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Arturo Herrera works in sculpture, wall painting, collage, photography, and video. He is known for collage works that intertwine found images of Disney cartoon characters and abstract shapes. Through the fragmentation and recontextualization of familiar childhood images, Herrera evokes collective memories, often calling into question the innocence of such memories. In the artist’s words: “I believe the tension within constructed images reflects an essential tension inherent in life, where reconciling the familiar and the unknown is a continual, though generally unconscious, process. For this reason animated films and illustrations have been a rich source for my work. Their stylized, graphic qualities communicate the familiar in an effortless and immediate way that can also be pushed quickly into abstraction through fragmentation and dislocation.”

In the large collage Hasen, Herrera has composed an expansive, abstract field from cut paper and brightly colored paint. Moving beyond his more recognizable cartoon images, Herrera here works with a multitude of references, from magazines and newspapers to cartoons and coloring books. Alternating between legibility and abstraction, Herrera’s juxtaposition of the cutout and painted elements generates an unusual sense of wholeness—an allover field.

Celebrated for his reuse of mass-produced imagery, Herrera has stretched the means and methods of appropriation in his ambitious collages, paintings, and architecturally scaled installations. The acquisition of Hasen furthers critically important conversations around the history of appropriation and the relationships between painting and abstraction as explored in works by such artists as Kai Althoff, Dr. Lakra, and Thomas Hirschhorn in the ICA/Boston collection.

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In his works on paper, tattoo artist Dr. Lakra transforms found prints, advertisements, and objects. His work is often tinged with gothic overtones, as he adds morbid symbols to the found imagery. Spiders and snakes, blood stains and skeletons, sneak onto the pages of his unsuspecting subjects.

This untitled portrait shows an unidentified man wearing a black suit coat and white dress shirt; his hair is slicked back neatly in place. He stares ahead with a direct and vacant gaze, as if posing for a passport or visa application. Opaque though he is, many of the symbols found in the image hint at a potentially violent history. Spider webs fill the upper corners of the picture and creep onto his chin, as if he were metaphorically caught in an inescapable situation. The number 666 is scrawled on his forehead, a reference to satanic practices, and tears drip down both cheeks, signifying that he may have killed someone while serving time in prison. The initials “MS” on his forehead and the word “Salvatrucha” across his eyelids signal an affiliation with the infamous Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, a powerful transnational group that originated in Los Angeles and now has members all over the world. The inscriptions “Big One Ocho,” to the right of his head, and “18 S,” across his cheeks, refer to the Hispanic LA–based 18th Street gang. Dr. Lakra stresses the importance of territory to gangs by listing the cardinal directions. At the bottom of the page, to the right of his prominent signature, he has inserted “OAX” in reference to his hometown of Oaxaca, Mexico.

This portrait appeared in a solo exhibition of Dr. Lakra’s work presented by ICA/Boston in 2010. Enhancing the collection’s strength in figurative work, it complements the populist and street-culture references found in collection works by Shepard Fairey and Swoon.  

800.10.1

Thomas Ruff, along with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, is one of the contemporary artists who have most significantly transformed the medium of photography. Meeting while students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the three emerged in the late 1980s as artists who would influence a rising generation of photographers. Like Gursky and Struth, Ruff is known for exceedingly large-scale prints of digitally manipulated but seemingly realistic images.

This series of reproduced newspaper photographs confounds the notion that the print source provides fundamental information about our world. The images included in this portfolio are incongruous, ranging from the spectacular to the banal: a space shuttle launch, two suited men sitting on a park bench engaged in conversation, a bird perched on a ledge, a lively dance scene. Some are portraits, including an internationally recognizable figure such as Chairman Mao or an anonymous girl. In a 1991 article on Ruff’s well-known Portraits series and the Zeitungsphotos, Norman Bryson and Trevor Fairbrother noted that the newspaper images place “the private and the public radically out of phase,” arguing that the voyeuristic nature of these images taps into the sense of anxiety over the prevalence of surveillance in our times.

Alongside works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov, and Collier Schorr, Zeitungsphotos fleshes out an increasingly strong collection of works by important contemporary photographers held by the ICA/Boston.

2012.13

Since 1999, Swoon (born Caledonia Curry) has made cut-paper figures that she applies, often illicitly, to the exterior walls of industrial buildings. In recent years, she has started to make work for museums and galleries, in part to help support her interventions in public space.

