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AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot)

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Sharing artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago's Contemporary Art department. Automated thanks to @andreitr.bsky.social and @botfrens.bsky.social

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AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 35m

Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley https://www.artic.edu/artworks/90579/

Known as an innovative abstract painter, Barnett Newman made a small but significant body of sculptural work, from which Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley stands out as uncommonly literal and blatantly political. Newman made this sculpture in the fall of 1968 for an exhibition organized by Chicago’s Richard Feigen Gallery as a forum for artists to protest the brutal treatment of anti–Vietnam War demon- strators during the previous summer’s Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago. Richard J. Daley, then mayor, was largely seen as responsible for the violent police tactics deployed. What Newman called a “Lace Curtain“ is in reality a hefty screen constructed from barbed wire and splashed with bloodred paint.

Gift of Annalee Newman

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 2h

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/184213/

David Wojnarowicz was identified by The New York Times critic, Michael Kimmelman, in 1992 as "one of the most influential artists of the 1980s." Wojnarowicz first emerged in the context of the brash and brief burst of energy that took place in New York’s East Village in the beginning of the 1980s. Fusing the aesthetics of the punk-music scene, a keen awareness of an ethnically diverse street culture, and a committed sense of political activism, Wojnarowicz’s earliest works were often informal and ephemeral. The 1980s East Village scene in which Wojnarowicz thrived produced a number of artists who went on to broader recognition, including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jenny Holzer, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. His paintings, photographs, installations, performances, and experimental films are distinguished by raw expressions of rage and personal longing. Wojnarowicz’s work, most often concerned with the inequities and disenfranchisement of living with HIV and AIDS, ranged from the intentionally shrill to the elegiac. A gifted writer, the poignant beauty of his vision is perhaps best glimpsed through his published journal excerpts, short stories, and autobiographical essays. Indeed, the artist is now widely recognized for the strength of his artistic expression both in the visual arts and with the written word. The artist died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-eight.

Gift of Stuart and Susan Handler

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 3h

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/73423/

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 18h

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146895/

Kiki Smith has been instrumental in shifting the abstract rhetoric of the human form in art into a grounded conversation about the body, particularly as it is defined in social and political terms. Her figurative sculpture examines the physical and spiritual nature of the body by presenting it in an abject, fragmented, and damaged state. Untitled, which is one of only a few sculptures by Smith that investigates the male form, is executed in tissue-thin gampi paper—a fragile and ephemeral material—to convey the porous and permeable quality of skin. Here, as in much of Smith’s work, the artist engaged viewers in issues of individual and collective health and disease, heroization and victimization, and life and death.

Gift of Lannan Foundation

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AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 20h

Melville https://www.artic.edu/artworks/223333/

Gift of the estates of Walter Netsch and Dawn Clark Netsch

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 1d

Blue Note https://www.artic.edu/artworks/158639/

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 1d

Some Thames - Group C https://www.artic.edu/artworks/184581/

This selection of framed photographs belongs to a series of 80 different images that comprise Some Thames, which depicts the surface of the Thames River in central London. These works extend Roni Horn’s larger, serial investigation into the visual, literary, and metaphoric possibilities of water. The artist stated: “Some Thames is literally the idea of a finite thing having an infinite range of appearance or expression because of its inseparable relation to other things.” The Thames—alternately transparent and opaque, violent and still, pastoral and urban, cleansing and dirty—offers a range of broad metaphors for an understanding of self. Some Thames, like most of Horn’s work, is an abstracted self-portrait. Self, like this river, is transcendently fluid, ultimately unknowable.

Restricted gift of Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation; through prior gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison, and Muriel Kallis Newman in memory of Albert Hardy Newman; Oscar L. Gerber Memorial Endowment; and Robert and Marlene Baumgarten Memorial Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 1d

September 12 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/199001/

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 1d

Many Mansions https://www.artic.edu/artworks/137125/

Many Mansions is the first in Kerry James Marshall’s series of five large-scale paintings depicting public housing projects in Chicago and Los Angeles such as Rockwell Gardens, Wentworth Gardens, or, as in Many Mansions, Stateway Gardens. Struck by the absurdity of the term “garden” to describe these failed solutions to low-income housing, Marshall was inspired to represent the profound contradictions of living in such an environment. Many Mansions is filled with ironic and startling juxtapositions of the real and artificial—from the unnaturally cheerful landscape to the three haunting, ebony-skinned figures dressed in nostalgic Sunday best. The title of the painting, visible on the red ribbon above, is a variation on Christ’s oft-quoted remark found in John [14:2]: “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.”

