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Although a brain tumor ended the life of Eva Hesse (Born 1936 in Hamburg, Germany; died 1970 in New York) at age thirty-four, the style of postminimalism she developed during her abbreviated career has made her one of the most influential artists of the postwar period. Hesse blended the industrial materials and hard, geometric shapes of minimalism with softer, almost organic forms to create work that suggests both human pain and mechanical indifference. While the work for which she has received the most recognition is sculptural, drawings and collage are an important part of her oeuvre. The artist’s first solo exhibition, at Allan Stone Gallery in March 1963, consisted of works on paper, and she continued making drawings after she began to create sculpture in 1964–65.

In 1959, Hesse graduated from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, where she studied color theory and advanced painting with Josef Albers, and gained a reputation as a talented colorist. Untitled shows the artist experimenting with various color combinations, as well as with black-and-white forms. After leaving Yale, Hesse worked as a textile designer in New York. The gridded composition of Untitled, in which each rectangle bears a distinct design, is reminiscent of a woven piece of fabric or a quilt, and also anticipates Hesse’s later use of the grid in her three-dimensional work.

Through performances and multimedia installations, Sharon Hayes (Born 1970 in Baltimore) investigates how speech—both public and private—transects with politics, history, personal identity, desire, and love. By appropriating the tools of twentieth-century protest and demonstration, she reconfigures the images of the protestor in a manner that destabilizes the viewer’s expectations, exposing the possibilities and challenges of reviving past models of protest, and highlights the friction between collective activities and personal actions.

Ricerche: three is the first in a series of works that will carry the title Ricerche. In Ricerche: three, Hayes interviews thirty-five students at Mount Holyoke College, a women’s college in western Massachusetts, about issues surrounding sex, sexuality, and gender. As the interview unfolds, the camera alternates between a focus on the group and on Hayes with specific interviewees. This provides a unique dual portrait of the student body and of individual students, a distinction that is enhanced as the conversation becomes more heated and individual identities become more prominent. By investigating students at a women’s college, Hayes addresses individual and collective issues surrounding gender-segregated institutions, including the perception that women’s colleges are a hotbed of lesbian culture and the community’s responsibility to accommodate students who change their gender after enrollment. Ricerche: three is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film Comizi d’amore, in which Pasolini investigates Italy’s postwar cultural attitudes toward sex by asking Italians—young and old—to speak in detail about various issues: childbirth, virginity, homosexuality, divorce, and prostitution. His questioning and his manner are intrusive, judgmental, and at times confrontational. Hayes uses Pasolini’s film as a model for a contemporary inquiry into the issues around sexual identity in the United States today.

Françoise Grossen’s (Born 1943 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland) work is central to the wave of innovations in fiber art that took place during the second half of the twentieth century. In describing her artistic development, Grossen summarizes two of the most important ways in which artists transformed fiber in the late-1960s: “First we broke with the rectangle, then we broke with the wall.” By exploring the sheer weight of rope and its response to gravity, Grossen aligned her work with broader artistic debates taking place in New York in the 1960s and ’70s.

Inchworm’s insistent horizontality is related to avant-garde dance, which during this period was moving from the stage to the floor, as well as to contemporaneous installations of scattered scraps of industrial felt and thread. While experimenting with scale, orientation, and composition, Grossen maintained two constants: her medium and her process. She has worked almost exclusively in rope: knotting and braiding it throughout her career. Rather than inhibiting her, this self-imposed limitation has facilitated her sustained contemplation of rope’s material properties.

Gilbert Prousch (Born 1943 in San Martin de Tor, Italy) and George Passmore (Born 1942 in Plymouth, United Kingdom), better known as Gilbert & George, have worked together since the mid-1960s. They have described their relationship in life and work by saying, “It’s not a collaboration… . We are two people, but one artist.” In the late 1960s and ’70s, they performed what they called Living Sculpture, documenting their life as art through the creation of small cards printed with captioned drawings of themselves. Always attired in three-button suits, their sartorial formality contrasts with their cheeky, avant-garde work. Their signature works from the 1970s and ’80s consist of composite photographic images assembled in a large grid and overlaid with bright flat colors. Influenced in equal parts by pop and conceptual art, these collage works blend the logic of the billboard with that of the stained-glass window to make an iconic and unique contribution to twentieth-century art.

Sky Blue World is from the series 25 Worlds. In each work in the series, dozens of identical postcards are arranged in concentric patterned fields that measure about eight by six feet. Nearly every work includes the image of a handsome young man’s face multiplied to kaleidoscopic effect. In Sky Blue World, from the series 25 Worlds more than one hundred identical postcards of Indian Bollywood screen idol Govinda alternate with postcards featuring the dome of St. John’s Cathedral in London and an architectural roofline. The intense repetition of the movie star’s face gives the montage the aura of an altar, presenting him as both a pop culture icon and a quasi-religious personage, while also gesturing to homoerotic desire in a mode akin to the work of Andy Warhol. At the same time, the mosaic pattern created by the arrangement of the postcards places the individual images in service to the pulsating, almost cinematic overall composition.

By blurring the line between documentary photography and portraiture, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s (Born 1982 in Braddock, PA) photographs and videos address issues of propaganda, politics, and the importance of individual identity and agency. Frazier’s practice has manifested as an investigation of the social, economic, and environmental deterioration of her home town of Braddock, PA, experienced through the tangible and psychological effects of these circumstances on her immediate family. Once a center of the American steel belt, Braddock experienced a massive downturn following the recession of the 1980s, when many of the mills vital to the local economy were either closed or downsized. The resulting economic instability drove many to flee the region, causing urban blight and widespread underemployment. The residents that remained, including Frazier and her family, witnessed their community fall into disrepair.

