AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot)

Jeff Wall uses state-of-the-art photographic and computer technology to create images that evoke the composition, scale, and ambitions of the grandest history paintings. His works frequently have the formal clarity of documentary photography or photojournalism, but he often relies on staged or constructed artifices. This image is the result of two years of work, during which the artist fused countless photographs of both documentary and fabricated scenes into a single, surreal whole. After taking pictures in two Vancouver cemeteries over the course of several months, Wall built an aquatic system in his studio, crafting the tank from a plaster cast of an actual grave. With the aid of marine-life specialists, the artist cultivated a living, underwater ecosystem identical to one found off the coast of Vancouver. In the finished product, the two worlds are married through a technical process that presents the illusion of a water-filled grave. The Flooded Grave therefore challenges the notion of the photograph as the record of a single moment in time; instead, it is an elaborate fantasy on the subconscious life of the image it projects. Promised gift of Pamela J. and Michael N. Alper; Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art; Harold L. Stuart Endowment; through prior acquisitions of the Mary and Leigh Block Collection

The Flooded Grave https://www.artic.edu/artworks/157160/

Featuring unusual and often banal materials such as industrial carpet and Styrofoam, Rudolf Stingel’s conceptual paintings and site-specific installations transform into dazzling pictorial statements. Sometimes produced through unexpected results, Stingel’s work deconstructs—and therefore demystifies—the processes of making art. His work often disrupts the perception of exhibition spaces and destabilizes the accepted hierarchy between the work and the context. Untitled is the first in Stingel’s series of iconic textural silver paintings—made by a process of coating the canvas in a single color, laying a piece of tulle over the surface, spraying the canvas with silver paint, and then removing the fabric to reveal lyrical, painterly creases on a luminous field of color. The silver surface disrupts the modernist monochrome, making it more contemporary, and adds a touch of glamour and decoration. Embracing nontraditional strategies in painting, as well as redefining the role of the artist, Stingel printed a step-by-step illustrated list of instructions in six languages, which reveals his technique and allows anyone who followed his “recipe” to create one of his paintings. Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/186720/

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

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

For over 50 years, Raimer Jochims has remained committed to painting contemplative, process-based abstractions. His mature work evolved out of his participation in monochromatic and optical painting movements in the 1960s and ’70s. Started in 1973, his uniquely shaped paintings originate from studied observations of wide-ranging source materials such as Buddha statues, Polynesian ancestor figures, Aztec pottery, Egyptian sculptures, and Chinese paintings. He uses small traces of these objects to create autonomous works lacking any obvious references to their origins. Ignoring historical and geographical differences, Jochims’s approach assimilates the resulting forms into innovative abstract statements. Jochims manipulates his painting supports as much as he does their surfaces. He contemplates each shape and selectively activates its edges by chipping the wood with tongs. Jochims then patiently chooses color gradations that seem to respond to the particular demands of the form: some shift quickly and dramatically, while others dissolve slowly and subtly. He later adds an open-ended title that does not necessarily relate directly to his source material but may trigger other associations such as cities, ancient cultures, influential artists, and mythical beings. Finally, he selects the placement and hanging height of each individual work according to color, dimension, and orientation. Using a distinctive methodology, Jochims creates new, autonomous pictorial forms with their own intricacies and self-reflexive logic. Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

Jericho III https://www.artic.edu/artworks/228846/

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David Levin

Lost Horizon https://www.artic.edu/artworks/70371/

Through prior gift of Arthur Keating

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

Kay Rosen uses words and letters as a means of examining the ways in which language structures knowledge— particularly in terms of awareness of self and place. Generally concerned with formal configurations of words and letters and with the gamesmanship involved in the deconstruction and reconstruction of language, her exceedingly clever, diagrammatic works consist of common phrases, poetic verse, and word plays based on synonyms and homonyms. These black-and-white paintings form a cornerstone of Rosen’s work from the late 1980s onward, reflecting an early and ongoing interest in themes such as systems and symmetry, the structure of individual letterforms, comparative structures of words, and humor. Walter M. Campana Memorial, Mr. and Mrs. Frank H. Armstrong, and Joseph N. Eisendrath prize funds; Virginia K. Headburg and Edward and Eleanor DeWitt funds