Max V. Kohnstamm Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 1d

Painting 190 x 222 cm, 5 February, 2012 (Peinture 190 x 222 cm, 5 février 2012) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/241158/

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 1d

TICK-TOCK JELLY CLOCK COSMOTRON https://www.artic.edu/artworks/109890/

Restricted gift of Janss Foundation; Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 2d

Ice (4) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146997/

Through prior gift of Joseph Winterbotham; gift of Lannan Foundation

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 2d

Head #3 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/48509/

In 1969, during a vacation in Rome, Willem de Kooning was invited by the American sculptor Herzl Emanuel to his nearby bronze foundry. While there, de Kooning began working with clay and, over the course of the next couple of weeks, made a series of small-scale figures, one of which Emanuel cast in bronze. Encouraged by the sculptor Henry Moore, de Kooning continued creating works that he called “painting in three dimensions.” The heavy, exaggerated form of Head #3 recalls the contorted figures from de Kooning’s paintings. Reflecting on his sculptures, the artist stated: “In some ways, clay is even better than oil. You can work and work on a painting but you can’t start over again with the canvas like it was before you put the first stroke down. . . . But with clay . . . if I don’t like what I did, or I changed my mind, I can break it down and start over. It’s always fresh.”

Restricted gift of Margaret Fisher

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 2d

The Order of the Angels (Die Ordnung der Engel) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/104086/

Restricted gift of Nathan Manilow Foundation; Lewis and Susan Manilow, Samuel A. Marx funds

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 2d

Gold (e) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/181121/

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 2d

Neon Wrapping Neon Bulbs III https://www.artic.edu/artworks/222379/

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 3d

Motel Cabin https://www.artic.edu/artworks/97395/

Gift of the Robert A. Lewis Fund in memory of William and Polly Levey

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 3d

Remainders: Novel, Sculpture, Film https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146917/

Interested in notions of collection and consumption, Allen Ruppersberg reconsiders texts, songs, narratives, photographs, and memorabilia culled from American vernacular culture. Remainders: Novel, Sculpture, Film is an installation that mimics a publisher’s remainders display in a bookstore. The artist manipulated the presentation in provocative ways: inserting fictional titles and authors onto book covers; printing the back covers and inside jacket flaps of each book with the entire screenplay of a 1960s educational film that warns of the dangers of hallucinogenic drugs; and inserting into each book a series of full-page, black-and-white stills from the artist’s film archive. Installed in a museum setting, the texts become a sculptural work that is seen instead of read.

Gift of Lannan Foundation

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 3d

Welcome to the Wadsworth: A Museum Tour https://www.artic.edu/artworks/193358/

$Andrea Fraser is a performance and video artist who has been regarded primarily as a pioneer of "institutional critique," since she structures her work around existing museum practices and protocols such as gallery talks and welcome speeches. Although they often begin rationally, her performances progressively unravel, frequently devolving into discussion of eccentric topics or performances of taboo behaviors. Spanning more than a decade, the five works in the Art Institute's collection are among Fraser's earliest and most influential creations.Welcome to the Wadsworth, which was commissioned by the Wadsworth Atheneum, documents a tour Fraser led there in April 1991. Rather than conducting visitors through the galleries, the artist takes them outside as she circles the perimeter of the museum campus, discussing the history of Hartford, Connecticut, as well as its fractured social and economic circumstances.— Entry, Film, Video, New Media, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 35 (1), pp. 98–99. Contemporary Art Discretionary Fund; restricted gift of James Cahn and Jeremiah Collatz$

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 3d

Curtain https://www.artic.edu/artworks/197779/

Through prior bequest of Florence S. McCormick; Ann M. Vielehr Prize Fund; Oscar L. Gerber Memorial Endowment

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 4d

Selected Works: Reel 2; Selected Works: Reel 3 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/47132/

