R. H. Quaytman (Born 1961 in Boston) 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

Damián Ortega (Born 1967 in Mexico City) 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.

Julian Opie (Born 1958 in London) 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.

One of the defining artists of her generation, Catherine Opie (Born 1961 in Sandusky, OH) is known for her photographic portraits and landscapes. She frequently combines the two genres by training her camera on people within their environments—from Boy Scouts at their campgrounds to ice fishermen on frozen lakes and surfers waiting for the next wave. Drawing on the tradition of American landscape painting and of social documentary photography by artists like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Opie gives us a view of democracy in action. Her photographs explore the intimate relations between community and politics, citizens and the landscape, offering a dynamic, open, and complex portrait of the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Untitled #1 (Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) documents a six-day international festival that occurs every August outside Hart, Michigan. Drawing nearly 10,000 visitors annually, the event is built, staffed, and run entirely by women for women (referred to as “womyn” to avoid overtones of patriarchy) of all age groups, ethnic backgrounds, and abilities. The festival was founded in 1976 by Mary Kindig, Kristie Vogel, and Lisa Vogel in response to the misogyny they experienced working at festivals and music venues run by men. Through a sea of tents, bodies, and trees, Opie presents a collective identity that has come to represent an idyllic version of female solidarity, diversity, and community.

Following the 2011 exhibition at the ICA/Boston Catherine Opie: Empty and Full, the artist donated Untitled #1 (Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival) to the museum. The addition of this work augments the ICA’s focus on work by women artists and its strong holdings of photography by such leading artists as Rineke Dijkstra, Lorna Simpson, and Sara VanDerBeek.

Ray Navarro (Born 1964 in Simi Valley, CA; died 1990 in New York) and Zoe Leonard (Born 1961 in Liberty, NY) emerged as artists in New York in the 1990s. Working primarily in photography, both artists have harnessed the conceptual aspects of the medium.

Navarro conceived Equipped after losing his vision due to AIDS-related medical complications, and he reached out to Leonard to help him produce it. Leonard functioned as his “eyes” in executing the work, recalling that “it was a very moving and intimate process, working together with him.” Each photograph in this triptych portrays a mobility device used by people with a disability, and is accompanied by a sexual euphemism or phrase etched on an office-style desk plaque. The juxtapositions of images and words, such as an image of a wheelchair flipped over accompanied by the phrase “HOT BUTT,” rearticulate the sexualized body by signaling the physical degradation caused by a disease that is often perceived as a consequence of sexual behavior. The frames are painted a warm pink to evoke the generic Caucasian flesh colors of most prosthetic devices, underscoring the link between the disabled body and assistive mechanisms.

Building on the ICA/Boston’s strength in photography, Equipped helps the museum tell the history of the AIDS crisis and its impact on art production and artistic communities, a key theme in the 2012 ICA group exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, in which this work appeared.

Boris Mikhailov has been called “the former Soviet Union’s most influential living photographer,” yet it has only been in the past decade—since the fall of the USSR—that his work has been widely exhibited in either the East or the West. Mikhailov’s exhibition at the ICA/Boston in 2004 was the artist’s first retrospective in the United States. His career has run parallel to the height, decline, and fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Over the past forty years, he has produced an exceptional body of work that bears witness to these tumultuous times.

Mikhailov’s Case History series documents the homeless community that has appeared since the end of Communism in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. In the late 1990s, he began photographing the so-called bomzhes, approaching them with his wife, Vita, and asking if he could take their photograph. The subjects, with tattered clothing and ailing bodies, bluntly reflect the economic deterioration of the post-Soviet era. Here, an older woman who appears in several photographs from the series crouches in a somewhat awkward pose in front of a tree. She looks cold in this wintry scene; her clothes are layered and threadbare, her gloveless hands clasped. In printing the image at almost life-size, Mikhailov confronts the viewer with his subject’s grim reality. Even so, her piercing blue eyes look straight ahead with a steady, sure gaze, never fully revealing what must be her daily struggles. Mikhailov’s Case History photographs expose a reality that most do not see or would rather ignore; they archive a community and a reality that would otherwise be erased, like so much of the suffering during the Soviet era.

Untitled is one of two works from this series in the ICA/Boston’s collection, and it joins the museum’s strong holdings of contemporary photography by such figures as Rineke Dijkstra and Nan Goldin.