Hug Hugh Ugh https://www.artic.edu/artworks/190830/

Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund

Man and Female Nude Leaning on a Chair https://www.artic.edu/artworks/36193/

Trained as a jazz saxophonist, Larry Rivers discovered a parallel in and an innate talent for painting early on as well. Equally cerebral, sentimental, and provocative, he is considered a key proto-Pop artist—bridging the gap between the painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism, dominant during the 1950s, and Pop Art’s pointed return to figuration during the 1960s. Rivers was at the height of his renown by 1964, having introduced found objects and imagery, including stencils and other forms of lettering, into his canvases. The composition of Lions on the Dreyfus Fund III is at once complex and diffuse: striding lions, jostling letters, floating tails, and muscular brushstrokes achieve a lateral push and pull. Through its title and its legible content this work refers to the Dreyfus Fund, a mutual fund broker that has featured lions prominently in its advertisements and corporate logo. Mary and Leigh Block Fund for Acquisitions

Lions on the Dreyfus Fund III https://www.artic.edu/artworks/22182/

Through prior purchase from the Mary and Leigh Block Fund

Slip of the Tongue https://www.artic.edu/artworks/222988/

Since the late 1960s, William Leavitt has produced sculptural tableaux, works on paper, and performances that draw upon and embrace the blurred lines between real and fake that characterizes much of Southern California culture. The artist’s installations evoke a “theater of the ordinary,” quoting strangely familiar locations such as soap-opera sets, furniture showrooms, and suburban interiors. These constructions—always empty and pur- posefully incomplete—summon recognizable spaces but are also evidently artificial. The objects in Manta Ray are like characters in a play, ripe with potential. Leavitt has explained that in these works he is “trying to frame some story through an object or a painting or a situation that would lend itself to further narrative. Restricted gift of Stephanie Skestos Gabriele

Manta Ray https://www.artic.edu/artworks/222912/

For over 40 years, Charles Gaines has created rigorous, rule-based photographs, drawings, and prints to reveal systems of order and meaning. As a leading exponent of Conceptual Art in the 1970s, he created serialized representative images based on exacting, self-imposed constraints. His works use dense grids of hand-drawn lines, numbers, and colors to demonstrate methodical ways of realizing forms such as trees and the human body. His arbitrary yet exhaustive processes provide alternative ways of representing universally known images, thereby investigating their visual content and potential meaning. For Walnut Tree Orchard, Gaines photographed 26 barren trees in a documentary fashion then devised systems to map each organic shape on a hand-drawn grid on paper. In the first drawing, the unique form is painstakingly drawn as an outline and thus generalized into an iconic “tree” in flattened space. For the third and final representation, the tree is sequentially plotted with others that have come before it in the series—in this case, the ninth with the first eight. With quiet restraint, visual precision, exacting marks, and mathematical sequencing, Gaines depicts this seemingly familiar natural form with unexpected curiosity, neutrality, and richness. Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

Walnut Tree Orchard: Set 9 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/239634/

Gift of LaSalle Bank

"Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 16, 1996," from Beach Portraits https://www.artic.edu/artworks/180805/

Since 1974, Peter Dreher has produced a seemingly simple, yet complex body of work by faithfully painting more than 5,000 depictions of an empty drinking glass. The German series title Tag um Tag guter Tag (Day by Day, Good Day) comes from a translation of the Zen expression “Every day is a good day.” Dreher’s dedicated, monk-like studio routine follows a similarly optimistic renewal as he diligently reconsiders the same object, day after day and year after year. With extraordinary patience, discipline, and curiosity he never paints from memory; each engagement with the transparent glass and its surrounding environment constitutes a unique experience. He explains, “I didn’t plan to do it this way. I always knew that I would call it a day when the motivation stopped. It wasn’t a self-imposed compulsion, rather the joy surrounding the object.” Dreher’s enduring investigation of an ordinary object is a testament to his unwavering belief in the acts of perception and painting. Atmospheric reflections in the transparent glass vary from canvas to canvas, according to the time of day and type of lighting. The series is divided into painting done during the day and at night; the two settings are distinctly visible through delicately painted details of the studio window and a lamp used in the evening. The subtle permutations and surprising diversity within Dreher’s paintings distinguish his long-term project. Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