Coney Island Installation sets three figures against a carnivalesque scene at Coney Island in New York. Constructed of more than fifty precisely cut leaves of Mylar and newsprint, the work presents semitransparent strata that blur the boundaries between figure and ground, inside and outside. Usually impermanent, these materials register a kind of pathos, suggesting the inevitable passing of all things and beings. In 2011, Swoon created a major installation for the ICA/Boston on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall and in the building’s elevator shaft, employing the same cut-paper technique.

The acquisition of this wall installation signals the ICA’s history with Swoon, as well as its curatorial interest in graffiti and street art, as exemplified by the exhibitions organized by the museum of work by Shepard Fairey and Barry McGee.

2010.3

Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, better known as Gilbert and George, have worked together since the mid-1960s. They have described their relationship in life and work by saying, “It’s not a collaboration… . We are two people, but one artist.” In the late 1960s and ’70s, they performed what they called Living Sculpture, documenting their life as art through the creation of small cards printed with captioned drawings of themselves. Always attired in three-button suits, their sartorial formality contrasts with their cheeky, avant-garde work. Their signature works from the 1970s and ’80s consist of composite photographic images assembled in a large grid and overlaid with bright flat colors. Influenced in equal parts by pop and conceptual art, these collage works blend the logic of the billboard with that of the stained-glass window to make an iconic and unique contribution to twentieth-century art.

Sky Blue World is from the series 25 Worlds. In each work in the series, dozens of identical postcards are arranged in concentric patterned fields that measure about 8 by 6 feet. Nearly every work includes the image of a handsome young man’s face multiplied to kaleidoscopic effect. In Sky Blue World more than one hundred identical postcards of Indian Bollywood screen idol Govinda alternate with postcards featuring the dome of St. John’s Cathedral in London and an architectural roofline. The intense repetition of the movie star’s face gives the montage the aura of an altar, presenting him as both a pop culture icon and a quasi-religious personage, while also gesturing to homoerotic desire in a mode akin to the work of Andy Warhol. At the same time, the mosaic pattern created by the arrangement of the postcards places the individual images in service to the pulsating, almost cinematic overall composition.

This work brings into the collection two new artists while also adding an important piece from the 1980s. Its deployment of the readymade, reference to pop culture, and photographic basis enrich the ICA/Boston’s holdings of work by artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, and Meyer Vaisman.

2013.07

Although a brain tumor ended the life of Eva Hesse at age thirty-four, the style of postminimalism she developed during her abbreviated career has made her one of the most influential artists of the postwar period. Hesse blended the industrial materials and hard, geometric shapes of minimalism with softer, more organic forms to create work that suggests both human pain and mechanical indifference. While the work for which she has received the most recognition is sculptural, drawings and collage are an important part of her oeuvre. The artist’s first solo exhibition, at Allan Stone Gallery in March 1963, consisted of works on paper, and she continued making drawings after she began to create sculpture in 1964–65.

In 1959, Hesse graduated from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, where she studied color theory and advanced painting with Josef Albers, and gained a reputation as a talented colorist. Untitled shows the artist experimenting with various color combinations, as well as with black-and-white forms. After leaving Yale, Hesse worked as a textile designer in New York. The gridded composition of Untitled, in which each rectangle bears a distinct design, is reminiscent of a woven piece of fabric or a quilt, and also anticipates Hesse’s later use of the grid in her three-dimensional work.

Hesse is one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Untitled is representative of an important early moment in her career, before she turned to sculpture. This piece strengthens the ICA/Boston’s holdings of works by important female artists, and complements the pivotal Hesse sculptures in the collection.

2014.25

Although her work encompasses painting, photography, sculpture, and video, Yayoi Kusama is perhaps best known for her overwhelming installations. Using various combinations of motifs such as lights, dots, and phalluses, Kusama creates environments that are frequently described as “obsessive,” filling entire rooms with repeated shapes and images. The artist herself has said she is an “obsessional artist.” The term refers not only to her art but also to her mental condition. The artist has experienced obsessive-compulsive disorder since 1973, the year she returned to Japan from the United States. She checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill in Tokyo in 1975, and since 1977 has lived in the facility, within walking distance of the studio where she works.

A Flower (No. 14) is one of Kusama’s early works, created before she arrived in the U.S. in 1958. Originally trained in the traditional Japanese style of painting, Kusama began studying Western styles in 1952, becoming especially interested in the work of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, with whom she began a correspondence in the late 1950s. A Flower (No. 14) reveals the influence of O’Keeffe’s floral paintings: Kusama foregrounds her subject on the picture plane, and seems to play on the similarities between vaginal and floral anatomies. One of several related compositions Kusama made during this period, A Flower (No. 14) is an early example of her experimentation with the dots that would eventually become a signature motif that is repeated throughout her monumental installations.

