initially positioned in line with the Pattern and Decoration artists of the late 1970s. The “abstract assemblage” work of these artists ran counter to painters such as Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente, who returned to the figure in their large-scale paintings. In his paintings from the 1980s, Taaffe appropriates motifs and gestures from abstract painting: one discovers gestures quoted from Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Bridget Riley.

Untitled III makes a particular nod to Riley’s use of black-and-white lines to create optical effects. Composed of striped, linoprinted paper, the work is a collage. Taaffe has cut or torn sheets of paper and then joined them to seamlessly craft unbroken lines. Created with no actual paint, Untitled III is an early work by Taaffe and demonstrates his experimentation with appropriated material—in this case, printed paper—to create singular works in dialogue with painting. The work’s surface creates undulations that generate striking visual effects.

Since 1999, Swoon (born Caledonia Curry, 1977 in New London, CT) has made cut-paper figures that she applies, often illicitly, to the exterior walls of industrial buildings. In recent years, she has started to make work for museums and galleries, in part to help support her interventions in public space.

Coney Island Installation sets three figures against a carnivalesque scene at Coney Island in New York. Constructed of more than fifty precisely cut leaves of Mylar and newsprint, the work presents semitransparent strata that blur the boundaries between figure and ground, inside and outside. Usually impermanent, these materials register a kind of pathos, suggesting the inevitable passing of all things and beings. In 2011, Swoon created a major installation for the ICA/Boston on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall and in the building’s elevator shaft, employing the same cut-paper technique.

Cindy Sherman (Born 1954 in Glen Ridge, NJ) is known for fusing performance and photography in 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 photographs of herself in highly staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, and wigs. She began the series Untitled Film Stills in 1977 shortly after moving to New York City, and continued the series until 1980 when, as she says, she “ran out of clichés.” Totaling seventy black-and-white photographs, this series is Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature photographic practice: playing the roles of both actor and director, changing her persona with simple props and costumes.

The first six prints in the series were shot in Sherman’s New York apartment and reveal snippets of the domestic life of an imagined blonde movie star. Untitled Film Still #3 shows a woman wearing an apron standing over the kitchen sink, surrounded by ordinary housewares: a bottle of dish soap and drying rack, a spice jar on a shelf, and, in the foreground, an open container of salt and the handle of a stovetop pot. Captured while pausing during a domestic activity, the woman stares over her shoulder, her right hand wrapped around her stomach. Set in the banal environment of a cramped apartment kitchen, the scene assumes a tension as the figure’s gaze suggests an unseen force in an unknown narrative. The title’s reference to the movie industry lends a voyeuristic quality to this glimpse into the private life of a female character who has yet to discover herself.

Alongside an established profile in the world of fashion and magazine photography, Collier Schorr (Born 1963 in New York) 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.

Interested in problems of identity—particularly sexuality and gender—Collier Schorr (Born 1963 in New York) 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.

Collier Schorr (Born 1963 in New York) 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.

Thomas Ruff (Born 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany), 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.

Thomas Ruff (Born 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) 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.

For painter Matthew Ritchie (Born 1964 in London), “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.

In her moving-image work, Pipilotti Rist (Born 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland) 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.