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Lisa Yuskavage paints hyper-sexualized images of women, assigning them poses that seem to be taken from pornography and giving them traditionally desirable qualities such as large breasts. Yet she undermines the usual relationship between pornographic subject and object by distorting aspects of the figures’ bodies in bizarre and unappealing ways. A figure might have an exaggerated belly, an oddly shaped backside, or any number of other malformations. This results in images that are at once tantalizing and revolting. By mirroring, but also disrupting, the ways in which women are presented in our culture, she calls attention to the misogyny with which the female figure is habitually treated.

​​Motherfucking Rock epitomizes this operation of both eroticizing and warping the female body. Yuskavage depicts the head and torso of a female figure, who peers through her blond bangs. The figure’s gigantic breasts point upward in an idealized fashion. The lower part of her torso, however, is unidealized, its rounded, uneven form reminiscent of an eggplant. The artist also attaches a number of spheres on the figure’s upper torso, decreasing its appeal further still. The seductive and the repellent combine in the painting to a confusing, almost humorous effect.

​Motherfucking Rock adds to the ICA/Boston’s recently expanding collection of paintings. This work was included in the ICA’s exhibition Expanding the Field of Painting, an exploration of the ways in which painting has been transformed since the 1970s. It joins works by Louise Bourgeios, Ambreen Butt, and Cindy Sherman that examine and undermine art-historical representations of women.

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Kai Althoff borrows from history, religious iconography, and countercultural movements to create imaginary environments that commingle paintings, sculpture, drawing, video, and found objects. Tapping a multitude of sources—from Germanic folk traditions to recent popular culture, from medieval and Gothic religious imagery to early modern expressionism—Althoff places his characters in fantastic realms that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion.

In Untitled, Althoff depicts a skateboarder caught midair within a field of luminous orange painted on a striped fabric support. The border between the monochromatic field and the fabric forms the curved edge of the ramp over which the body of the skateboarder hovers, somewhere between flying and falling. In taking on this emblem of youth culture, Althoff captures a moment of ecstasy and risk. As with so many of his works, this simple yet striking image suggests the emotional charge involved in an experience of the self (the lone skateboarder) in relation to the socially defined group (a particular form of youth culture). The work also reflects the artist’s exploration of different pictorial styles and painterly techniques.

Kai Althoff’s first U.S. museum exhibition was held at the ICA/Boston in 2004. This work, made that year, was one of the first paintings to enter the ICA’s collection, and it helps document the institution’s exhibition history and reflect its commitment to emerging contemporary artists.

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In the 1980s, Annette Lemieux was part of the burgeoning scene of appropriation artists working in New York, including Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, David Salle (for whom Lemieux worked as a studio assistant for a time), and Cindy Sherman. Lemieux uses painting, photography, and found-object assemblage to create works that yoke the cultural and the personal. Her work addresses war, time, memory, art-making, and the relationship between personal experience and history.

In Homecoming, Lemieux has compiled a mostly monochromatic assemblage of visual references to mid-twentieth-century wars. A large canvas is painted as a flag, with one gray star centered on black and brown rectangles. A framed black-and-white photograph hanging adjacent to the painting features a middle-aged woman sitting before a framed photograph of a uniformed man. On the wall of her home is a flag very much like the painted one. To the right of these two elements hangs another framed image––a blue sheet with a white star. The title evokes the homecomings everyone has waited for at some point in their lives, and may now remember with nostalgia. But for Lemieux, such wistful images also critique power structures, like those symbolized by flags, and the sacrifices made for the beliefs that the flags represent.

Lemieux is an important Boston-based artist and teacher whose work was featured in a solo exhibition in 1986 at the ICA/Boston, which included Homecoming, the first work by the artist to enter the collection. The work bolsters the museum’s strength in work by women artists, including such painters as Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl, and enables the museum to tell a fuller story of art in the 1980s and ’90s.

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Originally trained as an architect, Klara Lidén uses found material to create psychologically charged sculptures, paintings, and installations that mine the anxieties of the urban environment. Scavenging the streets of cities around the world, Lidén collects detritus to build sculptures that are often scaled to her own body. Her work alters the space of the museum by connecting it to the material and political realities of the world outside.

Untitled (Poster Painting) belongs to a series of paintings composed of layers of advertising posters the artist excised from city walls and lampposts. Retaining the roughness of the paper’s surface by layering the sheets and trapping the air pockets between them, Lidén obliterates the topmost image by painting over the unfurling stack. She hints at what lies beneath by folding over the first few layers.

Untitled (Poster Painting) is one of several works in the ICA/Boston collection that incorporate everyday found materials, using their expansiveness to provide, ultimately, novel ways to understand the world around us. It establishes a dialogue with works by such artists as Carol Bove, Alexandre da Cunha, Tara Donovan, and Annette Messager.

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R. H. Quaytman 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.

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Philip Taaffe 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.

Taaffe’s Untitled III makes a significant contribution to the museum’s modest collection of large-scale paintings. It joins works by other iconic artists of the 1980s, such as Dara Birnbaum, as well as major paintings by artists like Kai Althoff and Lucy McKenzie.

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For painter Matthew Ritchie, “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.

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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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Using the potency of advertising media, Kelley Walker appropriates iconic cultural images and digitally alters them to highlight underlying issues of politics and consumerism. He often employs a “copy, cut, and reprint” technique via inkjet printing and screenprinting. As the artist has stated: “I am thinking of printed matter as raw material with traces of history. The logo has an aura of propaganda that interests me.”

In Lee Radziwill Interview March 1975, one of Walker’s so-called brick paintings, the text and images are taken from an old issue of Interview magazine in which pop artist Andy Warhol and his associate Fred Hughes interviewed Lee Radziwill (an American socialite and younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). After printing various pages from the March 1975 issue of the magazine onto canvas, Walker added images of white bricks, disrupting, distancing, and obscuring the original source. The fragmented magazine content becomes the “mortar” that is laced throughout the composition, becoming a subtle anchor of meaning.

Walker’s use of appropriation and investigation of the everyday in Lee Radziwill Interview March 1975 opens a dialogue with works by a number of other artists in the ICA/Boston collection, such as Andy Warhol, Dara Birnbaum, and a younger generation that includes Shannon Ebner, Leslie Hewitt, Klara Lidén, and Sara VanDerBeek.

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In her distinctive gouaches, Laylah Ali depicts abstracted human figures who assume odd poses as they interact with one another. Many of them are brown-skinned, androgynous creatures she calls Greenheads. The Greenheads, with their bug eyes, simplified bodies, and pointy black boots, are recalled in the figures in Untitled.

As in all of Ali’s work, the cartoon style initially charms and disarms, but then discloses a world fraught with tension and mystery. The drawing shows a somber child being scolded by someone (perhaps his mother?). They both have strange headpieces—the boy’s is yellow with five small feet sticking out of it, and the woman’s is reddish, hairy, and horned. What do these symbolize—their tribes? A superpower? A disease? The piece has a looser technique than most of Ali’s paintings, which are customarily painstakingly composed and executed. While it is a bit less serious in tone, it retains her characteristic open-endedness. Ali allows viewers to interpret and complete her ambiguous scenes, as if they were comic-book pages with empty captions.

Joining another work by Ali in the ICA/Boston collection, this drawing provides an excellent introduction to the artist’s distinctive style and unforgettable world. It joins a nucleus of works on paper by such artists as Ambreen Butt and Yayoi Kusama.

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