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Jason Middlebrook works in sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation to image the clash between nature and the built environment. In California, where the artist was raised, this is called the suburban/wildlife interface: a trouble zone where wildfires regularly decimate neighborhoods and where you might see a coyote trotting down the street. In these edge scenarios, humankind encroaches on nature. Middlebrook’s drawings depict weedy, trash-strewn hillsides teeming with avian life. Roughhewn wooden planks, looking like construction castoffs, are embellished with paint and varnish and lean against the wall like surfboards or minimalist sculptures.

In Finding Square, Middlebrook moves away from quasi-narrative depictions of decaying landscapes and toward abstract modes. A roughly hewn empty wooden frame speaks more to roadside handicrafts (chainsaw animal sculptures) than to fine art accoutrements. The molding is painted with concentric, deep umber-red geometric borders of diminishing width that suggest pictorial recession. These nested borders are evocative of Frank Stella’s groundbreaking early painting, Sol LeWitt’s drawn and painted lines, and Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series. The frame is, therefore, a ground for painting; with timber substituting for stretched canvas, the painting is also object. The found object is readymade by nature—or, rather, by our manipulation of it. The interior space remains empty, making the wall on which it hangs the “picture” on display. Other works in this series are planks of similarly roughhewn wood, painted to highlight the wood grain or time-demarcating rings.

The addition of Finding Square to the ICA/Boston’s collection augments the strong holdings in works that elegantly merge the conceptual with the highly crafted, such as those by Taylor Davis, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and many others.

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A fiercely experimental artist, a catalyst in her native Glasgow art community, and a deeply perceptive writer on the work of her peers, Lucy McKenzie is a foremost emerging artist. Like Andy Warhol or Martin Kippenberger, McKenzie has a profoundly self-conscious sensibility, one that is rigorously engaged with her world on all fronts. Trained in the commercial techniques of decorative painting, she slyly recalibrates the legacies, both aesthetic and social, of abstract painting, investigating technique and proposing new attendant meanings.

Often layering her work with cultural signification, double appearances, and euphemism, McKenzie is noted for pastiching historical design styles to extract their latent meanings—from the woodsy proto-modernism of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to socialist realist posters to the graffiti and New Wave fonts of the 1980s. Untitled is a humorous and layered exploration of the art-historical tensions between abstraction and figuration, between so-called “high” art and popular culture. At first glance, the work looks like an abstract painting with the shadows of two women cast on its surface, as if they were contemplating it in a museum (or, since the left-hand figure is McKenzie herself, smoking a cigarette, perhaps her studio?). The painting recalls the style of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, an allusion McKenzie spoofs by rendering the blocks in faux marble—a decorative device used to add “class” to the ugly or banal. The geometric image is, in fact, a stylized figurative representation. Tilt your head to the side, and you can make out a pair of amorous robots, an image McKenzie took from a condom vending machine advertisement for “Mates,” a leading brand of prophylactics in the United Kingdom.

In 2004, the ICA/Boston presented McKenzie’s first one-person museum exhibition in the United States. Untitled thus marks the museum’s early commitment to this artist and adds a significant painting to the collection.

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2016.35

Josiah McElheny’s installations of handmade glass objects in precisely designed vitrines, pedestals, or wall units with explanatory texts, documentation, or titles entice us to reflect on the origins of this traditional craft, the history of aesthetics it embodies, and the ideologies these aesthetics project. The product of an ancient technology that defies scientific classification as liquid or solid, glass is an amorphous medium ideally suited to McElheny’s presentation of classic stylistic forms as suspensions of unsettled ideals. Through them, seemingly absolute notions such as perfection, infinity, self-reflection, and utopia are recast as malleable artifacts subject to the forces of history and culture, the advances of art and science, and the contemporary context of their display.

In Czech Modernism Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely, a line of eight polished decanters is viewed through a sheet of one-way glass that reflects the enfilade in what appears to be endless recession into a horizon-less darkness beyond the limits of our vision. A close look at the surface of each object reveals its own reflection, which itself contains another, like a Russian nesting doll. This vacuum of containers-within-containers completely bereft of our own reflection is a vision of modernism devoid of the human element. The seamless landscape of shining forms entrances our senses but denies our presence, hinting at the dangers of infinite absolutes.

Striking for its craftsmanship and conceptual rigor, this perceptually stimulating piece provides a counterpoint to other sculptural works in the ICA/Boston’s permanent collection, such as Taylor Davis’s finely fabricated Untitled, 2001, and Mona Hatoum’s handworked Pom Pom City, 2002.

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