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During her seventy-year career, Louise Bourgeois became an artist of wide influence and art-historical importance. Her charged work, a distinctive mix of abstraction and figuration, delves into childhood memories and the emotional struggles of everyday life. Working in wood, bronze, marble, steel, rubber, and fabric, she created powerful objects that reference the body, sexuality, trauma, and anxiety.

Among the motifs that appear most regularly in her work are breasts and penises. This imagery is often discussed from an autobiographical standpoint, as standing in for Bourgeois’s mother and father, with whom she had complicated relationships. Her use of the motifs can also be related to human sexuality more generally. Additionally, her objects have been compared to ancient religious icons. In Germinal, a small and domed sculpture in white marble, Bourgeois collapses the imagery of the breast and the penis. According to Bourgeois, as quoted in Thomas McEvilley’s Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, “Sometimes I am totally concerned with female shapes—clusters of breasts like clouds—but I often merge the imagery—phallic breasts, male and female, active and passive.” The “phallic breast” has an early precedent in sculptures and depictions of the goddess Rati in Bali, whose long breasts jut forward as though erect. Germinal stands as an archetypal example of Bourgeois’s manipulations and combinations of male and female sexual markers.

As part of a group of works by Bourgeois owned by the ICA, Germinal augments the museum’s collection of sculpture by significant female artists.

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Louise Bourgeois was one of the most influential artists of the last century. In her distinctive mix of abstraction and figuration, she delved into childhood memories and the struggles of everyday life. Using a variety of materials—wood, bronze, marble, steel, rubber, and fabric—she crafted evocative and personally cathartic objects that reference the body, sexuality, family, trauma, and anxiety.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Bourgeois repurposed found fabric as the material for a number of sculptures. In part, this stemmed from necessity—sewing was a technique she could still manage as an elderly artist. Stitching with bits of her old clothing, sheets, or towels, Bourgeois created small figures that convey strong emotions. Arched Figure No.1 is made from pantyhose-like fabric stretched over chicken wire. This crudely stitched female form could be in a state of sexual ecstasy or perhaps, conversely, excruciating pain. Bourgeois describes this arched form, which appears in many of her works, as “the arch of hysteria, pleasure, and pain … merged in a state of happiness.” Placed in a vitrine of the artist’s design, Arched Figure No. 1 calls to mind anthropological or historical museum display. Like a contemporary version of an ancient fertility figure, the object is preserved and protected for future contemplation.

Arched Figure No. 1 demonstrates the artist’s characteristic interest in subjects such as the body, sexuality, and androgyny. The piece was featured in the ICA/Boston’s 2007 exhibition Bourgeois in Boston.

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Performance and photography are fused in Cindy Sherman’s now-signature “self-portraits.” Since the mid-1970s, she has photographed herself in theatrically staged environments, transforming her appearance with cosmetics, costumes, and wigs. After finishing the black-and-white Untitled Film Stills in 1980, Sherman turned to color, focusing her work as actor/director/photographer on issues of women and celebrity, fashion photography, and advertising. She and cohorts Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo came to be known as the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of images from consumer and media culture.

While the subjects in the Untitled Film Stills are generic types, in Untitled Sherman mimics a specific actress: Marilyn Monroe. Sherman’s recreation of the American idol relies on many small details—from the blond hair and red lipstick to the hairline and parted lips. Seated on the floor against a backdrop (the rolled bottom of which is visible), the female figure is dressed in rustic clothing: a tan button-down shirt, blue pants, and leather booties. Though no corresponding photograph of Monroe has been identified, the reference is so persuasive that Sherman’s identity becomes subsumed by Monroe’s, an effect that distinguishes the image from the wholly invented, “simulacral” (art historian Rosalind Krauss’s term) stills of the Untitled Film Stills. Sherman thereby expands and complicates the possibilities that portraiture offers in her exploration of the mutability of identity. As the artist describes her own experience: “I feel I’m anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.”

The addition of Untitled to the ICA/Boston’s collection of prints from Sherman’s early Untitled Film Stills shows where the artist would next go in her work. It also enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by contemporary photographers, such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works likewise interrogate the staged portrait.

