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Rineke Dijkstra’s work offers a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. Often photographing in an objective documentary style, Dijkstra captures her subjects in states of transition: boys becoming soldiers, new mothers, or girls growing up. As the artist stated, “I’m interested in young people because they’re not fully developed. You can only guess which direction they will go. They’re open, an open book, really. And I think that interested me because it is also sort of an abstraction. You can look at [young people] and really project your own feelings and thoughts.” A photograph, by its nature, presents a past moment, and Dijkstra’s portraits lie at the threshold of activity, either after or before an event transpires. The setting is typically devoid of extraneous details, highlighting only the evocative nature of a person’s facial and bodily expression.

The subject here, Almerisa, was six when Dijkstra first photographed her in 1994 at a refugee asylum in Leiden, Netherlands. The ongoing portfolio that emerged records Almerisa’s transformation from a young girl from the former Yugoslavia to a woman, now a mother, from Western Europe. Dijkstra’s compositions maintain a spare and consistent format (frontal symmetrrical, seated pose, blank background), accentuating the changes, both physiological and cultural, in Almerisa’s appearance over time. A time-lapse portrait of identity in formation, the photographs also record a broader social context of war-wrought displacement and hybrid belonging. Using a 4 x 5 view camera and an unusually long exposure time, the artist’s technique allows for a quality of detail not often seen in the digital age. Almerisa locks her eyes with the camera lens, as though studying the portraitist and by extension the viewer, summoning a reciprocal gaze.

The ICA/Boston presented the first solo museum exhibition of Dijkstra’s work and has built a strong collection of her photographs. These eleven prints from the Almerisa series join other photographic portraits by such artists as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, and Catherine Opie.

2012.2

Andy Warhol began his career as an illustrator for advertisements and magazines, and by the 1960s had become one of the most prominent figures in pop art. Warhol experimented with a wide range of media—from filmmaking and video to painting, printmaking, and performance, often carried out in his vaunted Factory. Perhaps more than any other medium, he is known for his experimentation with screenprinting, a technique that, like the artist himself, challenged the boundaries between popular culture and fine art.

Warhol’s Electric Chair prints depict an unoccupied electric chair in an empty room. The image was appropriated from a press photograph from January 13, 1953, of the execution room at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State. The room and chair, devoid of human presence and utterly still, convey a sense of death and absence. Warhol had already explored these themes in his Death and Disaster series of paintings and prints, which he began in the 1960s, screenprinting reproductions of car crashes, suicides, and other tragedies illustrated in newspapers. Unlike the subdued colors of silver, gray, and black he often used in these earlier images, the ten Electric Chair prints are rendered in the bright colors of pop: orange, purple, pink, red, and blue. The combination of jubilant colors and difficult subject matter registers Warhol’s notorious deadpan persona, which enabled him to avoid being pinned down.

These prints join another work by this canonical pop artist in the ICA/Boston collection—a photobook of Polaroids the artist took on Long Island (Red Book Prefix F158, 1972)—enabling the museum to better showcase Warhol’s pioneering appropriations.

2015.32.1–10

The work of John Houck explores the possibility of combining multiple perspectives in a single photographic image. Though they appear to be digitally altered, Houck’s photographs develop from a meticulous analog studio-based process of layering successive images to create powerful visual assemblages. Inspired by his training as an architect, Houck constructs small 3-D models or still-life arrangements that he then photographs: “A depiction of space, rather than an actual space,” as the artist has said. Houck frequently turns to objects and materials in his immediate surroundings. In the 2013 series A History of Graph Paper, he created images of items from his childhood that his parents had returned to him. He photographed different iterations of the artifacts by layering, adding, and subtracting materials to create compositions that evoke the complexity of memory in relation to the objects we collect.

Houck’s Petals and Interleaves depicts three books—two open and one closed—staged on a white and gray paper. Houck painted four cubic volumes on the books, which disrupt the perceived space of the photograph. The painted elements point emphatically to the flatness of the picture plane, with the volumes painted on the books appearing as holes, suggesting a playful sense of depth. This work was included in the solo exhibition Playing and Reality—its title taken from a book by British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Houck’s introduction of painted elements, sometimes as a layered part of the composition, other times directly on the surfaces of his prints, embodies a sense of playfulness modeled on Winnicott’s theories.

This photograph adds further depth to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of studio-based photography made by contemporary artists such as Anne Collier, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Leslie Hewitt, and Sara VanDerBeek.

800.16.13

Jenny Holzer’s text-based works are rooted in conceptual art, semiotics, and feminism. Holzer emerged in the 1980s by harnessing the power of language in the public realm to interrogate such issues as violence, sex, and money. Rooted in conceptual art and feminism, Holzer’s artworks incorporate a wide range of statements, ideas, observations, and confessions, which she disseminates through media such as paintings, posters, benches, and electronic billboards. The identity of the speaker and the source and meaning of her works are rarely certain.

Enclosure (Deep Red) is one work in a series of paintings Holzer created for her Archive project, which drew on declassified documents obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act. In detached and formal language, the document screen-printed on Enclosure outlines allegations against soldiers for incidents occurring during the Iraq War. Though we glean some of the gruesome details of maltreatment of prisoners of war—officers face multiple charges of “Cruelty and Maltreatment” and “Failure to Obey Order or Regulation”—all names and personal information are fully redacted and the outcomes withheld. By juxtaposing abstract painting with this authoritative and inaccessible document, Enclosure (Deep Red) creates a complex relationship between painting and politics.

This work joins a sculptural work by Holzer in the ICA/Boston’s collection and helps to convey the breadth of her prolific practice. It adds to the museum’s collection of painting and is in strong conversation with explicitly political works by artists such as Cady Noland and Kara Walker.

2016.18

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, and filmmaker, Nancy Graves gained notoriety in the late 1960s for her realistic sculptures of camels. Throughout her career she explored the boundaries of art, especially its relationship to science, anthropology, and natural history. Her life-sized, realistic sculptures of camels made to look like taxidermy stood in stark contrast to minimalism and pop art in the late 1960s. After a period of working predominantly in painting and film, Graves returned to sculpture in the 1970s, though with diminished investment in verisimilitude and more integration of the playful lyricism of her paintings. In 1969, at the age of twenty-nine, Graves became the youngest person, and only the fifth woman, to be given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Graves’s Trace, a large-scale bronze and polychromed patina steel sculpture, is a paradigmatic example of this practice. The sculpture appears like a dynamic, wind-blown tree, its forked trunk of bright green rises from a red and brown foundation, with an undulating curve up toward the treetop. The canopy itself is composed of layered, multicolored sheets of grated steel, the amorphous forms of leaved branches punctuated by geometric lines and grids. Here, her enduring interest in the natural tends toward the poetic. As in much of her work, Graves approaches the natural world with a sense of wonder that endows her art with enigmatic beauty.

The addition of a large-scale sculpture from this period by Nancy Graves, one of the leading artists of her generation, introduces an important woman artist to the ICA/Boston’s collection and marks a major contribution to the museum’s holdings of sculptures by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Rachel Harrison, and Keith Sonnier.

2016.16