Momme is one in a series of collaborations between Frazier and her mother. The title, a conjunction of “mom” and “me,” references both the collaborative nature of the project and the seemingly conjoined appearance of the sitters in the photograph. Frazier’s mother appears in the foreground, peering downward, her profile parallel with the frame; the artist’s face is split by her mother’s profile as she looks out sternly toward the viewer. With both sitters dressed casually and sporting matching hairnets, the dual portrait highlights the similarities between two generations of women living through the travails of impoverished communities. However, the photograph also serves as a personal meditation on the relationship between mother and daughter—one that appears to be fraught with tension as well as mutual admiration.

Josh Faught’s (Born 1979 in St. Louis) sculptures are layered with seemingly contradictory elements that exist side by side: abstraction and representation, high art and kitsch, embarrassment and pride, and activism and disengagement. He invokes tensions by juxtaposing such incongruous materials as yarn, hemp, wool, linen, sequins, pins, and cast-off items ranging from self-help books to ceramic casts. He works these media using techniques that include crochet, collage, weaving, dyeing, and painting. The resulting assemblages offer critical commentary on the complexity of human relationships in the domestic sphere in which many of their components originate. His labor-intensive work draws on histories of gender and sexual politics, precariously balancing an urgent sense of anxiety with a nostalgic view of the present.

Untitled exemplifies Faught’s nonobjective work, generating visual interest primarily through shape, color, textural variation, and spatial effects. Segments of gray hemp are sewn together to form an approximate square, broken up by a swatch of woven indigo yarn in the upper right corner and a vertical band of burgundy sequins along the left edge. Crocheted barnacles line the bottom border and punctuate the center, and loose strands of yarn drip haphazardly across the surface. The entire textile is stretched over a wooden garden trellis like a canvas on an easel, inviting analogies with painting. The dangling, gestural threads subtly suggest the expressive brushstrokes of abstract expressionism, while the roughly rectilinear monochrome grid recalls the color field movement. For Faught, abstraction and activism are not mutually exclusive. He describes his artistic process as “constantly jamming together material histories until they become simultaneously abstract and narrative,” and notes that the evocative nature of his media enables his art to be simultaneously abstract and referential. Rather than illustrating his ideas, his work implies his agenda through playful puns on the materials. For example, the trellises that hold up Untitled symbolize social support systems, while their pointed posts suggest the idea of staking a claim or position. In some cases, Faught lashes together his own wooden armatures with survival knots—a metaphor for urgency and resilience. However, the allusions in his work are not always so direct. Sequins, for instance, suggest the performative nature of gender identity in general, and drag costuming in particular. Sequins, pins, and other memorabilia indirectly invoke gay countercultures and communities.

Leonardo Drew captures the tensions between order and chaos in abstract sculptural artworks that range from the intimate to the monumental in scale. Composed of accumulated found objects, paper, wood, and fabric, his work evokes the cycles of life, from creation and destruction, to fecundity and decay. Drew cast paper to form the gridded square panels of Untitled (2005–06). The process lends the work its varied surface with gaps and breaks revealing the hollow core, while the overall composition is dominated by the regularity of the grid. This piece highlights Drew’s hallmark merging of the abstract and non-representational with process-oriented works that reveal the labor of the artist’s hand.

2013.11

Willie Doherty (Born 1959 in Derry, Northern Ireland) began his practice of  photographs and video installations in the early 1980s, meditating on the political troubles in Northern Ireland. Having witnessed the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of unarmed nationalist civilians by British paratroopers, he began taking black-and-white photographs of his home town of Derry, with which he sought to counteract the images of political violence prevalent in the press. Doherty’s photographs and videos address issues surrounding the representation of landscape, territory, history, and the expression of identity. His work navigates the relationship between memory and subjectivity and presents them as sites of contestation and conflict. While Doherty’s work often focuses directly on the political impasse in Northern Ireland, he also makes work that is more metaphorical.

Factory III depicts an industrial yard filled with debris—segments of twisted metal pipes and broken fragments of wood—with the front of a dilapidated factory in the background. Cropped so only the yard, front windows, and roll top door of the factory are visible, the landscape gives off an eerie feeling that some sort of violence or devastation has taken place. As with many of Doherty’s works, Factory III stands as an archetypal scene of terrorism and political violence. The work activates universal emotions by playing off of the paranoia, anger, and desperation that rises to the surface when one encounters the detritus and broken windows of abandoned buildings. Yet the ambiguity of the photograph leaves the work open for multiple interpretations.

Willie Doherty (Born 1959 in Derry, Northern Ireland) is considered a pioneer in contemporary photography, beginning his practice in the 1980s. Born in Northern Ireland, the traumatic history of the region has been a major focus of his work. Doherty’s photographs explore post-conflict settings that suggest a troubled past, addressing issues of collective trauma, memory, and subjectivity. The scenes of isolated or abandoned places are often from his hometown of Derry, a city that was deeply divided by religious and political partisanship in the 1960s and ’70s.

Suspicious Vehicle depicts a red car that has been abandoned on the side of a darkened road. It is unclear if the vehicle was intentionally abandoned by its driver, whether the driver was taken from the car against their will, or if the car itself is a weapon. Regardless, through the combination of the title, darkness of night, and lack of human presence, the image conveys an unsettling scene that suggests some sort of unfortunate incident has (or will) occur.