PITTSBURGH, PA.- Lynn Zelevansky, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of
Carnegie Museum of Art, announced a round of major acquisitions from the 2013 Carnegie International, which opened on October 5, and remains on view until March 16. The museum’s collection has been shaped in significant ways by the exhibition, which was initiated in 1896 by Andrew Carnegie. Since its founding, the museum has made significant acquisitions from the Carnegie International, resulting in particularly strong holdings in contemporary art.
Exhibition co-curators Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers, and Tina Kukielski, along with Zelevansky, have worked to identify key objects from the exhibition that will significantly enhance and complement the existing collection. This is the first of two rounds of acquisitions from the 2013 Carnegie International, with the second to be completed and announced early in 2014.
“We’ve acquired as wide a selection as possible from the 2013 Carnegie International, with about 80% of the artists included,” remarked Byers, who is also the museum’s Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “It is very rewarding to see so much of the art that excited us during our travels and discussions—and that have already become visitor favorites—coming into the collection.”
Works from the 2013 Carnegie International acquired to date include:
Phyllida Barlow
British, b. 1944
Untitled: upturnedhouse, 2012
Timber, plywood, scrim, cement, polystyrene, polyfiller, paint, and varnish
138 x 200 x 128 in. (350.5 x 508 x 325.1 cm)
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Phyllida Barlow has been active since the late 1960s but only received broader exposure in the last 10 years. Her use of scrappy materials and rough construction techniques undermines the grand scale of her works, resulting in an ambitiously “anti-monumental” aesthetic.
Untitled: upturnedhouse is the size of a small house, but is turned upside down, resting at a precarious angle. It is made out of painted boards assembled together, and functions simultaneously as a sculpture and as a group of paintings. Impressive for its size, upturnedhouse is a bold statement: as architecture, it is as much a gingerbread-house-gone-wild as it is an invitation to think about the world the other way around; as a three-dimensional painting, it is a baroque, generous, and exuberant work challenging our views on painting, material, and composition.
Sadie Benning
American, b. 1973
Locating Centers, 2013
40 pieces; casein paint and acrylic paint on board with plaster and polymer clay
Commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art for the 2013 Carnegie International
18 x 27 x 3/4 in. (45.7 x 68.5 x 1.9 cm) each
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Locating Centers is one of Sadie Benning’s most ambitious paintings series to date. Based on drawings the artist made on the iPhone, blown up in scale, cut out of wood, and built up with layers of sanded plaster, clay, and paint, the 40 paintings meditate on the relationships between analogue and digital processes. Benning describes the work as being inspired by the Carnegie International itself: “I was thinking about being in this international group show, being in Pittsburgh, and how there is no center to such a show—that there is a multiplicity of centers that interlock and overlap. So I was thinking of that in a conceptual way, about the body, and trying to find a middle, and also how that relates to narrative—a beginning, a middle, and an end, as well as a transitional connection between sequences.” These themes of inside and outside, and the body as a metaphor, are explored across four separate sequences that comprise one whole.
Vincent Fecteau
American, b. 1969
Untitled, 2012
papier‑mâché and acrylic paint
20 1/2 x 43 5/16 x 35 7/16 in. (52 x 110 x 90 cm)
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
A sculptor of unparalleled originality, aesthetic sophistication, and conceptual and psychological subtlety, Vincent Fecteau has been quietly making some of the most important American sculpture of the last 15 years. Untitled collapses painting and sculpture, portrait and landscape, conflating intimate close quarters with muscular declaration. Wrought on an intimate scale, Fecteau’s painted papier‑mâché sculpture turns in upon itself, the taut outcroppings and dark crevices connected through illogical turns of surface and recess. This is a sculpture that must be circumnavigated to be seen, with its personality and character changing dramatically from different angles. The colors and gestures are “off” as much as they are uncannily intuitive and lyrical. It is an exemplary work by the artist that combines so many of his most important effects from years of exploration, and represents his practice at the height of his inventiveness.
