August 1 , 2001
PRESS RELEASE
ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY ANNOUNCES 31
ADDITIONS TO THE COLLECTION THIS YEAR
Buffalo, NY--- Albright-Knox Art Gallery Director Douglas G. Schultz has announced that the Gallery has acquired 31 new works of art this year, including 10 gifts and 21 purchases. "As a museum of modern and contemporary art, it is our mission to actively collect the artwork of our time," said Schultz. "This year’s acquisitions represent the work of some of the most important artists working today."
Among the highlights are three important works by African-American artists. Feeling His Oats, 1988, is a large-scale acrylic on canvas by Robert Colescott, whose work is characterized by incisive, often witty, and complex social commentaries that deal with racial issues. The central figure in this painting, a well-dressed African-American man, sits at a table surrounded by symbols of his success while in the lower part of the painting the figures call to mind the barriers of racism that cloud any successes African Americans achieve in this country.
Ellen Gallagher’s paintings are abstractions layered with metaphorical, literary, and racial references. In Bubbel, 2001 she created a grid by applying sheets of lined paper to the canvas, used pen and ink to reinforce the faint blue line and then painted doodle-like shapes in pale pastel shades. Her shapes represent stereotypes of eyeballs and lips from minstrel shows resulting in an elegant abstraction with racially charged subject matter.
The third work is a unique artist’s book entitled Cane, by author Jean Toomer and African-American artist Martin Puryear. Toomer first published Cane, a literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, in 1927. It is a collection of stories and poems that deal with African-American life of the rural south and urban north. The deluxe edition designed by Puryear in 2000 is enclosed in a wooden slipcase and includes a suite of seven woodblock prints that are haunting evocations of the female characters in the book.
Other noteworthy acquisitions include Infvitabile Fatvm, 1994, one of the politically-conscious paintings of American artist, Leon Golub whose work was featured in a major exhibition at the Albright-Knox this year. He often uses images from contemporary media and in this case the figure of the bare-chested man holding a gun over his head was derived from a news photo of a Lebanese fighter. The skull and dog are recurring symbols in his work and combined with the text, the artist has produced a symbolic and multi-faceted image that suggests brutal political realities while reminding us of the inevitability of death.
Beginning in the 1950s, Philip Guston was one of the most lyrical and lush of the Abstract Expressionist painters. He returned to figuration in the 1970s and in Multiplied, from 1972, there is a comic-book like cartoon style with colors ranging from muddy pinks to dull reds and grays characteristic of his ground-breaking figurative style. Quirky and personal, Guston’s figurative paintings have been hailed as pivotal to the development of Neo-Expressionism in the 1980s.
Fred Tomaselli’s Echo, Wow and Flutter, created in 2000, is a collaged mosaic of found images of human body parts, flowers, and birds with prescription pills, all imbedded in acrylic resin. The elliptical lines of these stringed-together fragments have the appearance of beaded sound waves, oblong stands of jewels, or the orbiting paths of planets. Tomaselli first emerged as an artist in the early 1980s out of the punk rock scene in Los Angeles and in some ways his art reflects that drug-induced world. The confluence of pills and natural forms also allude to the struggle between nature and technology and a longing for utopia.
Scottish artist, Callum Innes, who works in an abstract mode, grapples with how abstract painting can be reinvigorated in contemporary terms. Exposed Painting Ivory Black, Yellow Oxide, 2001, is from a series he began in 1998 to explore this problem. Thickly painted sections are contrasted with areas in which turpentine has been used to wash away paint generating a dialogue between presence and absence, material and immaterial.
Three major new sculptures entered the collection this year. Stephen Balkenhol’s Standing Man, is a fine example of the deadpan figurative sculptures this German artist has been making since the early 1980s. Balkenhol's figures are a kind of 21st century "everyman," . . . undistinguished guys dressed in nondescript clothing standing in casual poses. Made out of soft wood that is cut with a power saw and chisel, the artist allows the chisel marks to remain resulting in deeply textured surfaces. Balkenhol's works are provocative "monuments" for our contemporary world.
Cleft Foot, 2000, was acquired following a New Room of Contemporary Art exhibition of the work of Cathy de Monchaux. Unusual materials and sexually suggestive imagery are hallmarks of her work. This piece is intricately constructed and decorative in feeling while at the same time somewhat disquieting in its suggestions of body parts (both human and animal), skin, and bones.
In addition to painting and sculpture, the Gallery continues to actively collect prints, photographs, and works on paper. A highlight of those acquisitions is an eight-foot tall graphite and charcoal drawing, Untitled (open door, consulting room to study 1938) by Robert Longo. Part of a series of drawings based on historical photographs of Sigmund Freud’s residence and consulting room, Longo exploits contrasts between crisp, bright light and dark, velvety shadow to dramatize this quiet interior. Longo, a former Buffalonian and founder of Hallwalls, endeavors to create art works that provide us with an antidote to the daily bombardment of images to which we are all subjected.
In keeping with the Gallery’s more recent practice of collecting photography, several significant new works were acquired this year. Suite Venitienne, 1980, a seminal work by Sophie Calle, is a set of 55 black and white photographs, 24 text panels, and 3 maps that tell the story of the artist’s attempts to track a stranger she had recently seen at a party in Paris, as he traveled to Venice. This conceptual work creates questions about identity and the search for truth.
Untitled, 2000 adds to the Gallery’s comprehensive holdings by artist Cindy Sherman who has played a pivotal role as an innovator in the use of photography to explore cultural constructs of female identity. In this work, as is her practice, the artist has transformed herself into a female stereotype, a wealthy Park Avenue lady, and then photographed herself in her studio. Sherman’s images make us think about the ways in which women are seen in our society and the role photography and the media play in perpetuating those stereotypes.
Believing that photography can only record surface appearances, the young German photographer Thomas Ruff creates portraits that are as neutral as passport photos. This is exemplified by the large-scale portrait, Portrait (R.Eisch), 1999. The imposing portraits of his friends and acquaintances reveal nothing beyond their physical appearance yet, Ruff’s photographs elevate the banal and commonplace to the status of high art.
Since the mid-1970s Hiroshi Sugimoto has produced photographic series with subject matter ranging from seascapes to movie theaters that are concerned, in some sense, with the idea of picturing time. Emperor Hirohito, 1999 is from a series of portraits the artist has made from wax figures found in Madame Tussaude’s wax museums around the world. The exquisite realism in these larger-than-life pictures make us pause as we consider the complex layers of time embedded in a photographic portrait of a person, who had been dead for a decade when the picture was taken.
To see many of the previously mentioned works as well as other recent acquisitions, please be sure to visit the upcoming special exhibition Fresh: Recent Acquisitions, which features works of art acquired over the past five years. It will be on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery from September 8 through October 14. This exhibition will be accompanied by an e-publication with texts by Associate Curator Claire Schneider at www.albrightknox.org.