Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Photography (Photography)

Angela (crotch grab)

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series. It’s contrasting dark and vibrant tones presage his later series of works, exhibited at L. A.’s Hammer Museum as Scorched Earth. These larger works share a map-like quality, looking like aerial views of some scarred urban landscape.

Photography (Photography)

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth. Opie is known for her honest portraits of diverse individuals, from LGBT people to football players, and the self-portrait has also been a long-standing and important part of her practice. Instead of hiding her sexuality and interest in sadomasochism, Opie wears it proudly.

Photography (Photography)

Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture. The Freeway Series was developed in 1995, right after the artist’s inclusion in that year’s Whitney Biennial. As if suggesting that her work should not be restricted to being seen through overtly political or activist lenses, this series lends insight into the city of Los Angeles via its most characteristic urban feature: its highways.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

Alistair Fate (1994) depicts, presumably, a member of the LGBT community. Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of LGBT, queer, and outsider people; she intends them to come off not as shocking or different, but as human despite their deviance from societal norms. This image is one of several works by Opie in the Kadist Collection that show marginalized people, filtered through the artist’s signature appropriation of formal and classical portraiture in the interest of both documentation and reframing.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The application of bright colors and kitsch materials in Flower Tree manifests a playful comment on the influence of popular culture and urban lifestyle. And though his works share a similar sensibility to Claes Oldenburg’s oversized sculptures from everyday objects, Choi draws from his immediate surroundings and life experience. Public sculptures with a flower theme are often used to decorate the rapidly urbanized cities in Asia, which are constructed with concrete and steel materials.

Photography (Photography)

In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain. She wears an expression of both pleasure and intensity as she points a gun at someone or something outside of the frame. Raven (gun) (1994) is not so much threatening as full of sexuality and potential energy.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Titled afterTruman Capote’s protagonist famously played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Holly Golightly (2011) captures the essence of the character: seductive and bold, mysterious and capricious. Though tied to the ceiling by a chain, the suggested figure is literally light on her feet, with a pointed boot hovering just above the gallery floor. Non-parallel lines and inconsistent angles lend the sculpture a sense of airy haphazardness.

Painting (Painting)

The Rebellion of Roots by Daniela Ortiz depicts a series of situations in which tropical plants, held hostage in the botanical gardens and greenhouses of Europe, are protected and nurtured by the spirits of racialized people who died as a result of European racism. The work is divided into four short stories: About Afghanistan and heroin , About Exposition Colonial and cow , About Jardin d’acclimatation and potato , and About Vietnam . The series of 14 painted panels draw upon the aesthetic of ex-votos, a genre of traditional religious folk painting that acts as a tribute for divine intervention in response to personal tragedy.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Off-White Tulips is an intimate, meditative, and tender essay-film composed as a fictional exchange between Black gay writer James Baldwin and the artist, Aykan Safoglu. The work is primarily structured around Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s scholarly reconstitution of Baldwin’s self-imposed exile in Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum between 1961 and 1971, as well as autobiographical notes and intimations gathered throughout the years. Safoglu produced Off-White Tulips early on in his career when he was in the process of acquiring permanent residency in Germany.

Photography (Photography)

From Green to Orange is a series of silver films immersed in a bath of dye and rust. While the perception of the subject is made difficult by the chemical reaction, vegetation becomes discernible at a closer look. Thu Van Tran interferes in the depths of a mystery, in the density of a hallucinated dream.

Painting (Painting)

The works of Fabrice Hyber provoke divergent ways of thinking. In a kindred spirit with Raymond Hains, image and writing are intertwined. Drawings and diagrams are visually direct, as shown in the series of “Peintures Homéopathiques” (“Homeopathic Paintings”), collages covered in transparent resin (1986-1988).

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The headdresses, woven from artificial hair braids, symbolize historical icons including Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, Fela Kuti and King Guézo of Dahomey. The wigs portraying these grand figures also unambiguously recall Africa to mind. By declaring Cotonou, one of Benin’s cities, the Art Museum of Real Life, and by having thirty white-clad figures wearing Gaba’s latest series of tresses cross through it, he draws attention to the urban space and its inhabitants’ strategies of survival and improvisation.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Drawing, which is the essential embodiment of Fabrice Hyber’s artistic thinking, is at the origin of all his works. The artist uses accumulation, hybridization and mutation to create constant shifts between extremely varied domains. Each work is just an intermediate, evolving stage of this “work in progress” that spreads like a proliferation of thought, establishing links and exchanges that then help to create other connections.

Painting (Painting)

In 1970, Ruscha began a series of paintings made from stains. He experimented with a variety of materials (gun powder, dust, blood, among many others) to leave surface traces of different objects. The resulting images are negative shapes amidst blurry environments like Splinters and Seconal in which a grey surface is imprinted with the materials mentioned in the title.