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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.

800.16.15

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.

2017.02

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.

800.17.03

Ruth Root’s inventive painting practice is a playful take on the legacy of abstraction that reconfigures the medium’s traditional methods and modes of presentation through her use of irregularly shaped supports and digital printing processes.

Untitled is from a recent body of shaped, two-part works made with a painted Plexiglas panel attached to, and suspended from, a digitally-printed fabric support. Root designs each of the fabrics in Photoshop—which she employs as an “image-making device,” as she has said—from a range of found imagery. In Untitled, a repeating pattern of geometric and biomorphic forms made from found images of 20th-century design is printed on a garish yellow textile. The fabric element is affixed to the wall with grommets, folded, looped, and stitched through an opening in a Plexiglas panel adorned with an off-register array of spray-painted polka dots. Swatches of dots are overpainted with solid triangular blocks of enamel that emphasize the curvatures of the oddly shaped panel. Untitled playfully upends the traditional relationship between canvas and stretcher by making the fabric function as a literal support, beyond being solely a material support for paint. The result is a hybrid object with an unresolved sense of tension and a productive interplay between hard and soft materials, digital and analog processes, and the fine and applied arts.

The addition of Untitled builds on a developing strength of the ICA’s holdings in painting, complementing works by Charline von Heyl, Amy Sillman, and Laura Owens, and joins textile-based works by Charles LeDray, Kevin Beasley, and others.

2018.08

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.

2019.03

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

Steve Locke’s practice spans painting, drawing, photography, and installation and explores ambivalent relationships between masculinity, homosexuality, and public memory. His work also acknowledges contemporary anxieties around terrorism, war, and torture, themes which grounded his 2013 solo exhibition at the ICA, Steve Locke: there is no one left to blame. The titular work of that exhibition, represented here, exemplifies how Locke challenges the authority and power typically endowed to painting and portraiture.

For more than a decade, Locke has explore ideas of the gaze and modes of looking exchanged between and among men. For this work, he returned to his long-standing practice of painting men’s faces with their tongues hanging out of their open mouths. These faces often float disembodied within the canvas; their enigmatic expressions suggest disgust or dislike as much as they do teasing or flirting. Rather than displaying the painting in a traditional manner, Locke uses a painted wood panel affixed to a sculptural support to anchor There is no one left to blame directly on the floor, bringing the portrait off of the wall and into the space of the gallery, inviting engagement and interaction. This gesture draws the viewer into a direct relationship to the work, interrogating the conventions, experience, and representational limits of contemporary portraiture.

2018.17

The work of New York–based painter Caitlin Keogh considers the history of gender and representation, the articulation of personal style, and the construction of artistic identity. With a background in technical illustration and an interest in clothing design, interior decoration, and art history, Keogh’s vivid and exacting painterly style combines the graphic lines of hand-drawn commercial illustration with the bold, flat colors of the applied arts.

The fragmented and idealized female body—often appearing sculptural or mannequin-like—is a loaded political metaphor in Keogh’s figuration, symptomatic of the violence against women in a patriarchal culture that influences representations of women in art history and popular culture. In Blank Melody, Old Wall, which the artist conceived as part of a group of works for her 2018 ICA exhibition, we perceive a portion of a limp, statuesque arm bound with a knotted rope. This arm extends across an indeterminate interior space decorated with a purple and black checkerboard pattern. Inspired by illuminated medieval manuscripts, a length of ornamental fabric embellished with natural motifs unravels and comes alive, as a jet black tress protrudes from a cartoonishly rendered hole at the top of the canvas. Peeled away passages of paint, modeled on degraded frescoes, disrupt the immediacy of the image and reinforce the idea that the surface of the painting is an imaginary space in which a seemingly indiscernible drama unfolds. Even as the female body appears fragmented and bound, pointing to a sense of violence inherent in representations of women, the figures in Keogh’s paintings decisively evade easy identification, exploring indeterminacy as a form of resistance.

The ICA presented Keogh’s first solo museum presentation in 2018. This work builds on a developing strength of the ICA’s holdings in painting, joining recently added works from artists such as Sadie Benning, Laura Owens, Dana Schutz, and Henry Taylor.

2018.05

Through textured use of digital and found images collected from print media and the Internet, Deborah Roberts creates figural collages that examine constructions of race, gender, and Black childhood in the United States. Her work negotiates between the real and the possible forms of representations of Black children (particularly girls), while also seeking out what modes of self-representation, agency, and self-making are available and accessible to Black youth.

For Roberts, collage is a practice of envisioning new and liberating forms of social life, especially for Black Americans. She employs found media to contend with dominant portrayals and narratives of Black youth, narratives that she teases out, challenges, and subverts through her use of collage. In works like Ulysses, Roberts combines cutout images with drawings, painted addendums, and detailed patterns over a blank background. Each component to the collage draws from different source material, transforming the figure into a layered assemblage of images, histories, and ideals that compose the character, as though wrapped in and by imagery. This connotation doubles the symbolic meaning of Roberts’s works, which reference and honor the particular social and political conditions under which Black youth struggle to retain their humanity and agency over their own futures. In Ulysses, Roberts fashions the figure of a young Black boy who stands demurely to the left of the canvas, appearing to be held back or in place by an unknown white hand. This presence of the white figure, even fragmented and disembodied, is an important illustration of Roberts’s interest in how representations of Black youth are often filtered through a dominant white gaze.

Ulysses joins other works in the ICA’s collection by artists who employ novel approaches to race and representation, such as Toyin Ojih Odutola, Tschabalala Self, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. This work enriches the ICA’s strong holdings of collage works and portraiture.