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Louise Bourgeois was one of the most influential artists of the last century. In her distinctive mix of abstraction and figuration, she delved into childhood memories and the struggles of everyday life. Using a variety of materials—wood, bronze, marble, steel, rubber, and fabric—she crafted evocative and personally cathartic objects that reference the body, sexuality, family, trauma, and anxiety.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Bourgeois repurposed found fabric as the material for a number of sculptures. In part, this stemmed from necessity—sewing was a technique she could still manage as an elderly artist. Stitching with bits of her old clothing, sheets, or towels, Bourgeois created small figures that convey strong emotions. Arched Figure No.1 is made from pantyhose-like fabric stretched over chicken wire. This crudely stitched female form could be in a state of sexual ecstasy or perhaps, conversely, excruciating pain. Bourgeois describes this arched form, which appears in many of her works, as “the arch of hysteria, pleasure, and pain … merged in a state of happiness.” Placed in a vitrine of the artist’s design, Arched Figure No. 1 calls to mind anthropological or historical museum display. Like a contemporary version of an ancient fertility figure, the object is preserved and protected for future contemplation.

Arched Figure No. 1 demonstrates the artist’s characteristic interest in subjects such as the body, sexuality, and androgyny. The piece was featured in the ICA/Boston’s 2007 exhibition Bourgeois in Boston.

2014.10

Since the mid-1980s, Doris Salcedo has addressed the effects of criminal and political violence through sculptural works and installations that bear witness to death, loss, and pain. Collecting testimonies from individuals living in rural Colombia, she both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently invisible nature of trauma.

In many of her works, Salcedo employs an uncomfortable combination of domestic furniture and building materials such as concrete and steel. Instead of engaging the traditional methods of sculpture, such as carving or molding, she makes her work through acts of physical and symbolic violence: filing, scratching, bending, beating, fusing, melting, and burying. In Untitled, an armoire’s interior has been filled with cement. The gray cement surface appears perfectly smooth except for the wooden chair that has been turned on its side and embedded in the lower right-hand corner. Salcedo’s careful application of cement elicits both fullness and emptiness. The material weight of the wood and cement suggest fullness, while there is a literal emptiness in what is missing—clothing and personal belongings—and a visual emptiness in the opacity of the gray cement. Variations of light and dark waver across the surface, creating the illusion that the cement is shifting. The small empty space almost hidden behind the back of the chair offers a momentary break in the solidity of the sculpture. With this subtle void, Salcedo furthers the tension and heightens the lingering sense of loss. By distorting the familiar, her work transforms our perception of home from a space of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation.

Untitled forms part of the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture, as well as holdings that investigate themes of war and violence. It joins works by Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura that visualize social and political violence.

2014.34

Since the mid-1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has addressed the themes of loss and mourning in works that evoke criminal and political violence. Her sculptures and installations are informed by her research and fieldwork in rural communities in Colombia, particularly the testimonies she collects from survivors of political abduction who were presumed dead, as well as the families of those who did not return. Her work both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently unspoken results of trauma.

In 1989, Salcedo began to make works in which she buried, covered, brushed, and fused domestic wooden furniture with cement. By distorting the familiar, she transforms our perception of home from a place of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation. In Untitled, a chair has been almost entirely encased in a block of cement, with only its wooden frame and hints of red cushion peeking through. Metal spikes pierce the object, acting as both a form of support and an instrument of violence. When pouring the cement, Salcedo took care to preserve its rough and haphazard surface. Combining the impenetrable materials of cement and metal and the humble delicacy of the chair, Salcedo creates a strong sense of physical tension. Typically, we arrange wooden chairs in relation to a table or desk, but here the sculpture faces the wall, and at an uncomfortably close distance. For Salcedo, the installation of the work is as important as the materials from which it is made. The placement of the chair suggests confinement and punishment, both for the viewer, who cannot neither sit down nor fully view the sculpture, and for an imaginary detainee undergoing interrogation.

This work adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture, and of works in all mediums by artists who explore the subjects of war and sociopolitical violence, including Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.35

Since the mid-1980s, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has made works that attest to the human consequences of criminal and political violence. Salcedo’s sculptures and installations are informed by her extensive research and fieldwork in rural communities in her native Colombia, particularly the testimonies of victims of political persecution. Her work both honors the memory of lives lost and contemplates the frequently unspoken and lingering effects of trauma. Her unorthodox medium is a combination of domestic furniture and unyielding building materials such as concrete and steel. By distorting the familiar, she transforms our perception of home from a place of comfort and safety to one of disorienting dislocation. Instead of engaging the traditional methods of sculpture such as carving or molding, she realizes her work through acts of physical and symbolic violence: filing, scratching, bending, beating, fusing, melting, and burying.

