AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot)

Woman in Tub, based on a postcard, depicts a female nude acting out a crude sexual joke in the bathtub. Jeff Koons explained: “There’s a snorkel and somebody is doing something to her under the water because she’s grabbing her breasts for protection. But the viewer also wants to victimize her.” The cartoonlike rendering of the form belies the exquisite hard-paste porcelain finish, typical of 18th-century Rococo figurines. Part of his Banality series, which is characterized by oddly eroticized, comic, and kitsch images, this work demonstrates Duchampian and Pop Art strategies of appropriation and, combining imagery from multiple sources, makes the primary subject taste itself. Collection of Stefan T. Edlis and H. Gael Neeson, partial and promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago

Woman in Tub https://www.artic.edu/artworks/186545/

Adopting imagery from a diverse array of artists—including Salvador Dalí, Frank Auerbach, and science fiction illustrator Chris Foss—Glenn Brown’s paintings transform his original sources into works of swirling, brightly colored paint. Copied from reproductions, his distortions project his manipulated figures into an eerily futuristic world. A direct quotation of Rembrandt van Rijn’s A Bust of a Young Woman Smiling (1633; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), Dark Star both captures and parodies the subtle expression of the original, yet still mimics its lush surface. Brown’s brushwork is actually thin, even glassy, rendering Rembrandt’s strokes utterly nontactile, their texture an illusion. The title, Dark Star, perhaps quoting the low-budget 1970s astronaut film of the same name, evokes the appeal of the science-fiction genre, serving to transport an Old Master painting into, or perhaps beyond, the realm of kitsch. Through prior gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne

Dark Star https://www.artic.edu/artworks/182391/

Mary and Leigh Block Fund for Acquisitions

Primeval https://www.artic.edu/artworks/15154/

Broadus James Clarke Memorial Fund

Transom #2 (Twilight) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/156077/

John Chamberlain began to make abstract sculptures— both wall-mounted and freestanding—of painted, compressed automotive parts in the 1950s. Skillfully combining the vigorous gestures of Abstract Expressionism with the playful use of found materials and compositions of Dada and Surrealism, the artist took previously cast-off pieces of sheet metal and then crimped, bent, and cut the usually unyielding material into an imposing form. Toy is atypical in its incorporation of a Slip n’ Slide (a plastic waterslide first introduced in 1961); the work slyly suggests a classical relief and the motif of drapery. Gift of William Hokin

Toy https://www.artic.edu/artworks/32587/

For over thirty years, Bill Viola has created single-channel videos as well as sound and video installations that focus on spirituality and explore multiple levels of human consciousness. In constructing these works, the artist draws from his extensive study of Eastern and Western art, philosophy, and religion. He also consistently deploys cutting-edge technologies, investigating new ways to manipulate viewers’ percep-tion. Both the videos in The Reflecting Pool and the installation Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House are important early works that foreshadow Viola’s later creations, combining philosophic inquiry with captivating physical environments.The Reflecting Pool is a series comprising five individual videos, including Moonblood, that offer a collective meditation on the various stages in an individual life. The first work, also titled The Reflecting Pool, demonstrates the shift from stillness to motion as a fixed camera captures a man approaching a pool of water through trees and lush foliage. The only sounds are those of the branches rustling and the water rippling. The man momentarily stands before the pool before jumping into the air. As he reaches the crest of his jump, he is frozen in space while the water beneath him continues to undulate. There is a fleeting reflection of other people walking around the pool, although no one can be seen doing so. After a series of similar perceptual and temporal fragmentations, the man’s image fades, leaving only the pool. The final moments of the video are evocative of baptism, as a nude man emerges from the water and retreats into the woods.In this series, Viola aims to deconstruct viewers’ concepts of time and memory, divorcing images from their subjective meaning and reconnecting them to universal truths. This process of fostering self-awareness is an undercurrent of the artist’s practice. He has remarked, “There’s another dimension that you just know is there, that can be a source of real knowledge, and the quest for connecting with that and identifying that is the whole impetus for me to cultivate these experiences and to make my work.”In both The Reflecting Pool and Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, the artist urges viewers to become active participants. Of his work, Viola stated, “You’re a part of it. It’s not something that’s just a fixed projection from the past.” Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

The Reflecting Pool: Collected Works https://www.artic.edu/artworks/108765/

Through prior purchase from the Mary and Leigh Block Fund

Bicho - Monumento a Todas as Situações https://www.artic.edu/artworks/224181/

Jeff Koons originally made this work for his now notorious Made in Heaven exhibition, in which he explored concepts of love by referencing his own marriage to Italian porn star Ilona Staller. He explains, “With Bourgeois Bust, I wanted . . . to be able to bring Ilona’s body and my body down together in a point so that it’s a heart—a symbol of love—and take the flesh and cut through it to form it that way without any sense of violence.” Here the couple appears within a traditional Baroquestyle portrait bust like those of 18th-century sculptor Antonio Canova (whose work you can see in the museum’s galleries of European painting and sculpture). Bourgeois Bust sets in tension the elegance of neoclassical sculpture and the irreverence of deploying its idealized terms in the postmodern era. Gift of Edlis Neeson Collection