Day by day, good day (Tag um Tag gutter Tag) Nr. 2544 (Night) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/228838/

Gift of Judith Neisser; Modern and Contemporary Art Purchase Fund in honor of The Art Institute of Chicago, United States Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2001

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/158462/

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

demonstration https://www.artic.edu/artworks/181112/

In his work from 1972 to 1983, Jasper Johns used a distinct arrangement of crosshatched marks, traditionally considered a graphic method of adding depth and volume to an image or conveying the illusion of light in space. Johns first glimpsed this pattern on a passing car, recalling: “I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me—literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning.” Emphasizing the flatness of the painting, Johns’s cross-hatching is gestural without being emotive; in this sense, the technique extends his larger critique of overtly expressionist models of painting. Johns forged a new model of painterly abstraction, using a schema that is repeatable and ordered but not strictly geometric or reductive. Lent by the artist

Corpse and Mirror II https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118981/

New York-based artist Tom Burr’s minimal sculptural installation investigate the body’s relationship to the built environment. The Railings (May, 1970) positions the well-known queer French novelist and playwright Jean Genet as a stand in for the artist. In 1968 Genet traveled to Chicago to core the Democratic National Convention for Esquire magazine, and he witnessed firsthand the brutal response of the police to protestors. There he also made contact with members of the beleaguered Black Panther Party. Sharing their commitment to racial and class equality, Genet returned to the United States in 1970 to advocate on their behalf. Genet, a white, gay man, and the Panthers, a radical black network of civil rights activists, proceeded to collaborate on a series of campus speeches. This culminated in a May Day event in Burr’s hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, for which Genet wrote a speech as a call to action against racism and black oppression. The entirety of the address into the polished is etched into the polished steel grip of the 103-foot-long handrail of The Railings. Inscribed onto the fence, the “May Day Speech” links Burr, Genet, and the Panthers within a continuum of social and political address that transgresses the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. The sculpture, taking the form of a code-complaint railing, imposes oder and regulation while simultaneously communicating a provocative message of resistance. Restricted gift of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams; Dirk Denison and David Salkin; Martin Fluhrer and John W. Williams; Jennifer and Scott Gordon; Chuck and Kathy Harper; Patty and Mark McGrath; Gary Metzner and Scott Johnson; Linda Usher and Malcolm Lambe; Jay Dandy and Melissa Weber; Valerie Carberry and Richard Wright; and David Nelson and Randall Kroszner

The Railings (May, 1970) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/243815/

For decades Gaylen Gerber has employed the supposedly “neutral” color gray, often making works that appear—but are in fact not—identical. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he made uniformly sized square canvases that contain almost invisible still lifes rendered in three tones, or values, of gray on gray grounds. The longer one looks, the more the underlying image emerges. Untitled and undated, these paintings exist only in the present tense. What can seem like flat or closed surfaces are not only unexpectedly nuanced but also inclusive and ongoing. Speaking of his work at the time, Gerber remarked, “For me, what started as negation . . . came to simultaneously include its contradiction: an acceptance of the significance of everything. Jacob and Bessie Levy Art Encouragement Fund; Pauline Palmer, Mr. and Mrs. J.F. Brower, Ann M. Vielehr Prize, Martin B. Cahn, and William and Bertha Clussman prize funds