Atrabiliarios is one of Salcedo’s earliest and most powerful depictions of violence, suffering, and loss. The title references the Latin expression atra bilis, which describes the melancholy associated with mourning. Worn shoes are inserted into a cavity in the gallery wall that is then covered with stretched cow bladder. This skin-like membrane is coarsely sewn to the wall with surgical thread, creating a milky layer between the viewer and the discarded footwear. Salcedo collected the shoes from the families of desaparecidos: the people, mainly women, who have mysteriously “disappeared” from their homes, a method of social control commonly practiced in Colombia during the internal conflict between paramilitary and guerilla forces in the 1980s. Now discarded, the once-lived-in shoes offer a metaphor for the body’s absence, a specter of loss and death summoned further by the sewn “skin” that encloses them, calling to mind post-autopsy stitching.

This work adds to the ICA/Boston’s strong and ever-expanding collection of sculpture and of works in all mediums by artists who explore the subject of war and sociopolitical violence, including Kader Attia, Louise Bourgeois, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, and Yasumasa Morimura.

2014.33

Known for her spectacular adaptation of existing materials, Cornelia Parker poetically transforms objects through conceptual and physical processes. She brings an elegant sculptural hand to the evocative metaphors she conjures in deeply compelling works.

Wedding Ring Drawing (Circumference of a Living Room) captures the conceptual richness and visual delight of much of Parker’s work. In this case, she quite literally draws the symbolic found elements, two wedding rings, into new metaphorical forms. The gold was melted into an ingot and drawn into a single thread approximately 40 feet long. Its lengthening suggested to the artist the dimensions of a living room, an association that added a note of domesticity to the unfolding narrative. She then trapped the thread between two sheets of glass, creating a “drawing” that lyrically winds around and over itself, delicately describing loops and turns, knots and kinks. Parker simultaneously evokes the history of these two abandoned rings and the possibility of renewed connection, both fragile and beautiful.

In 2000, Cornelia Parker’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States was organized by the ICA/Boston and traveled nationally. This exhibition, a landmark for both the artist and the museum, received critical acclaim as well as popular interest in Boston and beyond. This important moment in the ICA’s history is marked by the presence of two Parker works in the collection, including Wedding Ring Drawing.

2006.6

Cornelia Parker is known for her poetic transformation of existing materials, which she achieves through processes that are both physical and conceptual. With an elegant sculptural hand she constructs works that function as richly evocative metaphors.

Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) is an outstanding example of Parker’s suspended sculptures. This major installation piece is constructed from the charred residue of an actual case of suspected arson. Here, Parker uses the materials as found, without transforming their physical nature. Yet in her hands, they constitute a spectacular explosion of form in space as the once-glowing, now-blackened embers are precisely hung to create a forest of charcoal fragments. Parker’s sculpture can be considered formally in relation to the rich tradition of recent British sculpture, by artists ranging from Richard Long to Tony Cragg. It also captures the forensic fascination evident in so much of Parker’s work, evoking through its title the malicious intent of an arsonist, making her sculpture the perfect vehicle for both dazzling visual experience and vivid imaginings.

Cornelia Parker’s major ICA/Boston show in 2000 proved to be a landmark exhibition for both the artist and the institution. Parker’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, it won critical accolades and popular attention in Boston and reached still wider audiences on a national tour. Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) marks this important moment in the ICA’s history.

2006.5

Since the 1960s, Annette Messager has used photography, knitting, drawing, collage/assemblage, and other techniques to engage issues of the body, gender, and identity. With imagery that is poetic, humorous, and morbid, she interrogates assumptions around femininity and exposes the cultural forces that shape our ideas about what it means to be a woman.

​In the series The Story of Dresses, Messager inserts dresses into shallow wooden cases covered with glass. Along with the clothing, she includes such items as small photographs of body parts, painted images, and printed words. Because of the nature of their contents, the cases conjure coffins—they seem to allude to the body and life of a woman who is no longer present. The work’s title suggests that the real story does not concern the person herself but rather the objects and images that surround her. 

As part of her work, Messager has created a number of roles for herself, including those of “the trickster,” “the practical woman,” and “the peddler.” Like the personas she assumes, the dresses and images in the cases suggest that identity is something unfixed, that it can be “worn” like an item of clothing. The objects also evoke relics and votive images (images of saints or body parts given to churches during the Middle Ages), in line with Messager’s frequent invocation of religious imagery. During her childhood, her father exposed her to the stained glass windows and altarpieces of medieval churches, and she often draws on these aesthetic experiences in her work.

