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In 1969, Robert Rohm’s manila rope reliefs were included in three important group exhibitions: Lucy Lippard’s 557, 087 at the World’s Fair Pavilion in Seattle; Marcia Tucker and James Monte’s Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and String and Rope at the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. These three presentations defined the emerging movements of conceptual art, process art, and fiber art, respectively. In his rope reliefs, Rohm united the three currents by giving equal weight to issues of idea, process, and material. Knotted into grid shapes and darkened with a brown, oil-based wood stain, these netlike structures were nailed directly onto the gallery walls. Rohm then performed a sequence of simple, minimal interventions that drastically altered the appearance of the original grids.

Rohm divided his rope sculptures into three categories based on the gestures he executed. He made the first set by stretching or relaxing the rope; the second, by cutting it; and the third, by piling it. Gravity is the common denominator in the three groups. Untitled, 1969, is a knotted grid that exemplifies the first body of work. For this piece, Rohm tacked a rectangular net along its perimeter to the wall and then removed the nails along the top and right edges. He had anticipated that this would result in a crisp diagonal as with folded paper; instead, the rope slouched into an asymmetrical catenary curve. As it so often did, the material behaved contrary to Rohm’s prediction, introducing the element of chance.

Chance was also a factor in Rohm’s second and most influential series––rope grids he cut at predetermined points, such as Untitled, 1970. These cuts nearly always followed a logical pattern he had plotted on a preliminary diagram. Paradoxically, these methodical, orderly cuts caused the loose ends to dangle and droop into irregular, and at times even chaotic, new compositions. Rohm created a tension between rationality and randomness; after the grid’s connections were severed, its organized, geometric pattern devolved into disarray, illustrating the law of entropy that preoccupied many American artists during the 1970s.  The configuration of each sculpture provides the viewer with enough visual information to identify where Rohm sliced the grid and to mentally reconstruct the trajectory of the rope’s descent. “Visually, if it’s clear enough, one would read that that’s what happened,” he explains in an Artscanada article. “It’s not an illusion, it’s what actually did happen.”

Due to the ephemeral, disposable nature of Rohm’s early media, most of those early pieces were recycled or discarded soon after they were made. Like many important examples of conceptual and process-based works of the 1960s and ’70s, these two Rohm sculptures exist as instructions until they are realized in rope. Working with Rohm, and later his widow, Candy Adriance, the ICA/Boston obtained both the specific instructions for the works and recommendations of rope type. These works join other sculptures in fiber in the collection by artists such as Françoise Grossen and Sheila Hicks that appeared in Fiber: Sculpture, 1960–Present, organized by Jenelle Porter, former Mannion Family Senior Curator, and enable the ICA to give a more complete art-historical story about approaches to process and material in sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s.

2015.28

Sherrie Levine is a multimedia artist who works in photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, among other materials, to create pieces that challenge deeply rooted notions of artistic authenticity, originality, autonomy, the purity of medium, and immutability.

Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) is one of Levine’s series of knot paintings (the name is a pun on “not painting”). Each of these works uses the common building material of plywood, which is composed of many thin layers of wood glued together. Plywood is often used to build crates for artworks, though here the everyday material becomes the material support of a painting. Levine paints in gold over the naturally occurring knots within the wood, a process that again conflates high and low culture, granting a seemingly banal material aesthetic relevance and material worth.

Though fitting in with her oeuvre at large in its critique of modernist concepts, such as the end of painting, Untitled (Gold Knot: 6) complements the other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection by providing a modification of her signature strategy of appropriation. This piece is also an important reference for works by other artists in the collection, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman, artists who, like Levine, are considered part of the so-called Pictures Generation, known for their appropriation of images and critical examination of popular culture and consumerism.

2015.19

Sherrie Levine is known for appropriating the work of canonical male artists in order to deconstruct accepted art-historical concepts like originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium and suggest their inherent mutability.

Over a decade after she began reproducing works by famous male artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Walker Evans, and Willem de Kooning, Levine created a cast bronze replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, one of the first readymade sculptures, a commercially manufactured urinal that Duchamp removed from a functional context and presented as a work of art. In Levine’s Fountain (Buddha), she recasts Duchamp’s work in a critical light, challenging the nearly universal acceptance and celebration of Duchamp’s early twentieth-century radicalism. Levine subverts the everyday quality of Duchamp’s readymade by casting the work in bronze, a valuable material with strong currency in the history of sculpture. Levine collapses multiple associations within this work, as the low-culture urinal is presented as a bronze masterwork. The title points to the visual similarity of the upturned urinal with Buddhist reliquary sculptures, offering many pathways for reconsidering the original work.