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Cindy Sherman is known for fusing performance and photography in identity-morphing “self-portraits.” Since the mid-1970s, she has photographed herself as various female character types in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, and wigs. The sixty-nine black-and-white images in Untitled Film Stills construct and reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity, and were Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature photographic practice. She began the series in 1977, shortly after moving to New York City, and continued it until, as she says, she “ran out of clichés” in 1980. Sherman and her New York cohort in the 1980s, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, came to be known as the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of images from consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #63 depicts a young woman on the stairs of a building, wearing a dress, trench coat, and heavy boots. Stopped in her ascent, she turns back, gazing over her left shoulder toward the camera. Something has caught her attention and she turns to look at it, bringing her hand to her chin to hold back her hair. Her expression conveys a sense of concentration or perhaps consternation at what she sees. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, because the image evokes the familiar narrative tropes of Hollywood, the viewer is encouraged to fill in the next frame and imaginatively complete the narrative.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding set of prints from the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #63 enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by important contemporary photographers, such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works likewise generate questions about the ambiguities of the staged photograph.

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The series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80, marks Cindy Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature photographic practice. Reimagining the genre of portraiture, she plays the roles of both actor and director, transforming her persona with simple props and costumes, makeup, and wigs to mimic filmic stereotypes of postwar femininity. Though invented, the scenes in Untitled Film Stills appear disarmingly familiar. After producing sixty-nine black-and-white photographs, Sherman “ran out of clichés,” and ended the series. In New York City in the 1980s, she and her cohort, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation,” artists who critically appropriated images from consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #54 portrays a woman walking down a street at night toward the viewer, pulling the collar of her trench-coat to her neck. Resembling Marilyn Monroe in her facial features and blond bouffant, the figure is starkly lit by the flash of a camera in the surrounding darkness. Her pose is one of self-concealment and protection, as if she were being accosted on a nighttime walk by a paparazzo. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, the evocation of Hollywood movies encourages the viewer to anticipate the storyline’s possible outcomes.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding set of examples from the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #54 enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by the important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, who are also interested in the staged mise-en-scène.

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Since the mid-1970s, Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, and wigs. She began the series Untitled Film Stills in 1977 and continued it until 1980, by which time it comprised sixty-nine black-and-white photographic images that construct and reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity. The series marks Sherman’s seminal foray into her now-signature practice, in which she reimagines the genre of portraiture by playing the roles of actor, director, and photographer herself. Sherman and her cohort in New York in the 1980s, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of images of consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #48 shows a woman standing at the roadside with a suitcase beside her, presumably waiting for a car to round the bend and pick her up. The scene is infused with foreboding. Turned away from the camera with her arms crossed behind her back, dressed in a plaid skirt and sneakers, the woman exudes a schoolgirl innocence and naiveté that only heightens the uncertainty about her fate. A network of unseen gazes––the subject’s, the photographer’s, and the viewer’s––all situate the female figure as passive object. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, here Sherman exploits a host of narrative tropes familiar from Hollywood movies to trigger the viewer’s imagination.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding selection from the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #48 enhances the ICA’s holdings of work by important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works likewise generate questions about the meaning of the staged portrait.

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Cindy Sherman is known for 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 increasingly flamboyant photographs of herself in staged environments, transforming her appearance with costumes, makeup, wigs, and props. She began the black-and-white photographic series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80, shortly after moving to New York City. Ultimately comprising sixty-nine images, Untitled Film Stills presents images that reiterate stereotypes of postwar femininity. In this reimagining of the genre of portraiture, Sherman plays the dual roles of director and actor, viewer and viewed, maker and subject. In the 1980s, Sherman and her cohort in New York, including Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Longo, formed what has been called the “Pictures Generation” on account of their critical appropriation of everyday images of consumer and media culture.

Untitled Film Still #44 shows a woman standing expectantly on the platform of a train station. Leaning against a wall with her head turned over her right shoulder, she appears to be awaiting the arrival of a train and its passengers. She is smartly dressed in a pencil skirt and a scarf, an outfit that recalls, as does the train station, a previous era. One quickly envisions the person she awaits and what will come of their reunion. As in many of the Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s use of familiar narrative tropes from Hollywood movies leads the viewer to complete the narrative as if filling in the next frame of a film.

The ICA/Boston possesses a number of Sherman’s photographs, including an expanding set of examples of the Untitled Film Stills series. Untitled Film Still #44 enhances the museum’s holdings of work by the most important contemporary photographers, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, and Nan Goldin, whose works continue to generate questions about the truth of the staged portrait.