Wade Guyton
American, b. 1972
Untitled, 2013
Epson UltraChrome K3 inkjet on linen
128 x 108 x 2 in. (325.1 x 274.3 x 5.1 cm)
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Wade Guyton makes large-scale artworks that act like paintings and drawings, but are created using flatbed scanners, desktop computers, and Epson inkjet printers. On a standard computer, Guyton designs the motifs in Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, which he then prints out on canvas, book pages, exhibition invitations, and plywood. In the case ofUntitled, the canvas must be folded in half to fit through the printer, causing the machine to struggle with a medium for which it was not designed and mis-registering the image. The artist also pulls canvases through the machine, further manipulating the printing process. All these mundane steps lead to a surprising result that challenges our conception of art, creativity, and innovation. As viewer, we stand in front of paintings that are not paintings (but behave like them); we see works of art produced by a seemingly trivial process, yet are something close to sublime; we see finished pictures, yet they reveal every single trace of their making.
Rokni Haerizadeh
Iranian, b. 1978
Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 2010–2011
Video; color, silent
4:23 min.
Reign of Winter, 2012–2013
Video; color, silent
7 min.
My Heart Is Not Here, My Heart’s in The Highlands, Chasing The Deers, 2013
8 gesso, ink, and watercolor drawings on printed paper
11 13/16 x 15 3/4 in. (30 x 40 cm) each
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
In Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, Rokni Haerizadeh creates hand-painted animations using media imagery of protest, disaster, and violence from the 2009 Iranian street demonstrations, transforming the footage into fairy tales of sensual delights, where human heads of protestors and newscasters alike are replaced with those of animals. A more recent animation, Reign of Winter, made specifically for the 2013 Carnegie International, takes on the subject of the British royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
In the suite of 24 drawings called My Heart Is Not Here, My Heart’s in The Highlands, Chasing The Deers, Haerizadeh paints over and drastically alters news photographs depicting diverse subjects of human ritual: the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, Pussy Riot protests in Russia, American troops in Afghanistan, and the Diamond Jubilee celebrating Queen Elizabeth in 2012. The museum is acquiring eight drawings from this series, which was created for the 2013 Carnegie International.
Interrogating the voyeuristic role of the spectator and his or her ethical stance as a passive consumer of media, Haerizadeh’s drawings and animations transform found material into timeless parables, taking images out of context and turning conventional moral codes on end.
Amar Kanwar
Indian, b. 1964
A Love Story, 2011–2012
HD video; color, sound
5:37 min.
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
A Love Story explores the formal elements of time, narrative, and sequence as well as themes of human isolation and connection amid an epically filmed study of a monumental garbage dump on the outskirts of New Delhi. The video combines an intimate, subjective narrative with a meditation on the transformation of a landscape and way of life by the massive, unyielding currents of globalization, economics, and industry. Casting hope and despair together, A Love Storyis at once totally specific—to a romance, to New Delhi, to a culture—and universal in the way it brings humanity and compassion into focus. Amar Kanwar is a major voice on the international scene of experimental documentary and video art. One of the few artists to ever participate in three Documenta exhibitions in a row, Kanwar is surprisingly underrepresented in US museum exhibitions and collections.
Dinh Q. Lê
Vietnamese, b. 1968
In collaboration with Lê Lam, Quách Phong, Huỳnh Phương Đông, Nguyễn Thụ, Dương Ánh, Vũ Giáng Hương, Nguyễn Toàn Thi, Trương Hiếu, Phan Oánh, Kim Tiến, Minh Phương, Quang Thọ, Nguyễn Thanh Châu.
Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War, 2012
101 drawings; pencil, watercolor, ink, and oil on paper
Dimensions variable
Video; color, sound
35 min.
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Light and Belief: Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War is composed of one hundred and one drawings and paintings made by Vietnamese men and women serving as artist-soldiers on the frontlines of the Vietnam War, accompanied by a documentary film consisting of interviews with the artists and brief animations of some of their drawings and paintings. This collective narrative provides an unusual, personal perspective on what is also known in Vietnam as the Kháng chiến chống Mỹ or “Resistance War Against America.”
