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Alighiero Boetti was one of the most important artists associated with the Italian Arte Povera movement. Boetti sought to subvert traditional notions of authorship, dubbing himself “Alighiero e Boetti” (implying a partnership by adding “and” between his first and last names), as well as pioneering collaborative relationships with the fabricators of his work. He is perhaps best known for making embroidered works that feature words, numbers, and maps. These works, which first emerged in the 1970s, addressed a new sense of internationalism and global systems of power and authority as represented by flags, symbols, national borders, and language.

Like many artists of his generation, Boetti was interested in the relationship between, on the one hand, control and rational thought and, on the other, chance and authorship. In the 1970s, Boetti traveled to Afghanistan, where he met women from an embroidery school who he commissioned to create his first map work, a series he would continue for a decade. The embroiderers chose the colors and patterns of the work, and Boetti embraced the chance element that resulted from their decisions. In the 1980s, Boetti expanded his imagery from maps to focus on language play and a kind of poetry of time and space. The resulting textile works, of which Today on the Seventh Day of the Seventh Month of the Year Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Eight … Giampaolo Prearo Editor is a superlative example, create fields of numbers and letters that forms words and even equations while also creating visually arresting patterns of color and form.

This acquisition brings into the museum’s collection a prominent twentieth-century artist, whose influence on contemporary art has been palpable in the last decade. Boetti’s original approach to conceptually driven textile work ties in with works in the collection by Françoise Grossen, Robert Rohm, and Josh Faught.

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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

Sanya Kantarovsky creates humorous and wistful paintings—from surreal portraits to abstract compositions—that are infused with social commentary. Incorporating memories of his childhood in Moscow and cultural references, Kantarovsky often uses the language of cartoons. Born in 1982, Kantarovsky received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. This young, New York-based Russian artist works through figuration to arrive at paintings full of uncertainty and emotional energy.

Exemplary of the artist’s work, Violet pictures a man holding a dog and clutching a train pole. The man looks worn and sullen with a deeply creased brow, and the dog wears a red cone around its neck, perhaps following a recent medical procedure. Kantarovsky places the figures in a subway train; the window and strong rectangular shapes underscore the contained environment. While the canvas appears to capture a moment in time, the narrative and context are distinctly obscure. As Kantarovsky has said about his work, “it’s like a moment that never existed but that you feel you’ve seen before.” The artist employs a surreal, almost fauvist coloration, seen in the pale green face and hands, and in the bright red of the dog’s cone. This work was first presented as part of a 2016 exhibition titled Feral Neighbours about the concepts of privacy, impersonality, and anonymity of urban living.

This work expands the museum’s collection of paintings, joining figurative works by artists such as Alice Neel, Lisa Yuskavage, and Dana Schutz. With this new addition, the ICA/Boston introduces a new and important young voice to the museum’s collection.

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For the past twenty years, artist Laura Owens has pursued an ambitious and experimental practice that expands painting’s methods and means of presentation. In collaboration with technicians and assistants, Owens researches and develops new viscosities of paint, new techniques to dye fabric, and methods for hybridizing screen printing and painting. Her earlier works initially employed decorative motifs from both Western and Eastern aesthetic vocabularies alongside references from high art painting traditions. More recently, she has attempted to reimagine the systems of contemporary image production, proposing a vital relationship between the physical process of painting and the circulation of digital images.

In Untitled, 2015, Owens uses computer software programs developed in the late 1990s to explore the equation of painterly brushstrokes and the pixel. To this, she adds images of birds—both painted and printed in low-resolution blurs—to create an allover composition. Much of Owen’s work is site specific, with size and subject matter influenced by the gallery’s architecture and context. Untitled, 2015, was designed based on an architectural frieze, creating an unbalance between the exaggeratedly lite subject matter and the permanence of architecture.

This work significantly augments the ICA/Boston’s painting collection while also building on strategies of artists such as Sherrie Levine and Cady Noland that introduce notions of the painterly, the decorative, and the use of digital circulation of images into their work.

2016.15

Laura Owens is celebrated as one of the most innovative painters of our time, pushing the boundaries of the medium through her research of new materials, paints, and dyes, and through her incorporation of digital paint software and processes into her work. Owens’s work proposes a vital relationship between the physical process of painting and the circulation of digital images in the age of the Internet.