At once amusing and enigmatically strange, William Wegman’s work employs a wide variety of media, including painting, photography, text, and video. Wegman was among the first generation of video artists, and over the course of his career he has made over 150 works in the medium. The selection presented here was shown alongside Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up, Nos. 1–4 in the Art Institute’s 1974 exhibition Idea and Image in Recent Art.
In the early 1970s, Wegman began filming his own experimental performances, creating pieces that were a combination of documentation, parody, and subtle criticism of art making and artists, including himself. Within these, he demonstrated his fascination with linguistics and semiotics through the use of palindromes, puns, and fragmentary dialogue. Wegman was not alone in this interest—in the early 1970s, prominent artists such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Ed Ruscha, among others, shared his focus on language.
Selected Works is composed of short videos whose durations range from sixteen seconds to just over four minutes. Reels two and three include playful demonstrations and sales pitches for fictional consumer goods that take the form of television advertisements and infomercials. In Massage Chair, for example, Wegman talks for more than a minute as he attempts to pass off an uncomfortable plastic chair as a revolutionary invention. Other works in the compilation involve the artist’s Weimeraner, Man Ray, his faithful companion and collaborator for over twelve years. While the works featuring Wegman alone are often humorous, Man Ray’s presence is instantly endearing. In The Kiss, Wegman lays on the floor with a bone in his mouth while Man Ray attempts to wrestle it away.
Wegman’s videos, much like his other works, are economical yet poignant. At first glance, they are undoubtedly engaging as portraits of the relationship between humans and animals. Less expected, however, are the ways in which his early-1970s critique of television culture still resonates today.

Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 4d

The First Part of the Return from Parnassus https://www.artic.edu/artworks/186049/

Cy Twombly’s famously inimitable art is tensely balanced between expressively abstract and suggestively pictorial impulses. His work originated under the auspices of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s and advanced uniquely along lines afforded by its freedoms. Twombly’s entire enterprise is characterized by unruly marks—stammering, energetic, and raw—that merge drawing, painting, writing, and symbolic glyphs. Scrawled, overwritten, erased, or willfully misspelled, words cite people, places, events, and stories nominally derived from Greco-Roman culture and history, especially literature, poetry, and myth.

Through prior gift of Mary and Leigh Block; Marian and Samuel Klasstorner and Major Acquistions Endowment Income funds; Wirt D. Walker Trust; Estate of Walter Aitken; Director's Fund; Helen A. Regenstein Endowment; Laura T. Magnuson Acquisition Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 4d

Working Model for UNESCO Reclining Figure https://www.artic.edu/artworks/11441/

In the 1950s, Henry Moore executed a number of important public commissions, including Reclining Figure for the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in Paris. The Art Institute’s sculpture is one of six smaller bronze versions of the unique, over-16-foot-long marble figure that Moore installed at UNESCO in 1958. The artist looked to many cultures—particularly to enduring examples of art from ancient Greece and the Yucatán region of Mexico—to give his figural works their monumental forms and profound resonance with the art of the past. This reclining figure connects not only to history but also to the earth—its swelling masses and rounded voids suggest the female form as well as a landscape of valleys, mountains, and caves.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold H. Maremont

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 4d

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/230687/

Shiraga Fujiko, an artist associated with the first phase of the Gutai movement, characterized the collage materials she incorporated into her paintings as “dangerous things.” In Untitled, these included large shards of broken glass interwoven with torn sheets of Japanese washi paper, which she gradually layered with wax and oil paint to produce a range of textures and translucencies. The presence of hazardous materials reflects an aggressive stance toward traditions of fine art and stands in contrast to both the delicate effects she achieved and the work’s subtle palette. At the same time, Shiraga’s deployment of these media aligned her with fellow Gutai artists who pierced, burned, and shot at the surfaces of their works.
From 1955 to 1961, as Japan slowly recovered from the devastation of World War II, Shiraga helped inaugurate the Gutai Art Association, an artists’ group named for the Japanese word for “concreteness.” Embracing the vitality of raw materials and the authenticity of gesture, she and her colleagues championed abstraction, advocating for individual self-expression in postwar Japan. While Gutai artists positioned themselves in dialogue with Abstract Expressionist painters active in the United States and Europe such as Jackson Pollock and Georges Mathieu, they also helped change the critical conversation around Abstract Expressionism by underscoring the aspects of performance and physical interaction that had always been part of the movement.

Kate S. Buckingham Endowment Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 4d

Gold (b) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/181104/