Exhibited only once before, in Germany for Documenta 13, Light and Belief made its US debut in the 2013 Carnegie International. Some of the paintings and drawings present quick and loose reportage of a conflict as it unfolds, while others are meditations in times of repose, rendering life around the edges of war in fine pen-work and sweeping watercolors, serving almost as visual journals. Most poignant are the portraits. Resembling passport photographs or family snapshots, they are records of individual lives and were often kept in a soldier’s pocket to be passed on to family members should he or she die in combat. In Lê’s documentary, the artists speak with humor, candor, reflection, and a great deal of pride about the cultural history of their country and the power of art. Lê’s project is also a personal history, as the artist traces events he escaped as a child when his family fled Vietnam for the United States, where they eventually settled.
Tobias Madison
Swiss, b. 1985
Workshop, 2013
Video; color, sound
Text on panel
Edition 1/3
In collaboration with the Neighborhood Youth Outreach Program and St. Stephen’s Church, Wilkinsburg, PA
0, 0, 0, 0, 2013
Paper tissue, lanterns, and string
Dimensions variable
&&&&&&, 2013
Ball chain, aluminum, wire, and plastic
Dimensions variable
A. W. Mellon Acquisition Fund
Tobias Madison is one of the most talented, active, and innovative artists of his generation. He developed this group of works partly in collaboration with an after-school class from Wilkinsburg, PA, and Carnegie Museum of Art’s department of education. The participating students collaborated with the artist to produce an abstract film centering on the production process itself: the main actors were sound, light, props, film, and movement. It represents an art practice that dives into a given situation to risk new ways of production, presentation, and thinking. The complete artwork consists of the three-channel video, as well as sculptural elements: four altered lanterns, two with speakers inside of them; a series of long ball chains that connect the elements; and a semi-figurative abstraction made from various shiny metal parts. The work’s elements may be reconfigured and reimagined in space, depending on the context of their exhibition.
Zanele Muholi
South African, b. 1972
6 gelatin silver prints from the series Faces and Phases
30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8 cm) each
Audrey Mary, Harare Zimbabwe, 2011
Lugile Cleo Dladla, KwaThema Community Hallo, Springs, Johannesburg, 2011
Tinashe Wakapila, Harare, Zimbabwe, 2011
Vuyelwa Makubetse, KwaThema Community Hall, Springs, Johannesburg, 2011
Vuyo Mkonwana, Site B, Oliver Tambo Hall, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, 2011
Zimaseka ‘Zim’ Salusalu Gugulethu, Cape Town, 2011
A. W. Mellon Acquisition Fund
Born in 1972 in Umlazi, South Africa, photographer Zanele Muholi lives and works in Johannesburg. She began her photographic series Faces and Phases in 2006, working first in the townships of South Africa and then beyond. By the time the series is complete, Muholi intends to amass hundreds of portraits, giving visibility to the various faces of black LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) communities around the world. The portraits are classically beautiful, stylized pictures of the black lesbian community of South Africa, individuals who are discriminated against and sometimes brutally beaten or raped. A self-described “visual activist,” Muholi sees her work in photography and film as a lifetime endeavor aimed at redefining the face of Africa both within and outside the continent. Muholi was the winner of this year’s Fine Prize, for an emerging artist in the 2013 Carnegie International.
Paulina Olowska
Polish, b. 1976
Puppetry in America is Truly a Lonely Craft, 2013
Wrought iron and enamel paint
122 x 111 in. (309.9 x 281.9 cm)
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Paulina Olowska’s work resists the homogenization that has resulted from globalization, focusing on local character and history to distill a unique sense of place. This elegant wrought iron sign/sculpture is a a prominent component of Olowska’s project for the 2013 Carnegie International—a reinvention of the museum’s Carnegie Café as a puppet cabaret. The installation, and the sign itself, takes as a point of departure the history of the Pittsburgh-based Lovelace Marionette Theatre Company (1949–1983), the first puppet theater in the US to stage regular performances in a permanent venue. It refers to both the craft’s important but under-recognized history in Pittsburgh and to contemporary practice. Bringing together the artist’s interests in vernacular interpretations of modernist aesthetics, popular cultural institutions such as the cabaret and artists’ salon, and traditional crafts, this elegant work is a special expression of Olowska’s characteristic strategies applied to local context.
