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Past Exhibitions

    • ECHO: Sampling Visual Culture

      June 25–October 10, 2010

      ECHO: Sampling Visual Culture will explore a selection of contemporary artists from the Gallery's Permanent Collection who incorporate humor and appropriation into their artmaking.

    • Clyfford Still

      June 25–August 29, 2010

      The Albright-Knox Art Gallery owns the largest public collection of paintings by the American Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still—an ensemble of thirty-three abstract works that span the most critical developments of his career from 1937 to 1963.

    • Fletcher Benton: The Alphabet

      July 30, 2009–July 5, 2010

      Renowned American sculptor Fletcher Benton is best known for cutting, folding, and realigning two-dimensional sheets of steel into three-dimensional objects that seem to defy gravity.

    • Photography by Women Artists

      May 28–June 27, 2010

      Photography by Women Artists, focused entirely on photographs created by women, is designed to challenge our notion of the female perspective.

    • The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941–1960

      March 19–May 30, 2010

      Guest curated by Roald Nasgaard, Professor of Art History at Florida State University, this exhibition includes sixty works of art, as well as photographs, books, and other ephemera documenting the history of the Automatiste, Canada’s first truly avant-garde art movement.

    • Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008

      February 19–May 30, 2010

      Guillermo Kuitca’s prolific career encompasses a diverse body of work and a familiar yet thought-provoking range of imagery. The paintings and works on paper in Everything inspire viewers not only to contemplate their relationship to the piece in front of them, but also their place within personal spaces and the larger world.

    • Topographies

      November 13, 2009–February 28, 2010

      Topography, the practice of creating detailed maps or charts that define the terrestrial characteristics of a singular locality, was originally conceived by ancient cultures as simply “the study of place.

    • Ingrid Calame: Step on a Crack . . .

      September 25, 2009–February 28, 2010

      Ingrid Calame is the inaugural artist in the Albright-Knox’s Artist-in-Residence program. Calame and her local team made hundreds of square feet of tracings, which the artist transformed into the drawings and paintings that make up this exhibition.

    • ROBERT MANGOLD Beyond the Line: Paintings and Project 2000–2008

      October 23, 2009–January 31, 2010

      Organized by Albright-Knox Chief Curator Douglas Dreishpoon, this exhibition honors the outstanding career of Robert Mangold, an artist whose native roots are in Buffalo and who has been a major figure in the investigation of geometric abstraction since the 1960s.

    • WALL ROCKETS: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha

      July 24–October 25, 2009

      The premise of this exhibition can be defined simply as an artist and his sphere of influence. WALL ROCKETS takes its title from a work by Ed Ruscha of the same title depicting a majestic mountain range of snow-capped peaks amidst a deep blue atmosphere.

    • Bad Habits

      July 10–October 4, 2009

      A meditation on vice and naughtiness in contemporary art, Bad Habits presents a selection of the more subversive objects in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s Permanent Collection.

    • Strange Brew: The 1960s

      May 29–September 20, 2009

      This selection of works from the Gallery’s Permanent Collection focuses the art that sprang from the 1960s counterculture, which fuses elements of surrealism and pop art with swirling patterns, neon colors, repeated motifs, and bizarre iconography.

    • Frida Kahlo: Through the Lens of Nickolas Muray

      May 8–July 5, 2009

      Forty-seven exquisite color and black-and-white photographs of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo by the American photographer Nickolas Muray are featured in this exhibition organized and circulated by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services.

    • Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976

      February 13–June 14, 2009

      Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in collaboration with The Jewish Museum, New York, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, this special exhibition revisits the watershed period of American art from 1940 to 1976 through the writings of its two primary critics: Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg.

    • The Brave Buffalo: Abstract Expressionism and the City

      February 13–June 10, 2009

      This installation of original letters, photographs, publications, and other documents drawn from the Gallery’s archives and library collections tells the story of how the Albright-Knox became one of the first art museums in the United States to exhibit and actively amass the new art of the 1950s.