Bourgeois Bust- Jeff and Ilona https://www.artic.edu/artworks/229373/

Gift of Donna and Howard Stone

Double Sink https://www.artic.edu/artworks/189509/

In the late 1960s, Sylvia Plimack Mangold turned to her immediate surroundings as a source for imagery, making almost photorealistic paintings of interior spaces, including the wood and tile floors of her studio and home. By the 1970s she began to insert meticulous trompe l’oeil elements as well, including metal rulers and masking tape painted along the borders of her images. The artist has explained that the painted rulers measured or marked the physical dimensions of a work’s edge, while the painted floors measured or marked illusionistic space. In Mangold’s words, “The works of this period were like catalogues of these different realities in painting.” In their constant reappraisal of the relationship between painting and picture, and in their frequent recourse to the grid-like structures of flooring, Mangold’s works can operate like rigorous abstractions, aligned with Minimal and Conceptual practices of the time. Yet they often derive their affect from more subjective, even personal content as well. For instance, the ruler in this painting, which stops on the right edge of the canvas at 66 ¾ inches, serves as an intimate tribute, corresponding to the age of the artist’s father at his death. This is the only work in her oeuvre that offers such an overtly biographical, memorializing reference. The green linoleum floor, which is also exclusive to this work, was inspired by a small section of old flooring the artist discovered in her basement. Here Mangold painted, with her customary precision, an imagined reconstruction as opposed to an observed reality. Through prior gift of Adeline Yates

In Memory of My Father https://www.artic.edu/artworks/199002/

Christian Boltanski is a self-taught French artist who first came to critical notice in the late 1960s through his short, avant-garde films that combined real and fictional evidence of his and other people’s lives. In the 1970s, Boltanski began using photography to explore memory and consciousness, often by creating assemblages of documentary photography removed from its original context. The artist wrote of Detective: I cut the images from a specialized review of crime stories. The photographs—which are similar to those in our own photo albums—are as if from a play, and the people we see in them are the actors, assassins or victims. But it is impossible to differentiate among them, now that the images have been isolated from their context. Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund

Detective https://www.artic.edu/artworks/47129/

Christina Ramberg is known for enigmatic paintings of fragments of the female body—typically torsos, legs, and hands—tightly cropped and partially clothed, bound, or veiled. The formal clarity, stylized figuration, and references to Surrealism and popular culture in her works aligned her with the Chicago Imagists, who she exhibited with in the False Image exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s. The artist’s pointedly feminist critique of the social conditions that physically shape and constrict the female body was furthered by her interest in costume history and her collection of medical illustrations, paper dolls, and fashion advertisements. Her focus on patterning and clever use of juxtaposition are expressed in Parallel Manipulation, in which a head of braided hair mimics the decorative designs of a woman’s garment. Gift of the Robert A. Lewis Fund in memory of William and Polly Levey

Parallel Manipulation https://www.artic.edu/artworks/97403/

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/243600/

The Birmingham News, 1963 refers to a seismic year in the civil rights movement. Countless instances of police brutalit and arrests of black civil rights participants culminated inPresident John F. Kennedy’s deployment of federal troops to Birmingham, Alabama. The tense standoff made daily headlines nationwide, but, as the selected covers from April 3 to May 13 testify, the Birmingham News purposefully downplayed the violence against African Americans Critically interrogating the deep-rooted interrelations between race and language, Bethany Collins transforms these covers into a site of intervention that memorializes events ignored by the Birmingham press. Collins embossed, darkened, and distressed the front pages, reviving the very histories they ignored through this process of alteration and erasure. Emblematic of her conceptual and text-based practice, The Birmingham News, 1963 demonstrates how authored and institutional texts are always politicized, even when they take on the guise of objective reporting. Promised gift of the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection

The Birmingham News, 1963 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/243293/

Gift of the Raymond K. Yoshida Living Trust and Kohler Foundation, Inc.