Most recently, Owens has begun exploring how different techniques and materials are related within a single painting. After a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, she wondered whether an installation could happen inside of a painting. Untitled, 2016, is an example of this ambitious approach to painting. The ground layer is composed of a fine grid of pink and blue squares, dyed into the weave of the linen to create textile feel, and irregularly printed to suggest a patchy pixelated image. As is often the case in Owens’s work, this complex pattern has a popular source—the background from a Garfield cartoon. Other details—such as the pattern of lemons, the ship-in-a-bottle image, and the cartoon bubble—create uneasy relationships between seemingly foreign elements. A series of pictures within pictures, and motifs within motifs, fills the painting’s field to construct a formally and philosophically complex work.

Owens’s Untitled, 2016, adds a new depth to the ICA/Boston’s painting collection. It joins major paintings by artists such as Charline von Heyl and Sadie Benning that likewise address the threshold between abstraction and figuration through experimental painting practices.

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American artist Dana Schutz is best known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork. Her large-scale paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats. Schutz’s at once dark and humorous paintings combine abstraction and figuration into oddly compelling and intriguing pictures that point to the legacies of such figures as George Grosz and Wassily Kandinsky. Schutz’s unique voice in painting exemplifies the expansive possibilities of the medium today.

Over the last decade, Schutz has focused her painting practice on tightly structured scenes in which subjects are compressed by the boundaries of the canvas. Big Wave exemplifies the artist’s spatial exploration. In the painting, two children kneeling on the shore build a sand castle, while seemingly oblivious to the drowning figures alongside of them. Multiple limbs, bodies, and giant fish are entangled in the tumbling, green wave. The juxtaposition of these two scenes with their distinct color palettes and energy levels creates two worlds within a flatly composed canvas, showcasing Schutz’s truly individual and inventive compositions. As evoked in Big Wave, Schutz explores what can occur within parameters of space and time, and how finite zones can unfold into anomalous and evocative narratives.

Big Wave joins Schutz’s canvas Sneeze, 2002, in the ICA/Boston’s collection. In addition to expanding the museum’s holdings of paintings, this work exemplifies the abstract figuration seen in works by artists Joan Semmel, Lisa Yuskavage, Marlene Dumas, and Louise Bourgeois in the ICA’s collection.

2016.19

Trained as a painter, Lucy Kim has developed a robust body of work situated between meticulous image-making and low-relief sculpture, to explore the sometimes uncomfortable spaces between the natural and artificial.

Kim’s painted wall sculpture, Dr. Melissa Doft, Plastic Surgeon 1 is the first in an ambitious recent series that captures the features of three people whose work alters the human body: plastic surgeon Melissa Doft (the subject of this work); Kim’s personal trainer, Stephen Marino; and Eric. S. Lander, a geneticist, molecular biologist, mathematician, and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. After meeting Dr. Doft—a highly successful plastic surgeon based on New York’s Upper East Side, and collector of Kim’s works—the artist became interested in occupations that shift cultural perceptions of the body through its manipulation. Updating age-old ceremonial and artistic processes, her method involves a painstaking sequence of steps in which she casts a mold of the subject’s torso and face, uses Photoshop to create a surface pattern, and then constructs and paints the final work. These so-called “life masks” register an uncanny transitional state, lifelike yet frozen, unique yet multiplied, distorted yet descriptive. Drawing on traditions of religious and ceremonial sculpture, low-relief architecture statuary, and trompe l’oeil painting, these works hover between painting and sculpture, between image and object. By indirectly manipulating the body of each of her subjects, Kim creates an unsettling meditation on our fragile, mutable physical states.

Lucy Kim was included in the 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition at the ICA/Boston, where this series made its debut. Additionally, Kim’s painted sculpture is in dialogue with a number of works in the museum’s collection—such as those by Louise Bourgeois, Dana Schutz, Mona Hatoum, Ellen Gallagher, and others—that visually modify parts of the body to probe social and cultural questions.

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The paintings of British-Ghanaian artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, feature imagined characters and narratives, and reveal a sense of poetry and emotional depth in everyday scenes. Nearly all of her paintings begin with a formal problem—painterly questions of light, color, and composition. The characters she enlivens come out of a process of collaging into sketchbooks images taken from printed matter. These imagistic sketches create an armature on which she improvises, simultaneously addressing formal problems and representing the world as she sees it.