    • Bruce Jackson: Cummins Wide

      January 23–May 10, 2009

      This exhibition features fifty-three extraordinary Widelux images of Cummins Prison Farm, taken more than twenty-five years ago by Buffalo-based photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist Bruce Jackson.

    • From Tusk to Tail: Animals and Art

      August 29, 2008–January 30, 2009

      From Tusk to Tails: Animals and Art represents a cross-section of birds and beasts from around the world and is the second exhibition organized in partnership with the Buffalo Museum of Science.

    • Op Art Revisited: Selections from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

      July 18, 2008–January 25, 2009

      Op art, also know as “Optical art,” refers to the work of a group of abstract painters in the early 1960s who—under the direction of artists Richard Anuszkiewicz, Bridget Riley, Julian Stanczak, and Victor Vasarely—utilized parallel lines, concentric circles, and electric colors to create works that give the visual effect of afterimages and illusion of movement.

    • Works on Paper: The Natalie and Irving Forman Collection

      August 15–November 30, 2008

      This exhibition is the first time Natalie and Irving Forman's brilliant collection of works on paper has been exhibited en masse. It reflects the remarkable evolution of the Forman Collection, which today comprises wonderfully unique and, at times, experimental abstract works.

    • REMIX: Recent Acquisitions, Works on Paper

      May 1–August 1, 2008

      The expression “works on paper” corresponds to a completely different set of rules for making art, which extends beyond traditional media and abolishes the assumption that art made on or of paper occupies merely a complementary role to painting and sculpture. For decades now, artists have defied the simplistic notion of basic drawing by utilizing multiple techniques and diverse media to create works on paper.

    • REMIX: Recent Acquisitions

      April 11–July 28, 2008

      An active approach to collecting is at the heart of any museum whose mission and vision is to acquire and exhibit contemporary art. Since its original inception as the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy in 1862, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery has consistently been dedicated to collecting the “art of our time,” and the Permanent Collection has continued to grow in significant ways. Remix Recent Acquisitions presents an overview of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s collecting habits over the course of the past five years.

    • Jennifer Steinkamp

      March 14–June 29, 2008

      Jennifer Steinkamp, a nationally touring retrospective exhibition organized and circulated by the San Jose Museum of Art, offers a comprehensive view of one of the most important and prolific female video and new media artists of our time. Steinkamp creates stunning 3-D installations that explore architectural space, motion, and the phenomenon of human perception.

    • REMIX: Color and Light

      December 21, 2007–May 4, 2008

      Color is powerful, yet quixotic. As a result, it boasts a fascinating history that is constantly being rewritten to reflect the specific concerns and ideologies of the day. In large part the most insightful thoughts on color come from artists themselves. Not only are these ideas expressed in their art but also in their writings.

    • In the City: Works on Paper from the Collection

      January 18–April 6, 2008

      Artistic interpretations of “the city” entail a fascination with architecture, industry, and the vibrancy of metropolitan life. This selection of works on paper offers a unique portrait of modern civilization by revealing facets of urban living through an exploration of anonymity, industry, commerce, and life in the steel jungle.

    • Figuratively Speaking: Sculpture from the Collection

      November 30, 2007–March 2, 2008

      This exhibition brings together works from both the Gallery’s Permanent Collection and the Buffalo Museum of Science, exploring a multitude of approaches to the sculpted human form.

    • The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light

      November 16, 2007–February 24, 2008

      The Panza Collection: An Experience of Color and Light will include more than seventy works of art from the Panza Collection, which is now dispersed in Varese, Lugano, New York, and Los Angeles. In consultation with Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, whose vision has guided the project from the start, Gallery Director Louis Grachos and Chief Curator Douglas Dreishpoon have selected the objects and artists to be featured.

    • Drawing Architecture: The L.J. Cella Collection

      September 27, 2007–January 6, 2008

      An important part of the creative process for architects is sketching. The sketch, or plan, is the way architects express their ideas and develop their concepts, whether they begin as ink squiggles on napkins, colorful pastels on paper, or beautifully rendered graphite on vellum. Drawing Architecture showcases the work of mid-century and contemporary architects, landscape architects, artists, and designers who are represented in the collection of San Francisco Bay Area resident L.J. Cella.