Yours for Excellent Uplift https://www.artic.edu/artworks/204433/

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. Gift of the artist

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/250651/

Sherrie Levine first gained widespread critical recognition in the early 1980s for her photographic re-creations of famous works of art, typically by men, through which she questioned the ideals of high modernism and confronted issues of authorship, repetition, and authenticity. Although known for these works, which redefined the role of appropriation strategies, Levine’s concerns are never specific to any media; sculpture, drawing, and painting have always been a part of her practice. Later in her career, she began to make works inspired by the precedent of a generic type, rather than a particular work of art. Her series of stripe paintings, for example, refers to both Russian Suprematist painting of the first part of the 20th century and American Minimal painting of the 1960s. Untitled (Check 2) is from a series of game-board motifs, marking the first time Levine drew source material from outside the art-historical realm. Gift of Lannan Foundation

Untitled (Check 2) https://www.artic.edu/artworks/146913/

Gift of Richard Hawkins through the generosity of Richard Telles Fine Art

Edogawa Ranpo 2 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/204610/

Gift of Judith Neisser

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/195933/

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/243631/

Gift of LaSalle Bank

"Coney Island, N.Y., U.S.A, June 20, 1993," from Beach Portraits https://www.artic.edu/artworks/180795/

Alfred & May Tiefenbronner Memorial Endowment, Laura T. Magnuson Endowment, and Cyrus H. McCormick funds

Hot Spring https://www.artic.edu/artworks/250556/

Ibrahim El-Salahi swiftly became one of the most influential artists working in Sudan after the country gained independence in 1956. His paintings combine African motifs, Islamic calligraphy, and Euro-American modernism. A member of the revolutionary Khartoum school, El-Salahi contributed to the intellectual climate of postcolonial Sudan and the making of a national art and aesthetic in the 1960s. His work is characterized by the use of earthy colors, the transformation of Arabic letters into abstracted forms, and the merging of folk art with modern abstract painting. The artist once described the “Pandora’s box” of animal, plant, and, more specifically, skeletal and masked forms that seemed to open for him as he deconstructed and abstracted the shapes of written language; he was also inspired by the structure of West African masks. A radically abstracted figure—holding a pomegranate in its right hand—plays a prominent role in Male-Female Figure and the Pomegranate. Just as striking, however, is the material surface of the work, with its array of intricate textures. This painting exemplifies the artist’s innovations of the 1960s both in its compositional complexity and its evident engagement with process. El-Salahi used enamel and oil paint as well as a technique he called “tickling,” which involved manipulating the canvas with his fingers to create the appearance of depth. Discussing this painting, he has said, “I did it in Sudan, at a time when I was focusing on . . . somber relations. I started by building the image with a mixture of white oil and enamel paints, then treated it with a glaze of burnt sienna and black oil paints mixed with linseed oil. I used an old canvas, which after some time I had rolled so that the paint would crack, because that was the effect I wanted.” Through prior purchase from the Mary and Leigh Block Fund

Male-Female Figure with Pomegranate https://www.artic.edu/artworks/227420/

On Kawara’s work renders the passage of time and one life within its continuum. From 1966 until his death, the artist produced thousands of works in a series called Today. In each, he painted the date (notably, without using stencils) in white on a monochromatic field. While usually not exhibited a newspaper accompanies every work to document the location and context of its execution. Kawara always began and completed these works on the date represented, and if he did not finish a painting on its date, he destroyed it. While following these self-imposed guidelines, Kawara used a set range of canvas sizes for his date paintings. Oct.31, 1978 is one of only ten works painted at this scale, the largest used in the series. Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund

Oct. 31, 1978 (Today Series, "Tuesday") https://www.artic.edu/artworks/59646/

Through prior purchase from the Mary and Leigh Block Fund

grass greener on the other side 4 https://www.artic.edu/artworks/228484/

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

Lightning V https://www.artic.edu/artworks/181120/

Siah Armajani’s affinity for interior and public architecture is articulated in this sculpture, one of his early works from his Dictionary for Building sculpture series, in which he combines text from Robert Frost’s poem, The Hill Wife (1916) with abstracted, yet recognizable furniture or architectural objects, in this case a fireplace mantel. The poem’s text about a couple’s uneasy relationship with their home expands upon Armajani’s interpretation of a mantel as a dynamic structure—as opposed to a fixed centerpiece or sentimental hearth—to be moved through and around. Mirrors, which conventionally are installed above a fireplace, are angled inwards to reveal otherwise imperceptible aspects of the structure. For the artist, sculpture was “not a thing between four walls in a geometric spatial sense but a tool which directs us into a place for living, sitting, resting, reading, eating, and talking,” suggesting a symbiotic relationship between furniture, sculpture and architecture. Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

Dictionary for Building: Fireplace Mantel https://www.artic.edu/artworks/97407/

Gift of Alexandre Carel in honor of Koichi Kawasaki

Untitled https://www.artic.edu/artworks/239646/

Gift of the Grinstein Family

Al's Grand Hotel https://www.artic.edu/artworks/236645/

Through prior bequest of Katharine Kuh

Flag https://www.artic.edu/artworks/136994/