Big Things for Big Rooms @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - An Exhibition of Large-scale Artworks since the late 1960s

Big Things for Big Rooms

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

November 21, 2025 – July 4, 2027 

Sam Gilliam 

Light Depth, 1969 

Acrylic on canvas; 120 × 900 in. (304.8 × 2286 cm) 

Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art 

(Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund), 2018

Mika Rottenberg 

Tropical Breeze (exterior), 2004.

Installation view, Sneeze to Squeeze, Magasin III, Stockholm, 2013 

Single-channel video installation; 3:45 min. 

Exterior; 96 × 96 × 240 in. (243.84 × 243.84 × 609.6 cm) 

Gift of the Berezdivin Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2024 

Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

Photo: Christian Saltas 

Courtesy the artist, Magasin III, Stockholm; and Hauser and Wirth

Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum will open “Big Things for Big Rooms,” an exhibition tracing the development of immersive large-scale artworks since the late 1960s. The presentation of 10 artworks—five on view for the first time at the Museum—is drawn largely from the Hirshhorn’s collection. “Big Things for Big Rooms” offers a multisensorial examination of how artists create installation works that expand the boundaries of an artwork and the role of the visitor. 

“Big Things for Big Rooms” is organized into two parts. The first introduces the development of “Environments,” expansive installations by pioneering artists such as Robert Irwin, whose work defined the Light and Space movement, and Land artist Richard Long. The second half demonstrates how contemporary artists like Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, and Mika Rottenberg are expanding upon these foundational ideas in different ways, often using everyday materials. 

The exhibition is organized by the Hirshhorn’s head curator, Evelyn C. Hankins, with the support of curatorial assistant CJ Greenhill Caldera.

“This exhibition connects the profound creativity of the 1960s to the contemporary artists who are reshaping our sense of the world and our place in it,” said Museum Director Melissa Chiu. “Presented as a continuum from ‘Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960,’ which inaugurated our 50th-anniversary season, ‘Big Things for Big Rooms’ manifests these essential art-historical developments while demonstrating the significance of installation art in the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection.”

Rooted in artist and critic Allan Kaprow’s groundbreaking 1958 concept of “Environments,” which he defined as artworks that require visitors to actively engage with or even complete them, “Big Things for Big Rooms” begins with the Hirshhorn’s inaugural presentation of Sam Gilliam’s painting “Light Depth” (1969). Sam Gilliam experimented with dynamic, color-washed canvases, or Drapes, removing them from their stretchers and allowing their forms to change in response to each presentation. Extending 75 feet, the sweeping, frameless “Light Depth,” long considered to be Gilliam’s most important Drape, spills from the wall of the Museum’s first gallery, blurring the boundaries among painting, sculpture, and installation art.

Following “Light Depth” are other pioneering works, including Dan Flavin’s “‘monument’ for V. Tatlin” (1967), an arrangement of fluorescent fixtures that deploys light to define the space and involve the visitor. Also on view is Lygia Pape’s “Ttéia 1,A” (1979/2025), a geometric installation of shimmering metallic threads that anticipates the individual’s movement within the gallery.

As the exhibition unfolds, its focus shifts toward contemporary global artists, including Spencer Finch and Eliasson, who are envisioning immersive art for the 21st century. Highlights include recent Hirshhorn acquisitions such as Rottenberg’s “Tropical Breeze” (2004), a gallery-filling shipping container that functions as a screening room, and a recent site-responsive installation by Rashid Johnson, an assembly of objects of personal and cultural resonance (including live plants, books, ceramics, and shea butter) positioned within a minimalist sculptural framework that can be further activated by gatherings, performances, and reflection. The exhibition concludes with Chan’s “3rd Light” (2006), a mesmerizing choreography of digital projection, shadows, and objects exploring themes of transcendence, creation, and cyclical time. 