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Joan Semmel’s Erotic Series (or “fuck paintings”) of the 1970s, subsequent nude self-portraits, and recent unflinching depictions of her aging body establish her as one of the most important feminist painters of her generation. Over a fifty-year career, Semmel has practiced a radically self-possessed painterly project concerned with charged eroticism and frank, corporeal self-portraiture. Her practice has presciently combined photography’s unique subject/artist relationship and image cropping with painting’s viscous material capacity to describe and emulate flesh. In the 1970s, her work constituted a near-singular painterly investigation into desire and heterosexual sex from a woman’s vantage point.

In many ways, Green Heart is a key work in the development of the artist’s oeuvre. From 1963 to 1970, while living in Spain and South America, Semmel explored the potential of form, color, and composition in an abstract expressionist idiom. Moving back to New York in 1970, she began to bring her expressionist approach to the depiction of female and male figures tangled together in erotic embrace. In preparation for Green Heart, as with all paintings of the subject, Semmel asked a couple to have sex while she photographed them from above. Images of sex, so often depicted from a male perspective––whether for overtly pornographic purposes or with greater prurience in the high art context––are in Semmel’s work reconfigured from her perspective as a woman witnessing, capturing, and interpreting the act.

Semmel’s near-decade of experience with abstract painting informs Green Heart’s urgent paint handling, expressive color, and push-and-pull composition. Immediately compelling for its subject and formal decisions such as cropping and frontality, Green Heart shows the direction her paintings would take in the 1970s: carefully descriptive, cool, colorful depictions of sex and naked bodies, sourced by the disembodied camera, but reinterpreted in paint by the artist.

Green Heart adds to the ICA/Boston’s recently expanding collection of paintings. It joins works by Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman, and Lisa Yuskavage that examine and undermine art-historical representations of women.

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Dana Schutz paints abstracted figures in the midst of outlandish, gruesome, or humiliating situations. She begins by visualizing an absurd or impossible event––figures eating their own faces, carving shapes into their necks, or attempting to smoke cigarettes while swimming underwater––and proceeds to ask herself questions about the theoretical incident. Through these questions, Schutz imagines not only how the given situation might materialize visually, but also the feelings that would be associated with it. The resulting images are imaginative, humorous, and borderline sadistic in the treatment of their subjects. In its bright colors and loose brushstrokes, Schutz’s work recalls cartoons or children’s book illustrations, generating a strange contrast with the sinister circumstances it depicts.

Sneeze shows a graphic illustration of a physical event most sitters would prefer not to have immortalized in a portrait. Mucus from a woman’s nose, portrayed in exaggerated strokes of yellow, green, and blue paint, has sprayed several inches before ricocheting off her open palms. The painting might be called an “anti-portrait”; instead of presenting the sitter as dignified, it shows her at her most unappealing. The painting also departs from traditional portraits by capturing a momentary and involuntary pose that a subject would not have been able to hold long enough to have it documented.

Dana Schutz is an accomplished painter whose canvases have been seen in the tradition of the grotesque represented by artists from Francisco Goya to Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon. Sneeze joins works by other important quasi-representational contemporary painters in the ICA/Boston collection, including Ree Morton, Joan Semmel, and Amy Sillman.

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Since the mid-1980s, Doris Salcedo has addressed the effects of criminal and political violence through sculptural works and installations that bear witness to death, loss, and pain. Collecting testimonies from individuals living in rural Colombia, she both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently invisible nature of trauma.

In many of her works, Salcedo employs an uncomfortable combination of domestic furniture and building materials such as concrete and steel. Instead of engaging the traditional methods of sculpture, such as carving or molding, she makes her work through acts of physical and symbolic violence: filing, scratching, bending, beating, fusing, melting, and burying. In Untitled, an armoire’s interior has been filled with cement. The gray cement surface appears perfectly smooth except for the wooden chair that has been turned on its side and embedded in the lower right-hand corner. Salcedo’s careful application of cement elicits both fullness and emptiness. The material weight of the wood and cement suggest fullness, while there is a literal emptiness in what is missing—clothing and personal belongings—and a visual emptiness in the opacity of the gray cement. Variations of light and dark waver across the surface, creating the illusion that the cement is shifting. The small empty space almost hidden behind the back of the chair offers a momentary break in the solidity of the sculpture. With this subtle void, Salcedo furthers the tension and heightens the lingering sense of loss. By distorting the familiar, her work transforms our perception of home from a space of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation.

Untitled forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture, as well as holdings that investigate themes of war and violence. It joins works by Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura that visualize social and political violence.

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