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In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series––rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960–Present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.28

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

The figurative works of Chantal Joffe reveal the artist’s keen observation of everyday life and her active engagement with the medium of painting. Often large in scale and boldly colored, her paintings depict female figures in a wide range of poses and couplings. Joffe culls her subjects from photographs and fashion magazines, isolating and intensifying aspects of the images—from the textures of the clothing and details of the accessories to the poses of the models—through the process of painting. Constructed with blocks of brilliant color in thick, wet paint and quick strokes, her paintings appear both carefully composed and rapidly executed, exuding the immediacy of daily life.

Self-Portrait with Esme combines two staples in Joffe’s production: the self-portrait and the subject of mother and child. In this painting, a mother leans over and tightly embraces a small child. The two bodies—dressed identically in simple white underwear and painted in the same pink-tinged cream—appear to become one, an effect deepened by the strong outline around the figures posed against an indistinct background. The focus is on the intimacy of this quotidian scene, an intimacy conveyed not only through the subject matter but also through the proximity and visual unity of the two bodies in space.

Self-Portrait with Esme contributes to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of portraits of women by women, including important examples by Marlene Dumas, Alice Neel, Dana Schutz, and Lisa Yuskavage, and extends an inquiry into the subjectivity of identity by artists such as LaToya Ruby Frazier and Cindy Sherman. Joffe’s major painting also corresponds with the ICA’s collection of Nan Goldin photographs, which Joffe has frequently cited as a major inspiration for her work.

2015.08

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

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

Sam Falls’s artistic production is distinguished by the exploratory combination of painting, photography, and sculpture with natural phenomena––from the pooling of rain to the bleaching of the sun. Connected to historical movements such as land art, minimalism, and process art, Falls’s practice hinges on duration and perception as they are expressed and embodied in nature and art.

Untitled (Topanga, CA, Umbrella 17) displays the fabric of an umbrella removed from its support and pinned to the wall. The colorful pie-shaped sections form a simple hexagon, bringing to mind minimalist painting, the sculptural readymade, and a pop sensibility. To make this work, Falls first cut off umbrella panels and exposed one group of them to the sun for a prolonged period. He then interspersed these with the remainder of the panels, which had been protected from the sun. Brilliant red and deep blue panels thus sit next to their pale and faded counterparts, generating a subtle modulation of color. Like much of Falls’s hybrid production, Untitled (Topanga, CA, Umbrella 17) possesses a marked casualness and accessibility while touching on rich and deep topics such as the art object’s relationship to time and change, viewer perception, and artistic intentionality.

This work joins sculptures in the ICA/Boston collection by artists such as Rachel Harrison, Charles LeDray, and Sherrie Levine who are also engaged with the history of the readymade and assemblage. Untitled (Topanga, CA, Umbrella 17) brings this tradition to an exploration of the perceptual and constructive processes of nature and the environment.

2015.07

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