Arpedia

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name. Assembled from the remnants and found objects from a hotel room, including a collage, shelf and small lamp, this playful piece—a satirical shrine of sorts—echoes the decidedly un-modern spirit of San Francisco’s bohemian culture. Kienholz’s works, with their critical and anti-establishment content, are often linked to the 1960s Funk Art movement in the Bay Area.

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Suspension

Sebastián Díaz Morales

In Suspension a young man is hanging in the air, falling, or perhaps drifting through time and space. There is no special or definite way to understand it. And it is in this construction where Morales envisions the world as an endless void, or timeless gravity, that we fall deeper and deeper into our own humanity.

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Ghost games

Anri Sala

Ghost Games , follows the enigmatic dance of crabs “steered” by a flashlight in the night of darkness of a South American beach. The video produces a surreal impression, typical of Sala’s work, with no plot in the classical sense, no story being told. Like in Blindfold (2002), in which a sunrise is reflected in urban billboards, and Time After Time (2001), in which the figure of a horse emerges from darkness lit by the headlights of an automobile, Sala likes to explore the phenomenon of light and its effects; In Ghost Games , he uses the threatening reflection of the flash light through the darkness of the beach.

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Plug the well ( July / August 2003)

Keith Tyson

Painting (Painting)

The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence. Philosophical problems such as the nature of causality, the roles of probability and design in human experience, and the limits and possibilities of human knowledge, animate much of his work. Language as a coded system, as a representation medium, but also as something that generates a whole variety of realities also plays a central role.

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Juego de Banderas

Antonio Caro

Painting (Painting)

Juego de Banderas (a play on words that loosely translates to both set of flags and game of flags) is a triptych of modified Colombian flags by Antonio Caro. Although the yellow, blue and red stripes on the first flag are faithful to the original, the second flag at the center has been modified to feature the word Colombia, emulating the typography and white-on-red design of the iconic Coca-Cola brand. Caro’s first version of this logo was a 1976 graphite drawing, and he has since produced several variations in different materials.

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Lynelle on my bed, NYC

Nan Goldin

Lynelle on my bed, NYC

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Untitled

Martin Kippenberger

Untitled is a work on paper by Martin Kippenberger comprised of several seemingly disparate elements: cut-out images of a group of dancers, a japanese ceramic vase, and a pair of legs, are all combined with gestural, hand-drawn traces and additional elements such as a candy wrapper from a hotel in Monte Carlo and a statistical form from a federal government office in Wiesbaden, Germany. Text cut out from a Newspaper spells out in German “Egg hunting in the Bavarian forest” and an additional piece of text reads in all capitals “BIN DABEI DU AUCH” (“I’m here too” in English). Together, all the messages and geographies from the separate elements suggest an alternative, highly stylized portrait of the artist; in this case, a fragmented, fluid, and itinerant sense of identity.

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Untitled (Rolled up)

Jonathan Monk

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father. Jonathan Monk bridges a conceptual art and his family privacy, and ironically ensures that there is “no difference between Sol Lewitt and my mother, he does not know more than she do not know. ” What is the status of the O-backed chair rail to the white cube?

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Untitled

Chris Ofili

Untitled

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Hat with photograph

Hans-Peter Feldmann

The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations. Hats and photographs are regularly part of his appropriations and arrangements. He famously made numerous trips to England in search of old photographs when he was an antique dealer, and then worked in a gift store with his wife when he left the art world in the 1980s.

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La Loge Harlem

Abigail DeVille

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The work La Loge Harlem focuses on the history of Harlem and its development over the last 200 years. It was a playground for the rich in the 19th century and where Old New York had its summer homes and diversions. The center image is a portrait of the artist’s grandmother when she was 16 in 1949.

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One Must

John Baldessari

In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text. The otherwise banal scissors become suggestively violent in relation to the text, which was originally the title of a print in Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series. However, Baldessari is less interested in the logical relationships between text and image than he is with the conceptual leaps that the viewer makes with the limited information provided.

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Blind Spencer (Mirror)

Douglas Gordon

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.

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Ponderosa Pine IV

Rodney Graham

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience.

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Baobab

Tacita Dean

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

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Absentia

Tony Oursler

Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium. Mounted on platforms suspended in space on metal stands, the video sculpture contemplates human relationships, expressed here by shouts and murmurs, the strange and the familiar.

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Columpio

Gabriel Orozco

Columpio

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Work n. 335: THINGS

Martin Creed

Work n. 335: THINGS

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Charco portatil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle)

Gabriel Orozco

Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994). The artist arrived a week prior to the opening with no artwork to install, and created three spontaneous works from locally sourced materials. This one was made of white plastic record sleeves that Orozco arranged on the damp roof of the gallery.

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Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate

John Baldessari

The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive. In Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate , a woman’s facial expression is obscured by such void, leaving only her posture to suggest her emotional state. The two images stacked above the woman can be read as comic-style thought bubbles, intimating that she has lust, desire, and fate on her mind.

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Mickey Mouse

Paul McCarthy

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey. On his shoulders he supports an enormous false head, Mickey’s familiar face grinning with glossy eyes. The artist has marked out in heavy black the background of Cinderella’s castle.

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South Africa Righteous Space

Hank Willis Thomas

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race.

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A Place to Call Home

Hank Willis Thomas

A Place to Call Home

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Black Imitates White

Hank Willis Thomas

Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content. Meaning, therefore, changes depending on one’s perspective—and in the case of Thomas’ installation, only emerges when one knows that there is always something hidden, always more to one of his works than immediately meets the eye. This lenticular print with text shifts as you walk in front of it from its title, “Black Imitates White” to the inverse, “White Imitates Black”(and some other possibilities in between) emphasizing that there are always at least two perspectives to the same scenario, and thereby encouraging us as viewers to consider them all together rather than trying to identify with any one subjectivity.

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VFGY9

Larry Bell

Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight. The blocks resemble a stone carving, or slabs of wood shaped into a simple organic composition whose overall sheen is varied through a thin layer of aluminum vapor. Yet, the real material of Bell’s piece is actually light, formed within the viewer’s eye into masses as present as stone.

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Mike and Sky

Catherine Opie

Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender. The very practice of being photographed raises many complex issues around gender performance and the relationships between an inner self and an outer public persona. Even though Mike and Sky are cropped and obscure one another, many of their choices for self-presentation—as emphasized by their tattoos—remain visible.

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Forking Sprawl

Robert Smithson

Forking Sprawl

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Freeway Series

Catherine Opie