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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

When creating her diverse works, Arlene Shechet (born 1951 in New York) embraces chance processes, especially those dictated by materials that change from one state to another (such as plaster). 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.” For much of her career, Shechet has worked predominantly in clay, a medium historically overlooked in mainstream art discourses because of its associations with craft and domesticity

Essential Head was part of the ICA’s 2015 exhibition, Arlene Shechet: All At Once, and is an important early work by Shechet, emblematic of the artist’s sustained interest in East Asian art and the possibilities of chance. In 1983, Shechet visited the ninth-century Indonesian temple compound of Borobudor, one of the largest Buddhist monuments in the world. She describes it as “an experience of sculpture as a language for transmitting information, feelings, beliefs, and thoughts.” Ten years later, Shechet created a series of heads—including Essential Head—whose materials and visual vocabulary are similar to her Buddha-inspired sculptures she created during the same period. To make the heads, Shechet sets 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 one hand while she continues to pour with the other. Through this process, Shechet plays with chance and emphasizes the physicality necessary to create the finished object.

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

Haegue Yang makes intricate and visually-compelling sculptures from largely banal materials, including clothing racks, light bulbs, and bamboo roots. She first became known for her experiential installations consisting of venetian blinds—an important material for the artist due to its binary properties of folding and unfolding, transparency and privacy. As Yang said in a 2014 interview in Ocula, “My driving interests and motivations are often concrete, but my artistic language is one of abstraction. Abstraction is, for me, a way of thinking and working through collective and individual narratives across different histories, generations, and locations.”

The Intermediate – Inceptive Sphere comes from a larger series of straw works entitled The Intermediates. Some of the works reference actual architectural structures or are stand-alone sculptural objects or figures. Each is decorated with Asian folk objects, such as a Korean bride’s headpiece and bells that are hung from the necks of cows in India or used in shamanistic rituals, all collected by Yang herself. The critical material is straw, a familiar, even primitive material, but here Yang uses artificial, plastic straw dismissing all potential nostalgia or desire for a primal past. As with most of her sculptures, this work evokes an in-between, intermediate state, between the real and artificial, civilization and nature, and, largely, the human and spirit worlds.

This work reflects the museum’s commitment to have a more global program and to explore how artists are reconciling the ever-changing concept of the global, especially the fraught binary between the so-called East and West. In addition to the 2013 Art Wall, Yang’s work was included in the ICA/Boston’s 2014 exhibition Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present. The Intermediate – Inceptive Sphere connects with the museum’s commitment to critically examine craft in contemporary art, as seen in the work of Nick Cave and Arlene Shechet, and joins significant sculptures by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Marisol, and Rachel Harrison.

2016.04

Over the last thirty-five years, Diane Simpson has produced a unique body of work founded on the relationship between precise, diagrammatic drawings and the uncanny sculptures they generate. Simpson begins by translating details she encounters in daily life and through research—elements of clothing, parts of the body, domestic and public archi-tectural details—into rigorous schematic drawings rendered at a 45-degree angle. From these plans she retranslates each detail back again into an object in the world. She creates each sculpture through labor-intensive fabrication, using materials that range from corrugated cardboard and MDF (medium-density fiberboard) to aluminum, wool, polyester, poplar, faux fur, mahogany, brass, copper, and steel. During this process, her original sources are wholly transformed.

Elements of clothing are Simpson’s most frequent subject. Drawing inspiration from both physical facts and their social contexts, Simpson’s decisions about color, bodily proportions, clothing references, fashion, and style add pointed specificity to each sculpture’s abstracted form. By exaggerating details such as sleeves and necklines, and often highlighting ancillary garments that cover and hide, Simpson’s outsized forms make a big deal out of the marginal. Vest (Scalloped) is one of only a few works that appropriate an existing material element: the base of the work is a stand from a dress form, which Simpson has wholly transformed by applying a thick, skinlike coating in a turquoise reminiscent of a 1950s appliance color. The upper vest form is made of a psychedelically patterned linoleum on one side and an elegant, minimalist combination of burlap and copper on the other side. Simpson is committed to the small details that normally function as supporting characters and that, by the end of her labor-intensive process, have gained new stature and created a playful distortion of everyday life.