    • A New Installation by James Turrell

      January 1–December 31, 2007

      James Turrell isolates a central component of everyday experience - light. His installations grow out of a radically simple goal - to let the viewer experience light as directly as possible. In indoor installations such as Gap from the “Tiny Town” series, 2001/2006, he lets light take on its own otherworldly quality, creating a contemplative space where one experiences a single plane of illuminated color.

    • REMIX The Collection

      November 10, 2006–November 25, 2007

      The latest installation of REMIX The Collection continues to offer Gallery visitors new and exciting ways to experience the Gallery's permanent collection. This thematic exploration of beloved favorites, as well as some new and exciting additions, reinforces the vast depths and relevance of art.  One of the themes highlighted is “Pop Post Pop,” which explores the Gallery’s pop art collection and the movement's renaissance during the 1970s and 1980s.

    • Beyond/In Western New York 2007

      August 17–October 28, 2007

      This exciting invitational exhibition featured the work of artists from Western New York, Central New York, Southern Ontario, Northeastern Ohio, and Northwestern Pennsylvania.

    • Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint 9

      June 27–October 21, 2007

      Matthew Barney is heralded as the most influential American artist of his generation for his epic, ravishing, eccentric, and all-consuming work. His films and the sculpture and photographic series that derive from them are biological, mythological, and historical. Drawing Restraint 9 follows his Cremaster Cycle, which was screened, in part, at the Gallery in February 2004, by looking back to a central tenet of his creative vision, an idea that grew out of Barney’s early experience as a athlete: form emerges through struggle with resistance.

    • Ken Heyman: Pop Portraits

      June 15–August 26, 2007

      While Ken Heyman’s name may not be instantly familiar to most, his body of photographic work is extensive and has penetrated printed media and popular culture for the past fifty years. As a photographer for Magnum Photos (an international photographic organization) Heyman shot more than 150 photojournalist assignments for Life magazine and is perhaps best known for his lengthy, twenty-year collaboration with well-known anthropologist Dr. Margaret Mead.

    • Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s

      May 4–July 29, 2007

      The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is proud to host Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s, an exhibition that focuses on what is perhaps the most creative period of Bacon’s career. Curated by Michael Peppiatt, a personal friend of Bacon and author of the exhibition catalogue and a biography, this project is organized by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The exhibition is centered around a group of thirteen paintings from the collection of Sir Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, prominent art collectors, patrons, and friends of Bacon.

    • Collective Identity: Expressionism to Realism and the Art of Printmaking in Germany

      February 21–May 27, 2007

      Albrecht Dürer, who is considered one of the greatest printmakers of all time, produced both woodcuts and engravings with a level of detail that is virtually unsurpassed. Dürer, among other German printmakers of the sixteenth century, was an enormous influence on early-twentieth-century German artists who were concerned with such issues as the atrocities of war, death, the difficulty of city life, and man's relationship with nature during a period of social upheaval and uncertainty in pre- and post-World War I Germany.

    • Surface Matter: Collage from the Collection

      November 17, 2006–February 11, 2007

      While many artists have worked solely in the medium, collage has failed to rise to the popularity of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Surface Matter reveals nearly one hundred years of collage and exemplifies how it infiltrated a century of art making and continues to relate to the artistic expressions of the twenty-first century.

    • Andrea Zittel: Critical Space

      October 6, 2006–January 7, 2007

      Andrea Zittel is one of the most exciting and influential artists of our time because she makes art about the questions that nag us everyday: what to wear in the morning, what to fix again for dinner, how to deal with all the clutter, and how to escape the tyranny of the clock. Part philosopher, part scientist, part designer, part artist, Zittel has made her own life an experiment about the best way to live.

    • Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005

      July 21–October 22, 2006

      Celebrated as one of the most influential artists of our time, Chuck Close has retained his vitality by continuously reinventing portraiture, a genre often underrecognized in contemporary art. Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967 – 2005 focused exclusively on the artist’s self-portraits, consisting of more than eighty works in a broad range of media — painting, drawing, photography, collage, and printmaking — that trace the evolution of his process and self-examination from 1967 to the present.