​Messager has become a key figure in postwar art, and The Story of Dresses augments the ICA/Boston’s collection of works by important female artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

2014.31

Working in sculpture, drawing, photography, and site-specific installation, Roni Horn explores the very nature of art, especially as it relates to site, environment, and identity. In an interview on Art21, Horn describes the importance of words to her process: “I move through language to arrive at the visual.” From this conceptual basis, she crafts objects and arrangements that often implicate the viewer, either through spatial structures or direct address. Frequently aligned with the aesthetics of minimalism, Horn uses repetition and doubling to invite viewers to look closely and to discover the subtle differences that constitute the world. Through her artistic practice, she seeks to activate the space between the perceptible and imperceptible. Since the 1980s, she has frequently visited Iceland, finding inspiration in its remarkable landscape and relative isolation.

Key and Cue, No. 288 forms part of a body of text-based sculpture that Horn began in the 1990s. In this work, an aluminum bar propped against the wall draws attention to the supports of both floor and wall. Having more than one face, the sculpture refuses to be seen or known all at once. From one vantage point, an abstract pattern of black lines resembles a barcode. From another, these embedded plastic bands cohere into a line of text, an extract from poem 288 by Emily Dickinson, whose writing has had a strong influence on Horn. As the viewer shifts from seeing to reading, the line of text, a statement and question—“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?”—moves the viewer beyond the physical object into a space of introspection.

Key and Cue, No. 288 adds to the ICA/Boston sculpture collection, especially works that engage with seriality, such as examples by Tara Donovan, Sheila Hicks, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and Andrew Witkin.

2014.27

Jenny Holzer’s medium is words and ideas, and she uses a variety of vehicles—from stickers, posters, and T-shirts to benches, bronze plaques, electronic displays, and the Internet—to disseminate her piercingly incisive phrases in public spaces. Holzer incorporates strategies from mass media and advertising to interrogate the effects of rhetoric. Rooted in conceptual art, semiotics, and feminism, her text-based works engage spectators in fundamental questions: Who is speaking? Where does this text come from? What does it mean? Answers, however, remain productively elusive. Her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—tend to elide authorship, unlocking a sort of societal subconscious from which hacked-up bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth. Like many other artists who came of age in the 1980s, Holzer addresses such issues as violence, war, sex, power, and money, harnessing the power of text and public space to do so.

​Reminiscent of memorial benches found in public parks, this small marble sculpture has been etched with the phrase “HANDS ON YOUR BREAST CAN KEEP YOUR HEART BEATING,” taken from Holzer’s the Survival Series, 1983–85. The marble bench—a form typically associated with classical statuary, gravestones, and tombs—lends a weighty permanence to its epitaph-like inscription. Enigmatic, the phrase suggests both a sexual advance and a patriotic gesture. Like much of Holzer’s work, the sculpture raises questions about the many forms of desire and how they might intersect with nationalism, sex, and consumerism.

​This bench from the Survival Series adds to the ICA/Boston collection of sculpture, especially those that engage with seriality by artists such as Tara Donovan, Sheila Hicks, Roni Horn, Charles LeDray, Josiah McElheny, and Andrew Witkin.

2014.26

By combining disparate elements—some readymade and some crafted—Rachel Harrison challenges viewers to explore layers of metaphor, allusion, and double-entendre. Since the early 1990s, she has been recognized for the wry humor she brings to political satire. As grotesque as they are humorous, Harrison’s sculptures evince her consideration of the global traffic of pop-culture images as well as their correspondence with art history. Her work is often considered alongside other contemporary assemblage sculptors such as Isa Genzken, Paul McCarthy, and Franz West.

Jack Lemmon shares the same name as the comic actor, who was commonly referred to as “Dickhead” by his co-star in the film version of The Odd Couple. The sculpture also prominently features a rubber mask of Dick Cheney—a figure many hold responsible for the controversial political policies of the last decade—as one side of the mannequin’s head. Whether sociopolitical satire or sheer folly, the sculpture is purposefully playful and ambiguous, inviting viewers to build narratives by interpreting complementary elements. As Harrison argues in a 2008 interview in Bomb, “Artworks need to unfold slowly over time in real space to contest the instantaneous distribution and circulation of images with which we’ve become so familiar.”

The addition of Jack Lemmon enhances the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of sculpture, which includes works by Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker, and adds a new dimension by representing politically engaged figurative sculpture.

2014.17