Pedro Reyes
Mexican, b. 1972
Disarm (Double Psaltery), 2013
Recycled metal
7 7/8 x 19 11/16 x 19 11/16 in. (20 x 50 x 50 cm)
Disarm (Guitar), 2013
Metal
33 7/8 x 11 13/16 x 3 15/16 in. (86 x 30 x 10 cm)
The Henry L. Hillman Fund
Beginning in 2012, Pedro Reyes has transformed nearly 6,700 weapons, most confiscated from the drug war in the city of Juárez, Mexico, into musical instruments. This body of work, called Disarm, reflects Reyes’s interest in the purposeful and playful, in turning “agents of death” into “instruments of life.” These two works from the series are important examples of Reyes’s practice, which seeks alternative methods to restore a peaceful society through pedagogy and participation. This combination of formal innovation, activism, and radical optimism, also reflects extremely current themes and preoccupations of international contemporary art and its display.
Mladen Stilinović
Croatian, b. 1947
Artist at Work (for Neša Paripović), 1978
8 black-and-white photographs
11 13/16 x 15 11/16 in. (30 x 39.8 cm) each
Exploitation of the Dead, 1984–90
13 pieces; various materials
Dimensions variable
The Henry L. Hillman Fund and A. W. Mellon Acquisition Fund
Since the 1970s, Mladen Stilinović has practiced a quixotic interrogation of power, or, as he calls it “the language of politics.” The photographic self-portrait series Artist at Work reflects Stilinović’s belief that “there is no art without laziness.” Stilinović pictures himself in bed, in contrast to the expected scene of a studio filled with material and finished pieces. Non-work and non-activity are a form of protest against capitalism and a Western art world that favors the production and promotion of objects over what Stilinović sees as the “virtues of laziness”: impotence, futile concentration, amnesia, indifference. The practice of laziness also confounds a socialist conception of labor in that any activity (even non-activity) can be conceived of as work.
Exploitation of the Dead, a constantly rearranged cycle of over 100 (of which the museum is acquiring 13) individual paintings, drawings, texts, found objects, and photographs, is a rich example of Stilinović’s philosophy. For the artist, the “dead” in the work are the dead symbols of the 20th century—symbols from religion, abstract art history, social rituals, and systems of economics. By repeating abstract visual signs (flags, money, logos, slogans), Stilinović attempts to transfigure symbols into objects that allow for subjective interpretation, a technique he refers to as “de-symbolizing.” For example, by repeating and recontextualizing the color red throughout this installation, viewers are encouraged to simply see a color, rather than a representation of communism. In Stilinović’s words, “If language (the color, the image, etc.) is possessed by ideology, I too want to become the owner of such a language.”
Zoe Strauss
American, b. 1970
15 color inkjet archival prints
Two Yellow Ribbons, Frackville, PA, 2003
17 x 23 5/8 in. (43.2 x 59.9 cm)
If You Reading This, Philadelphia, 2001
25 1/2 x 17 in. (64.8 x 43.2 cm)
Red Carpet Stairs, Las Vegas, 2007
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
Lights at Phillies Game, Philadelphia, 2008
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
Woman in Pink Shirt, Camden, NJ, 2006
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
Half House, Camden, NJ, 2008
25 1/2 x 17 in. (64.8 x 43.2 cm)
Cynthia, Philadelphia, 2004
17 x 23 5/8 in. (43.2 x 59.9 cm)
Everything Is Name Brand, Philadelphia, 2003
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
Daddy Tattoo, Philadelphia, 2004
17 x 23 5/8 in. (43.2 x 59.9 cm)
Mom Were OK, Biloxi, MS, 2005
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
Coal Billboard, Near Ellengowan, PA, 2004
17 x 23 5/8 in. (43.2 x 59.9 cm)
Wench with Flag in Front of Dolphin, Philadelphia, 2010
25 1/2 x 17 in. (64.8 x 43.2 cm)
Phylicia’s Wall, Philadelphia, 2006
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
TVs Under Tarp, Philadelphia, 2006
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
Vanessa, Philadelphia, 2006
17 x 25 1/2 in. (43.2 x 64.8 cm)
A. W. Mellon Acquisition Fund
These 15 photographs were taken in locations across the United States as part of Zoe Strauss’s Under I-95 project, an epic, open-ended narrative in photographs “about the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Strauss has a particular talent for articulating the complexities of the human condition, often capturing seemingly contradictory traits and desires within a single frame. Her photographs Cynthia and If You Reading This, for instance, convey a fraught sense of simultaneous invitation and repulsion, engagement and hostility. Other portraits, such as Daddy Tattoo, Woman in Pink Shirt, and Vanessa, represent people—with unflinching empathy—on the margins of society, trying to get by and find ways to express themselves despite their circumstances. Architectural photographs such as Half House achieve similar effects with traces of human presence, while works like Mom Were OK and Two Yellow Ribbons speak volumes about the emotional toll of war and natural disaster.