    • Petah Coyne: Above and Beneath the Skin

      June 9–September 10, 2006

      Combining both figurative and abstract traditions and deploying a diverse range of materials, Petah Coyne’s sculptures constitute a complex language. This comprehensive nineteen-year survey was organized by Albright-Knox Art Gallery Senior Curator Douglas Dreishpoon and included a selection of Coyne’s organic concretions from the late eighties; metallic black sand works from the early nineties; wax chandeliers and intricate hair weavings from the same decade; more recent, figure-based wax personages; and a suite of eight large-format photographs from the years 1992 to 2001.

    • Formal Exchange: Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Latin America

      February 17–July 2, 2006

      Formal Exchange: The Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Latin America will examine Latin American abstraction from the 1960s and early ‘70s, and pay homage to the Gallery’s commitment to aquiring modern and contemporary art from all over the world.

    • Karin Davie: Dangerous Curves

      February 24–May 14, 2006

      Karin Davie is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and drawings; a survey that tracks the evolution of Davie’s visual vocabulary. A true innovator, Davie redefines the modernist convention of stripe painting by inserting gesture and the artist’s hand back into optical, hard-edged, geometric convention.

    • The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art

      October 21, 2005–January 29, 2006

      The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art is came to Buffalo in October 2005. Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries in collaboration with the Millennium Art Museum, Beijing, The Wall was the largest exhibition of contemporary Chinese art to travel beyond China. It also marked the first collaboration between American art museums and a major Chinese art institution focusing on contemporary Chinese art.

    • On View: Stellar Works from the Collection

      February 1–January 7, 2006

      On View: Stellar Works from the Collection is an exciting reinstallation of the Gallery’s permanent collection, featuring well-known masterworks from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. This exhibition is in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the collection’s first home - the magnificent building designed by Edward B. Green in 1905.

    • A New Installation by Robert Therrien

      January 1, 2006

      Los Angeles-based artist Robert Therrien has been making sculpture for more than three decades, transforming ordinary objects and forms into extraordinary works of art. More than simply an enlarged replica, this work of art combines the abstract sculptural forms of the furniture with the novelty and magic of experiencing these everyday objects from a new perspective.

    • A New Installation by Paul Pfeiffer

      January 1, 2006

      In recognition of the Stanley Cup’s visit to Buffalo on April 24, 2006, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery presents Pfeiffer’s work, honoring hockey’s Holy Grail. In Caryatid, Pfeiffer presents video footage of the Cup, as it is held up above the heads of players of winning hockey teams; but by erasing the players, Pfeiffer alters our perception of hockey’s highest symbol of achievement.

    • A New Installation by Rachel Whiteread

      January 1, 2006

      The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is pleased to present Untitled (Domestic) as part of an ongoing series of large-scale sculptural installations in the Gallery’s impressive Sculpture Court. British-born artist Rachel Whiteread has received critical acclaim for her unique body of work, in which she transforms ordinary domestic items and proverbial spaces into discretely poignant objects that subvert the viewer’s sense of traditional function, form, and space.

    • A New Installation by Jim Hodges

      January 1, 2006

      Jim Hodges - a highly respected artist who transforms ordinary objects into poetic spectacles – brings his largest work to date to the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden this summer. This sculpture entitled look and see is an eleven-and-one-half-foot, twisting plane of stainless steel, with a surface that has been cut with a laser, polished, and painted black and white to create a stylized camouflage pattern, which includes reflective areas, through which one can see the surrounding architecture.

    • Franz West: Recent Sculptures

      October 21, 2004–October 16, 2005

      Franz West is one of Austria’s most highly regarded artists. He has spent his career rethinking the ways in which art is experienced and encourages viewers of his work to become active participants. For West, art is not about perfect form, but about finding a way to get around convention and articulate the psychological and physical sensibilities that make us uniquely human.