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - A Landmark Exhibition

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Through January 3, 2027 

Portrait of Adam Pendleton

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus 

Adam Pendleton 

WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024 

Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas 

19 x 15 in. (43.3 x 38.1 cm) 

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist presents new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, highlights his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.

“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. ‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ invites our almost one million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”

“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” said Adam Pendleton. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the Museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”

Adam Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” features Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.

The artist also debuts “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968, which is considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.

In its totality, “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” offers a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that are concurrently presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan. “It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” said Hankins. “‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.

Artist Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light,” at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); “Adam Pendleton: To Divide By,” at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); “Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022).

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate London.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

OSGEMEOS: Endless Story @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

OSGEMEOS: Endless Story 

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

May 18, 2024 – July 6, 2025

The Hirshhorn Presents the first US museum survey and largest US exhibition of work by identical twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1974), known globally as OSGEMEOS—Portuguese for “the twins.” The yearlong, full-floor presentation brings together approximately 1,000 artworks, photographs, and archival materials to highlight the trajectory of their collaborative, multidisciplinary practice, including the roots of their fantastical artistic language inspired by their upbringing in urban Brazil. OSGEMEOS: Endless Story spotlights the artists’ playful combination of universal themes with magical elements drawn from their heritage, urban art and graffiti traditions, and shared imagination.

“We are inspired to collaborate with OSGEMEOS to share their multigenre practice that, by dissolving art world hierarchies, defines what it means to be an artist in the 21st century,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “Since childhood, OSGEMEOS have adapted graffiti traditions to create an increasingly complex and immersive studio practice rooted in their brotherhood: one thought process shared between two people for more than forty years.”

Featuring large-scale paintings on wood and canvas, monumental sculptures and room-sized installations that incorporate light, movement and music, “Endless Story” will fill the Hirshhorn’s sweeping third-floor galleries. To highlight OSGEMEOS’s interest in fusing the real with the fantastic, central place will be given to dreamlike worlds including “The Moon Room” (2022), built specifically for exhibition spaces and featuring sound, colorful architecture and custom wallpaper. The presentation also will include scores of rarely seen drawings illuminating the growth of their creative practice, from the walls of their childhood home to freeways and building façades to global galleries, alongside documentation of their outdoor graffiti and murals.

“We are delighted to accept the invitation to fill the Hirshhorn’s circular galleries with our story and hope to inspire a new generation to share their own stories,” said OSGEMEOS. “‘Endless Story’ will trace our trajectory from childhood across different media. The survey will explore how we developed our visual style, highlight our influences and present the diversity of language. We’re very happy to showcase this work in our first retrospective exhibition at a museum in the United States.”

“Endless Story” frames OSGEMEOS’s origin story in São Paulo with rarely seen early sketches and introduces Tritrez, a mystical universe the artists invented as children and continue to populate with their colorful imaginings and signature large-headed figures. Sources of inspiration, such as their mother’s embroidery, American hip-hop, breakdancing and graffiti, life, nature and dreams, sci-fi and the supernatural, as well as music, feature throughout the galleries. Many works have never been shown outside Brazil, including “The Tritrez Altar” (2020), a vast rainbow-colored structure housing sculptures of OSGEMEOS’s trademark characters. Other highlights include a colossal handmade zoetrope devised in 2014 that, when activated, animates OSGEMEOS’s world in the spirit of pre-cinema days. In addition, more than 30 paintings from lenders across the United States demonstrate the breadth of the artists’ practice.

OSGEMEOS (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1974; live and work in São Paulo), whose name means “the twins” in Portuguese, are a collaborative art duo composed of twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo. As children, the brothers developed a distinct way of communicating through artistic language, but it was with the introduction of hip-hop culture in the 1980s that OSGEMEOS began to use art as a way to share their dynamic and magical universe with the public. Combining historical and contemporary elements of Brazilian culture with graffiti, hip-hop, music, dreams and international culture, the artists have created an expansive body of work that includes murals, paintings, sculpture, site-specific installations and video. They use a symbolic visual language often inspired by dreams that, as twins, they claim to share. In addition to the use of bright colors and elaborate patterns, they are best known for their paintings featuring long-limbed figures with thin outlines, enlarged faces and simplified features. The use of doors, canvases, and mirrors, both literal—they paint directly onto discarded doors and incorporate reflective surfaces into their works—and as motifs, signal access to another realm or an entry point to the psyche, pulling viewers into their surreal and chimerical world.

