LACMA Communications Department
Vija Celmins
Haegue Yang
Leslie Hewitt
Rachel Harrison
Glenn Ligon
Paul Pfeiffer
Zhang Huan
Larry Bell
Sol Lewitt
Donald Judd
Joseph Kosuth
Bruce Nauman
Vito Acconci
George Herms
Betye Saar
Nam June Paik
Gerhard Richter
Lynda Benglis
David Hammons
Ana Mendieta
Hannah Wilke
Vito Acconci
Mark Bradford
Alexandra Grant
Mark Grotjahn
Elliott Hundley
Friedrich Kunath
Liz Craft
Franklin Sirmans
Terri Smooke
Michael Smooke
Christine Y. Kim
Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966, exploring an essential yet often overlooked period of the artist's work. The exhibition brings to light the artist's ability to appropriate the media of her era to speak to her own background, while offering a distinctive contribution to this cool and aloof aesthetic. Human Nature, Contemporary Art from the Collection features approximately 75 pieces, representing a striking variety of works in diverse media - painting, drawing, photography, video, and audio.
Ahmanson Building, Level 2
March 13, 2011–June 5, 2011
Vija Celmins
Television and Disaster 1964-1966
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA) presents Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966,
exploring an essential yet often overlooked period of the artist’s work.
Throughout much of her career, Vija Celmins has been internationally
recognized for her meticulously executed paintings and drawings using a
monochrome palette of black and gray, depicting starry night skies, ocean
waves, barren desert floors, and fragile spider webs. But the images that
first grounded her interest as a young artist in Los Angeles during the
early 1960s are characterized by violent themes such as crashing
warplanes, smoking handguns, and other images of death and disaster
influenced by the violence of the era—the war in Vietnam, social change,
political assassinations—and the mass media that represented it:
newspapers, magazines, and television.
Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Menil
Collection, Houston, Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964-1966 is
the first exhibition to concentrate on an important segment of Celmins’s
art dictated by a specific time and subject matter. Recent survey
exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, have concentrated on her drawings and prints, respectively.
Bringing together paintings and sculptures from national and international
museums and private collections, all from a brief three-year period, this
exhibition uncovers the technical and thematic groundwork from which
Celmins would build her international career.
The exhibition curators are Franklin Sirmans, the Terri and Michael Smooke
Department Head and Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, and Menil
Collection Associate Curator Michelle White. “It was between 1964 and
1966, before she was 30 years old, that Celmins created some of her most
important pieces in her Venice Beach studio,” said Sirmans. “She was aware
of what was happening politically and socially in the world via
television, newspapers, and magazines, and thus her work evolved—entwined
with time and memory of family and growing up.”
When Celmins arrived in Los Angeles in 1962, the city’s art scene was
realizing its final break with Abstract Expressionism, forging a coolly
detached Pop Art aesthetic unique to Southern California. With Walter
Hopps’s Ferus Gallery at its epicenter, artists such as Larry Bell, Joe
Goode, and Ed Ruscha offered stylistic alternatives to both Abstract
Expressionism’s action painting and New York’s bold version of Pop Art.
The city’s artists sought inspiration in found art and the painting of
common everyday objects, creating a fluid new language to critique the
decade’s increasingly commercialized and media-driven culture. Though
often associated with the Pop artists of the 1960s, Celmins’s work is
equally indebted to Conceptualism.
Never fully linked to the California Pop movement, Celmins is often
overlooked as an important figure in post-Abstract Expressionist art.
Television and Disaster brings to light the artist’s ability to
appropriate the media of her era—from newspapers and magazines to
snapshots and television—to speak to her own background, while offering a
distinctive contribution to this cool and aloof aesthetic.
Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and fled with her family to
Germany in advance of the Soviet army’s invasion in 1944. Migrating to the
United States in 1948 after World War II, the family settled in
Indianapolis, where Celmins took art classes and graduated from the John
Herron Art Institute with a BFA. In 1961 she received a scholarship to
attend the Yale Summer School of Art and Music, where she met artists
Brice Marden and Chuck Close. A year later, Celmins relocated to the West
Coast to attend graduate school in painting at the University of
California, Los Angeles. She has lived and worked primarily in New York
since 1981.