The dancer in The Much-Vaunted Air is portrayed in profile ready and waiting in the wings, his arms bent at the elbows and his resolute gaze fixed on the proscenium, just outside our field of view. The off-stage space in the painting is largely nondescript, the floor and walls are delineated roughly with gestural swaths of peach, black, blue, and lavender paint, unresolved passages that evoke the canvases of Édouard Manet. On the left side is the stage’s golden yellow curtain, and behind the dancer to the right, his shadow is cast on the wall from theatrical lighting that causes his legs to glow. Dancers recur as a motif throughout Yiadom-Boakye’s work, and the composed elegance of these figures in her works recall Edgar Degas’s ballerinas. Yiadom-Boakye has said that she seeks to “make people intelligible through paint.” “Although they are not real I think of them as people known to me,” the artist has said. “They are imbued with a power of their own; they have a resonance—something emphatic and otherworldly. I admire them for their strength, their moral fiber.” Like the other figures in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, the dancer in The Much-Vaunted Air is at ease, a political and reparative gesture toward representing black subjects as they might be in the world.

The Much-Vaunted Air joins important works in the collection by Henry Taylor, Lorna Simpson, Steve McQueen, and Ellen Gallagher that deal with black identity and the politics of representation. Yiadom-Boakye’s unique take on figurative painting and portraiture adds to the depth of the museum’s holdings of that genre of painting, including key works by Marlene Dumas, Chantal Joffe, Alice Neel, and Lisa Yuskavage.

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In New York in the 1970s, McArthur Binion began his artistic career as one of the few Black artists working in an abstract mode. His monochromatic, grid-based paintings merge the reductive aesthetics of minimalism with the eclectic materiality of collage to explore personal and collective memory, particularly that of his formative years growing up in the American South, and often using documents or other materials sourced from his own life.

Route One: Box Two: V belongs to a series of paintings in which Binion cuts black-and-white images to form larger illustrative works. Here, the artist has repeated images of his childhood home in Mississippi into small squares and then affixed them to the surface of a monumental square canvas. Binion describes this underlying photographic layer, which is visible beneath a dark, oil stick grid, as the painting’s “under-conscious.” The overlying grid, in other words, holds the impersonality of abstraction in tension with the autobiographical.

Fragments of other personal documents—discernible in glimpses and gaps from beneath an opaque surface—conjure the process of assembling memories from similarly incomplete or absent information. The physicality of the work’s facture—the artist uses his fingers to apply the oil stick—may also reference the tactile, muscle memory of Binion’s youth working on a cotton farm. Together, the lattice-like layered approach to painting in this work beckons close and careful looking and a unique engagement with the formal language of line, shape, and surface.

Binion’s work embraces the expressive capacities of abstraction and represents a significant direction in the history of abstract painting and Black contemporary art. Route One’s composition, determined by the contrasting warmer and cooler tones of the grid along the vertical axis and the painting’s border, optically engages the forms and tactics of artists such as Charles Gaines and Sol LeWitt. Unlike these practitioners of abstraction, Binion uses negative space as a series of windows onto a personal narrative, where concealment and erasure operate as both creative and subversive modes of visual expression.

2018.01

Tschabalala Self is among a generation of young artists who are advancing new modes of figurative painting, often while privileging African American selfhood and intersectional identities. Self’s large-scale work employs a diverse range of materials through collage, printmaking, and colorful handsewn and machine-sewn fabrics to form avatars or characters that are at once grounded in reality and visually uncanny.

Based between New Haven, Connecticut, and her hometown of Harlem, Self has long been interested in urban social life: since 2017 she has explored the bodega, drawing on the ubiquitous, small urban store as a multicultural site and subject of exchange and interaction. Lite is her first artwork to represent a character from this project on the outside rather than the inside of a store. Here, the wordplay of “deli” and “lite” evokes the language of fast food, consumption, and the false promises of advertising. Emblematic of the transition in the artist’s practice from a focus on private interactions to social exchange in public, Lite features a female figure striding assertively past a male bystander who nearly blends into the storefront, suggesting his omnipresence as a neighborhood fixture who is often ignored. Through this passive interaction, a tension emerges between stasis and movement, dereliction and progress, which the artist considers emblematic of city life. Addressing the dynamic of self-expression and the unwanted attention it sometimes draws—and, by extension, of invisibility and hypervisibility—Self claims space for bodies to exist for their own self-realization. Her figures celebrate the black body (especially those of black women), and their textural, coloristic, and abstract qualities reference psychological and emotional states. The artist’s community of interrelated characters, which often have imaginative or fantastical features, engages contemporary cultural discourses on intersectional and fluid identities, reflecting the patchwork of memories, physical parts, and psychic associations that make us human.

Lite joins other works in the ICA’s collection by artists who innovate in textile and collage, such as Nick Cave and Kevin Beasley, and builds on the ICA’s strong holdings in figurative painting by artists such as Joan Semmel and Dana Schutz.

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