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/189397/

In the mid 1950s, Sam Francis inaugurated a succession of monumentally scaled paintings informed by a variety of artistic sources, including Abstract Expressionism and French Impressionism. With their spontaneous brushwork and lyrical interplay of primary hues, these paintings established Francis as one of the foremost colorists of the postwar era. The artist often found inspiration in literary works and kept a notebook containing titles of books and verses. He named this and a related painting (In Lovely Blueness No. 1, 1955–57) after a poem by the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin, hoping to capture the poem’s sublime imagery and prophetic vision. Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan and Flora Mayer Witkowsky purchase prize funds; through prior gifts of Wallace L. DeWolf, Albert A. Munger and the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection; gift of Lannan Foundation

In Lovely Blueness No. 2 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146987/

Elisabeth Wild’s colorful and abstract collages emerge from her rich life experiences and the artistic practice she has developed over the past six decades. Born in Austria to Jewish parents, Wild escaped the Nazi regime and fled to Argentina in 1938. She worked in textile design, marrying textile industrialist August Wild. Due to the volatile political climate in Argentina, the family moved to Basel, Switzerland, in 1962. Wild returned to South America in 1966 and joined her daughter, artist Vivian Suter, in Panajachel on Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. While their home at the edge of the rainforest may have appeared serene, violence caused by natural disasters and drug trafficking continually impacted their life.Evoking the still-life paintings that were foundational to her early practice, Wild’s later collages balance figuration with abstraction. The rich colors and patterns recall her work in textile design and are often inspired by the visual traditions of Argentina and Guatemala. Making collages became a daily meditative ritual for Wild. She would leaf through fashion and lifestyle magazines and take fragments from their commodified context, combining them with cutouts from colored cartons and glossy paper and rearrange them into complex compositions that visualized the artist’s inner experience. Part of a series titled Fantasías, the collages are, indeed, fantastical spaces to encounter, our eyes moving from the light-blue wall (its color chosen by Wild herself) into the artist’s kaleidoscopic world. Promised gift of Helen and Joe Cesarik

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/250637/

Promised gift of Donna and Howard Stone

Yellow Backdrop https://www.artic.edu/artworks/204279/

Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art

from the series I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous https://www.artic.edu/artworks/243624/

Cildo Meireles’s ongoing Coca-Cola Project, an extension of his Insertions into Ideological Circuits project, interrogates how power—socioeconomic and political—is distributed through networks of commodity and information exchange. Since 1970 Meireles has removed Coca-Cola bottles from circulation and inscribed statements, questions, and instructions in white text on the glass in the style of the brand’s label. Noted on each bottle is Meireles’s intention: “To register in- formations and critical opinions on bottles and return them to circulation.” Each bottle also carries a distinct political provocation. These three read, “Yankees go home!”; “Jesse Helms No!”; and “Which is the place of a work of art?” With this project, Meireles—and his growing number of unknown collaborators—emphasizes the global reach of American consumer culture by subverting one if its most popular emblems. Gift of Mel Bochner and Lizbeth Marano

Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project https://www.artic.edu/artworks/226986/

Christopher Wool’s paintings explore the points of intersection between signage and language, pattern and decoration. Born in Boston and raised in Chicago, Wool moved to New York in the 1970s and aligned himself with a group of artists, filmmakers, and musicians associated with the punk rock movement. In the mid-1980s, he began to use printmaking techniques— including patterned paint rollers, rubber stamps, stencils, and silkscreens—to create enamel on metal works, often featuring filigree or floral motifs. The monochromatic black-and-white Type B, one of the artist’s earliest paintings to use printmaking methods, ironically recalls the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. Gift of Kathleen and Roland Augustine

Type B https://www.artic.edu/artworks/156598/

Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art

from the series I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous https://www.artic.edu/artworks/243629/

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/59771/

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joel Starrels

Madonna and Child https://www.artic.edu/artworks/12637/

Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman in honor of James Cuno

Gold Mats, Paired—for Ross and Felix https://www.artic.edu/artworks/184106/

Gift of Alexander Calder

Clouds Over Mountains https://www.artic.edu/artworks/23379/