Credit
This exhibition is co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
and The Menil Collection, Houston. It comes to LACMA from The Menil
Collection where it opened on November 18, 2010, and continues through
February 20, 2011.
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BCAM, Level 2
March 13, 2011-July 4, 2011
Human Nature
Contemporary Art from the Collection
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(LACMA) will display the most extensive presentation of the museum’s
permanent collection of contemporary art in ten years. Human Nature:
Contemporary Art from the Collection will feature approximately seventy-
five pieces, representing a striking variety of works in diverse media—
painting, drawing, photography, video, and audio. Borrowing its title from
a work by seminal artist Bruce Nauman, Human Nature will survey works by
several generations of artists who have made defining contributions to the
recent art landscape, from 1968 to the present. Many of the works are on
view for the first time since their acquisition, including pieces by
Haegue Yang, Leslie Hewitt, Rachel Harrison, Glenn Ligon, Paul Pfeiffer,
and Zhang Huan, among others.
Human Nature addresses several significant positions and thematic
dialogues, spanning a period known for its plurality of styles. Following
a loose chronological path, the show can be entered from the present or
the past. At one end are works that straddle the transitional space from
conceptual art to minimal sculpture by Daniel La Rue Johnson and Larry
Bell, followed by the abstract minimalism of Sol Lewitt, Fred Sandback,
and Donald Judd. In a nod to the prevalence of conceptualism since the
1960s there are text works by Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth, and Bruce Nauman.
An emphasis on the body and performance in the early 1970s is also
highlighted in works by Nauman, Lynda Benglis, David Hammons, Ana Mendieta,
Hannah Wilke, and Vito Acconci.
The assemblage tradition is seen throughout the exhibition from works by
George Herms to David Hammons and Betye Saar to young artists like Amanda
Ross-Ho. Existential notions of representation and the self are explored
in photography and video works by Lorna Simpson, Yinka Shonibare, Rodney
McMillian, Carlee Fernandez, and Nikki S. Lee.
Having recently undergone an extensive conservation effort, Nam June
Paik’s Video Flag Z (1986) will be shown in addition to the likewise
monumental work 48 Portraits by Gerhard Richter—one of only four
photographic sets that Richter made in 1998 after his seminal paintings
created in 1972 that filled the German Pavilion at that year’s Venice
Biennale. Haegue Yang’s major installation Doubles and Couples (Version
Turin) (2008) will be on view for the first time since being acquired in
2009.
There will be a considerable showing of works by young Los Angeles artists
that have been primarily acquired in the last five years, including those
by painters Mark Bradford, Alexandra Grant, Mark Grotjahn, Elliott Hundley,
and Friedrich Kunath, along with sculptor Liz Craft. Additionally, the
installation will incorporate some key loans to amplify and extend the
selection of works from the collection.
Human Nature: Contemporary Art from the Collection is curated by Franklin
Sirmans, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of
Contemporary Art, and Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary
Art. A series of performances and film screenings pertaining to the works
will also be presented in conjunction with the installation.
Modern and Contemporary Art Council
Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, LACMA’s Modern and
Contemporary Art Council (MCAC) has been instrumental in acquiring many
works that will be on view in Human Nature. Founded in 1961, the MCAC is
the longest-running support group for contemporary art at any museum in
the country. Since its inception the MCAC has added nearly 800 works of
art to LACMA's collection. The council has also supported the annual
acquisition of works by younger Los Angeles artists working through the
Young Talent Award (1963–1986) and the Art Here and Now program (1987–
present), through which works by Mark Bradford, Aaron Curry, Pae White,
and many others were acquired. In honor of its anniversary, labels for all
works acquired by or through the MCAC—on view in Human Nature as well as
throughout LACMA’s other galleries—are designated with a special
identification.
Image: Vija Celmins, Time Magazine Cover, 1965, oil on canvas, 22x16 in., private collection c/o Ms. Laura Bechter.
Press Contact: For additional information, contact LACMA Communications at press@lacma.org or 323 857-6522.
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