Fountain (Buddha) is one of several works in the ICA/Boston collection that critique accepted notions of artistic creativity, the authenticity and commodification of the art object, and the nature of the art-historical canon.

2015.18

An important female artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of what was later dubbed the Pictures Generation, Sherrie Levine is known for her appropriation of canonical work by male artists. In the words of Douglas Crimp, Levine’s layered works draw from “pictures whose status is that of cultural myth,” as the artist “steals them away from their usual place in our culture and subverts their mythology.”

In 1983, Levine began to re-create printed reproductions of works by male modernists, raising questions of originality, authenticity, authorship, and the purity of medium. Chair Seat: 7 binds together the flatness of modernist painting, such as Frank Stella’s “stripe paintings,” with a readymade material—here a store-bought chair seat—creating an awkward combination of high and low culture, the abstract and the everyday. While modernist painting aspired to visual flatness and disdained decoration, Levine undermines both principles by overlaying abstract painting on a three-dimensional surface intended for bodily use.

Chair Seat: 7 joins other works by Levine in the ICA/Boston’s collection to represent the breadth of this influential artist’s oeuvre in terms of media and technique. This piece also complements works by other female artists of the so-called Pictures Generation, including Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman.

2015.17

The figurative sculptures of Marisol (born Marisol Escobar) are as distinctive as they are visually eclectic and psychologically probing. Marisol combines many influences and materials in her work, from the angular and rough forms of folk art and pre-Columbian art to the distortions of cubism and the color of pop art, the movement with which she is most closely associated.

First exhibited in Marisol’s 1966 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, Couple No. 1 presents a pair of illustrated figures contained within a wooden block. The bright crimson top and the white fabric cone, which extends six feet into space with the help of a motor, distinguishes the figure on the left from the more spectral, carefully rendered, and feminine figure on the right. Shaded three-dimensional elements contrast with two-dimensional blocks of color, and the white-cone face contrasts with the more detailed face beside it, suggesting the duality of anonymity and individualization embodied not only by two people, and two genders, as the title might imply, but also by any single person. With remarkably minimal means, Marisol communicates an element of pathos in her rendering of the couple, which speaks to her skill and insight in representing the human condition.

This work is one among a number of figurative sculptures in the ICA/Boston collection, including works by Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith. Couple No. 1 also reflects the ICA’s commitment to women artists and to figures who may have been historically under-recognized.

2015.27

Sam Falls’s artistic production is distinguished by the exploratory combination of painting, photography, and sculpture with natural phenomena––from the pooling of rain to the bleaching of the sun. Connected to historical movements such as land art, minimalism, and process art, Falls’s practice hinges on duration and perception as they are expressed and embodied in nature and art.

Untitled (Topanga, CA, Umbrella 17) displays the fabric of an umbrella removed from its support and pinned to the wall. The colorful pie-shaped sections form a simple hexagon, bringing to mind minimalist painting, the sculptural readymade, and a pop sensibility. To make this work, Falls first cut off umbrella panels and exposed one group of them to the sun for a prolonged period. He then interspersed these with the remainder of the panels, which had been protected from the sun. Brilliant red and deep blue panels thus sit next to their pale and faded counterparts, generating a subtle modulation of color. Like much of Falls’s hybrid production, Untitled (Topanga, CA, Umbrella 17) possesses a marked casualness and accessibility while touching on rich and deep topics such as the art object’s relationship to time and change, viewer perception, and artistic intentionality.

This work joins sculptures in the ICA/Boston collection by artists such as Rachel Harrison, Charles LeDray, and Sherrie Levine who are also engaged with the history of the readymade and assemblage. Untitled (Topanga, CA, Umbrella 17) brings this tradition to an exploration of the perceptual and constructive processes of nature and the environment.

2015.07

In a career spanning over twenty years, Arlene Shechet has made diverse works by embracing the chance processes dictated by materials that change from one state to another before solidifying as a finished object. According to Shechet, working with variable materials such as plaster, cast paper, glass, and ceramic is “like stopping time, creating a pause, in order to generate new ways to look at things.”