Henry Taylor
American, b. 1958
That Was Then, 2013
Acrylic on canvas
95 x 75 x 3 1/4 in. (241.3 x 190.5 x 8.3 cm)
The Henry L. Hillman Fund, 2013.12
Noah, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
96 1/2 x 76 3/4 in. (245 x 194.9 cm)
Gift of Nancy and Milton Washington
Henry Taylor is one of the most important figurative painters working today. Taylor integrates lived experience, the people around him, and figures and events from pop culture and history into expansive, expressive canvases. Taylor’s work confronts American culture, addressing issues such as race, class, and economic disparity, through the intimacy of a friend’s portrait or through allegories of history made from collaged images, fragments, and remembered stories.
That Was Then shows a man standing on dirt against a bright blue sky wearing pants that are a complete mess of paint—loose and thick, describing its own material better than what it is picturing. The word “boy” repeats across the painting, always partially out of the frame. The immediate reference is the sharp, cruel diminishment of calling a grown man “boy” and the hundreds of years of entrenched racism that it conjures. That Was Then wants to be finished with “this is now,” and a corrective image. Instead, That Was Then is left unanswered, standing in for now and then; a present condition that describes a cultural state.
Noah exemplifies the way Taylor often treats intimate subjects. This large-scale painting, which nearly fills the entire canvas with a little boy’s face, pictures the artist’s son. Bold, expressive, and opaque, the likeness is both delicate and heavy. The near-monumental scale and the way the face is generalized short-circuits nostalgia and sentimentality. Yet, at the same time, it acts as a testament to the relationship, a larger-than-life portrait of his son.
Erika Verzutti
Brazilian, b. 1971
Swan with Hammer, 2013
Bronze and sledgehammer
25 9/16 x 27 9/16 x 27 9/16 in. (65 x 70 x 70 cm)
Egg Tower, 2013
Bronze, eggshell, concrete, and wax
110 1/4 x 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. (280 x 40 x 40 cm)
A. W. Mellon Acquisition Fund
Erika Verzutti’s work reveals the beauty and symbolic power of common objects, imbuing them with enigmatic properties. Interested in the formal qualities of things found in nature, like vegetables, eggs, or fruits, Verzutti transforms natural forms, with their potential for decay, into more permanent sculptures of bronze and concrete.
As separate but companion works, Swan with Hammer and Egg Tower both sit directly on the floor, challenging the established monumental properties expected in sculptural forms. The eggs in her totemic Egg Tower are those of an ostrich, one real but the others made from bronze and concrete, suggesting some absurd ritual commemorating endless reproduction, life and death. Swan with Hammer swells and cascades, like the head of a strange bird both propped against and balanced by an upright hammer, suggestive of the precipitous relationship between the natural and the man made.
Both works are exemplary of Verzutti’s work which is unmonumental, dense, informal, elegant, and unabashedly crude. Her objects and installations composed through a process of accumulation are characterized by an abundance of elements, media, reference points, processes, accidents, and anecdotes that speak to the relationship between art and life.