The first work by Kusama to enter the ICA/Boston collection, A Flower (No. 14) strengthens the museum’s holdings of work by key feminists working in the 1960s and ’70s, such as Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Spero, and serves the ICA’s goal of augmenting its collection of works by international artists.

2014.28

Photographer Jimmy De Sana was part of the countercultural “punk” community of artists and musicians living in New York’s East Village in the 1970s and ’80s. Among his best-known works are portraits of important figures from that scene, including Debbie Harry and Billy Idol, though these constitute only a small part of his practice. With work that is personal, surrealistic, and often shocking in its treatment of sexuality, De Sana helped raise the standing of photography in the art world and increased critical respect for the medium.

101 Nudes comprises 56 halftone black-and-white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posing inside or just outside homes. The artist was 20 years old and attending college in Atlanta when he first printed the series in 1972. The figures, which include De Sana’s friends as well as himself, are photographed from a variety of viewpoints. Although the series shows the influence of “grainy” pornography from the 1950s, the postures of the figures do not seem to suggest or invite sexual engagement; the artist noted that they are “without eroticism.” Sometimes the photographs feature only a fragment of the body, such as the pelvic area or buttocks. De Sana’s engagement with the history of surrealism has been noted, and these partial views in particular recall the surrealist photography of artists such as Man Ray, who in the 1920s photographed the body parts of friends and lovers in ways that removed them from their context and made them into almost abstract images.

101 Nudes speaks to other pieces in the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of photography and the art of the 1980s, including works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Willie Doherty, and Roe Ethridge. It is also part of the ICA’s collection of photographic works in series, joining Dijkstra’s Almerisa series and Nan Goldin’s From Here to Maternity.

2014.05.1–56

Kelly Sherman’s video- and text-based work reveals the dynamics of family and social relationships through carefully constructed charts, graphs, diagrams, and picture sequences. Sherman derives her source materials from her own experiences and those of strangers as gleaned from online searches and personal interviews. In elegantly restrained visual statements that speak to shared humanity, the artist considers the emotive power of a single word, the strategic placement of a symbol, the weight of a demarcating line, and the precise shade of a particular color.

In Wish Lists, Sherman presents forty such lists, taken from the Internet, each on a separate sheet of paper. The lists offer a powerful, suggestive glimpse into the lives of their authors, with hints about their age, gender, and circumstances. The items requested range from the most broad and basic, such as “School,” to the minutely specific, such as “VideoNow Color Disks 3-Pack: Monster Garage 2.”  Individually and collectively, the wish lists reveal how we are shaped by the things we live with and long for—both necessary and not.

Wish Lists, winning Sherman the 2006 James and Audrey Foster Prize, is the first fully text-based work acquired by the ICA/Boston. Though unique in its genre within the collection, it is in dialogue with a range of other works that incorporate found materials and deal with the issue of domesticity, such as those by Alexandre da Cunha, Ellen Gallagher, and Charles LeDray.

2007.3

Born in Germany, Charline von Heyl moved to New York in the mid-1990s and has pursued a vigorous and multivalent artistic practice. In her paintings, drawings, prints, and collages, von Heyl harnesses abstraction as a process of discovery, adding marks and obliterating them to produce vibrant and layered works.

This set of ten untitled drawings from 2003 was originally exhibited as part of an installation of forty-four black-and-white works at Petzel Gallery in New York. They demonstrate von Heyl’s interest in stimulating play between figuration and abstraction, as recognizable elements seem to lurk within the matrix of the abstract works. In 2001, von Heyl had begun to work with a photocopier, using the device as part of her experimental process of deriving patterns, lines, shapes, and motifs from found images. Von Heyl has drawn on a diverse range of visual sources, from Otto Ubbelohde’s illustrations for an early twentieth-century edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales to images from Dion Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel Poema a fumetti, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In von Heyl’s hands, such sources relinquish their specific references and figures, offering a plenitude of marks and gestures that she integrates into powerful and unified artworks.

This suite of drawings is part of the ICA/Boston’s collection of works that explore the history of abstraction and mark making by such artists as Matthew Ritchie and Amy Sillman, and complements another work by von Heyl in the collection, the large-scale painting Guitar Gangster, 2013.

2015.25.1-10