Shechet’s oeuvre ranges from series that draw on the forms and vocabulary of East Asian art to explorations of clay as a “three-dimensional drawing material.” During the last decade, she has worked predominantly in clay, a medium often overlooked in mainstream art discourses because of its associations with craft and domesticity. In 1983, Shechet visited the ninth-century temple compounds Prambanan and Borobudor in Indonesia, the latter being one of the largest Buddhist monuments in the world. Climbing among thousands of stone reliefs had a profound impact on Shechet, who described it as “an experience of sculpture as a language for transmitting information, feelings, beliefs, and thoughts.” Ten years later, Shechet made the first of several seated Buddha sculptures in plaster with applied paint skins. During the same period, she created a series of heads—including Essential Head—whose materials and visual vocabulary are similar to her Buddha-inspired sculptures. Though they are less overtly figurative, the form of the heads is drawn from the iconic portrait sculpture tradition of East Asian art. To make the heads, Shechet sets cut steel bars vertically into individually cast concrete blocks. As she grips the bar where it meets the base, she pours quick-drying plaster onto her clenched fist, grasping and forming with that hand while she continues to pour with the other. Through this process, Shechet both courts chance and emphasizes a physicality of making that becomes integral to the final object.

Essential Head is an important early work by the artist, emblematic of her sustained interest in East Asian art. The sculpture appeared in the ICA/Boston’s 2015 exhibition Arlene Shechet: All At Once, organized by former Mannion Family Senior Curator Jenelle Porter.

800.15.03

A renowned artist of the twentieth century who has had lasting influence, Louise Bourgeois is best known for her sculptural work. Influenced by surrealism and the work of émigré artists fleeing Europe during World War II, Bourgeois engaged a wide array of tactics—from enlargement to suspension and assemblage—to probe the human condition: its pain, fragility, violence, eroticism, and complexity.

In the early 1950s, Bourgeois began her series of spiral woman sculptures—swirling and suspended humanoid forms. In Spiral Woman, 1951–52, Bourgeois explores the abstract form and dynamism of the spiral by stacking blocks of wood on a steel rod. The spiral becomes rounded in Spiral Woman, 1984, implying flesh and folds, from which arms and legs protrude. Suspended by a cable from the ceiling, the sculpture resembles a corpse spinning on the axis of its demise.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA/Boston has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show Bourgeois in Boston. These sculptures join the ICA’s rich collection of work by Louise Bourgeois and add to holdings of figurative sculptures by such artists as Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith.

2015.12

A renowned artist of the twentieth century who has had lasting influence, Louise Bourgeois is best known for her sculptural work. Influenced by surrealism and the work of émigré artists fleeing Europe during World War II, Bourgeois engaged a wide array of tactics—from enlargement to suspension and assemblage—to probe the human condition: its pain, fragility, violence, eroticism, and complexity.

In the early 1950s, Bourgeois began her series of spiral woman sculptures—swirling and suspended humanoid forms. In Spiral Woman, 1951–52, Bourgeois explores the abstract form and dynamism of the spiral by stacking blocks of wood on a steel rod. The spiral becomes rounded in Spiral Woman, 1984, implying flesh and folds, from which arms and legs protrude. Suspended by a cable from the ceiling, the sculpture resembles a corpse spinning on the axis of its demise.

Since introducing Bourgeois to Boston audiences in a 1953 group exhibition, the ICA/Boston has featured her work in a number of exhibitions, including the major 2007–08 solo show Bourgeois in Boston. These sculptures join the ICA’s rich collection of work by Louise Bourgeois and add to holdings of figurative sculptures by such artists as Rachel Harrison, Juan Muñoz, and Kiki Smith.

2015.11

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, and filmmaker, Nancy Graves gained notoriety in the late 1960s for her realistic sculptures of camels. Throughout her career she explored the boundaries of art, especially its relationship to science, anthropology, and natural history. Her life-sized, realistic sculptures of camels made to look like taxidermy stood in stark contrast to minimalism and pop art in the late 1960s. After a period of working predominantly in painting and film, Graves returned to sculpture in the 1970s, though with diminished investment in verisimilitude and more integration of the playful lyricism of her paintings. In 1969, at the age of twenty-nine, Graves became the youngest person, and only the fifth woman, to be given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Graves’s Trace, a large-scale bronze and polychromed patina steel sculpture, is a paradigmatic example of this practice. The sculpture appears like a dynamic, wind-blown tree, its forked trunk of bright green rises from a red and brown foundation, with an undulating curve up toward the treetop. The canopy itself is composed of layered, multicolored sheets of grated steel, the amorphous forms of leaved branches punctuated by geometric lines and grids. Here, her enduring interest in the natural tends toward the poetic. As in much of her work, Graves approaches the natural world with a sense of wonder that endows her art with enigmatic beauty.

The addition of a large-scale sculpture from this period by Nancy Graves, one of the leading artists of her generation, introduces an important woman artist to the ICA/Boston’s collection and marks a major contribution to the museum’s holdings of sculptures by such artists as Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Rachel Harrison, and Keith Sonnier.

2016.16