Vest (Scalloped) joins other sculptural works in the ICA/Boston collection that address the body, gender, and the domestic, by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Josh Faught, and Doris Salcedo.

2016.08

Cady Noland emerged on the art scene in New York in the 1980s, and is now among the leading voices of her generation. Drawing from mass media images such as press photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald and Patty Hearst and found objects from the urban landscape such as beer cans, American flags, and police barricades, Noland’s collages, sculptures, and mixed-media installations examine the underbelly of the American psyche, specifically the fascination with celebrity and violence.

Noland is perhaps best known for her sculptural assemblages of the later 1980s and ’90s that incorporate detritus from American consumer and vernacular culture. A leading example of this vein, Objectification Process deftly explores the American psyche through its most potent symbol of national unity and pageantry—the flag. The motif populates a number of her works from this period, but rather than hoisted high and unfurled, Noland’s flag is often draped or hung, limp or pierced. Objectification Process features a rolled-up flag placed on an orthopedic walker, suggesting a deflated, ailing, or immobilized nation. Noland’s incorporation of walkers, canes, police barricades, and fences conveys narratives of containment, confinement, and violence. The juxtaposed elements in Objectification Process create a powerful critique of the state of American nationalism and identity, a topic that still resonates deeply three decades later.

Although Noland has largely withdrawn from the art world, she continues to have a vital influence on younger artists working in sculpture and collage, including Ellen Gallagher and Rachel Harrison, both represented in the ICA/Boston collection. Noland’s provocative exploration of the more nefarious aspects of American culture paved the way for a generation of artists who also use methods of appropriation in their critique of culture, including Anne Collier, Leslie Hewitt, and Lorna Simpson. Objectification Process joins Noland’s screenprint Untitled, 1989, creating a varied representation of this important artist in the ICA’s collection.

800.16.02

One of the most original artists working today, Ron Nagle has made stunning small sculptures since the 1950s. A student of ceramics pioneer Peter Voulkos (who taught ceramics at Black Mountain College), Nagle participated in an important dialogue with other artists working in the medium, like Ken Price and Jim Melchert. At the beginning of his career, Nagle made funky, rough cups and vessels out of earthenware, and by the early 1960s was using low-fire, slip-casting techniques to make smoother surfaces and bring into play the luminous colors that would become his calling card. He also began gluing elements together, disrupting the purity of ceramics and allowing more play and flexibility with form. In vessels no higher than a few inches, Nagle references experiences of the body and architecture in a vocabulary that draws on abstract expressionism, minimalism, and the California Light and Space movement.

Although he has been influenced by such diverse artists as Joseph Albers, Philip Guston, and Giorgio Morandi, Nagle is equally attached to popular culture: “I’m just as moved by seeing a 1934 DeSoto Airflow or by listening to ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by the Kinks as I am by most things in a museum.” In the irreverent Boston Scrambler, pocked polyurethane surfaces create a dynamic contrast with the glassiness of an adjacent porcelain finish. Like many of Nagle’s works from 2015, this one references the landscape as well as the body: tentacle-like forms evoke vegetal matter as well as limbs, and the baselike block and its liquidy cover conjure ground and water, habitat for a strange pink form. Nagle invariably imbues his work with linguistic humor. Contributing to an obvious allusion to the Boston Strangler, the word “scrambler,” in Nagle’s lexicon, is a toupee or comb-over, amusingly recasting the imagery.

Since the 2010s, Nagle has diverged from pure ceramic processes in innovative ways. Boston Scrambler joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection that approach body, cultural references, and new approaches to traditional sculptural process by artists including Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison, and Arlene Shechet.

2016.03