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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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Amy Sillman’s work is aligned with that of Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, and Willem de Kooning in blurring the boundary between abstraction and figuration. What makes Sillman’s work unique is the freedom with which she experiments with color. Early in her career, she painted in a riot of pastel and acid hues, but more recently her sensibility has veered toward digital-like colors and jarring combinations. Sillman has consistently resisted ideas of “good taste” and instead uses color to investigate the range of possibilities in painting. Cuing color to emotion and incorporating nonverbal jokes inherent in cartoons and comics, she has been able to examine the whole range of human emotions, from joy and pleasure to awkwardness, anxiety, and neurosis. No matter how discomforting or melancholic her work becomes, Sillman infuses her paintings with a physical and robust sense of humor to convey the compassion and empathy that lie at the core of her project.

Unearth depicts two landscapes, one above the other, separated by a band of blue sky. In the upper landscape, we see a cluster of building-like shapes huddled in a chaotic mass. In the lower landscape, lines and geometric blocks of color might represent figures marching in procession. Although Sillman deploys the landscape genre, the typically clear division of earth and sky is confounded here by the presence of two realms, one worldly and the other extraterrestrial.

This work adds to the ICA/Boston’s recently expanding collection of painting, and its acquisition reflects the tradition of collecting works from significant ICA exhibitions: it was included in Amy Sillman: one lump or two (2014), the first major survey of Sillman’s work. It joins works by Louise Bourgeois and Tara Donovan, who also had solo exhibitions at the ICA, as well as recently acquired paintings by Jason Middlebrook and Matthew Ritchie that similarly explore the history of abstraction and mark-making.

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Throughout her more than sixty years as an artist, Nancy Spero maintained a commitment to socially and politically engaged art. In her paintings, collages, prints, drawings, and murals, she expressed stances that were antiwar, antiviolence, and, most notably, feminist. Spero was a member of a number of artist-activist groups, including the Art Workers Coalition, Women Artists in Revolution, and the A.I.R. Gallery, which dedicated itself to art by women. She consistently sought to meet what she considered to be the social obligations of the artist.

Determined to advance the representation of female experience in art, by the mid-1970s Spero depicted only women. Birth portrays the quintessentially female act of childbirth, an event that had been systematically excluded from art history. Spero’s representation of the act does not resemble the reality of childbirth—the woman stands, raising the infant in the air and seeming to thrust him or her forward, as if to emphasize the power that the ability to give birth confers. The image is rendered exclusively in brown, black, and off-white, and the background is filled in with rough brushstrokes. These qualities give the work the appearance of a prehistoric artwork. Spero often utilized ancient motifs and symbols, drawing on figures from Egyptian, Greek, and Irish sources.

Nancy Spero is a seminal female artist of the twentieth century. Birth augments the ICA/Boston’s collection of work made by the pioneers of feminist art, including Ana Mendieta, Joan Semmel, and Faith Wilding.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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