“OSGEMEOS: Endless Story” is curated by Marina Isgro, Associate Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, with the support of Curatorial Assistant CJ Greenhill Caldera.

OSGEMEOS: Endless Story

Exhibition Catalogue

Rizzoli Electa, 2024

The exhibition is accompanied by the first major English-language monograph of OSGEMEOS’ work, copublished by Rizzoli. The fully illustrated 344-page catalogue will feature nearly 350 illustrations and smartphone-enabled Hirshhorn Eye video activations, as well as original contributions by Isgro, Alan Ket, Peter Michalski, and Marguerite Itamar Harrison, plus interviews with the artists by Jochen Volz and Chiu.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 

Independence Ave. and 7th St., SW, Washington, DC 20260 

www.hirshhorn.si.edu

Barbara Kruger: Belief+Doubt, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Barbara Kruger: Belief+Doubt 

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC 

August 20, 2012+2013+2014

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, has commissioned internationally renowned artist BARBARA KRUGER to create a site-specific installation for one of the museum’s most-visited public spaces. Belief+Doubt (2012) will fill the lower-level lobby and extend into the newly relocated museum bookstore. Approximately 6,700 square feet of surface—including walls, floor and escalator sides—will be covered in text-printed vinyl, surrounding viewers with lettering up to 12 feet high in a high-contrast color scheme of red, white and black.

Belief+Doubt speaks to the social relations and networks of power that define daily life. At a time when the value of certitude is taken for granted, Kruger says she is “interested in introducing doubt.” Large swaths of the floor are covered in open-ended questions WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO SPEAKS? WHO IS SILENT?, while the area facing the bookstore explores desire and consumption YOU WANT IT. YOU BUY IT. YOU FORGET IT.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” said Barbara Kruger, noting the particular resonance these themes have in Washington, a city preoccupied with power.

Belief+Doubt will remain on view through 2014, the year the Hirshhorn celebrates its 40th anniversary. Like the recent presentation of Doug Aitken’s “Song 1” on the façade of the museum, Kruger’s installation is part of an initiative to activate new sites in and around the Hirshhorn. “Throughout the museum, we are emphasizing the artist’s voice,” said Richard Koshalek, director of the museum. “In addition, we are committed to curating all of the Hirshhorn’s public areas, not only those already thought of as exhibition spaces. Barbara Kruger’s work interrogates the way power and money flow in contemporary society. Having her intervene in a part of the building that is at once a social site and a place of commerce amplifies both her concerns and those of the Hirshhorn.”

Assistant Curator Melissa Ho, coordinator of the project, said, “Kruger’s command of architectural space and her ability to engage an audience amidst busy, lived experience make her the ideal artist to work with this site. ‘Belief+Doubt’ takes advantage of the constant movement through the lobby. As visitors descend the escalators, they are surrounded by language that beckons from all sides but only fully reveals itself as they pace and circulate through the entire space.”

In the 1980s, Barbara Kruger’s work helped bring photographic illustration and the techniques of mass media into the mainstream of contemporary art. Her signature photomontages, in which images from old books and magazines are emblazoned with banners of text designed to complicate the original meaning of the pictures, are some of the decade’s defining artworks. Kruger built on her early experience as a magazine photo editor and designer and book jacket designer to reconceive conceptual art as a vibrant public discourse by endowing it with a provocative visual identity and graphic punch. A profound influence not only on the development of visual art but also on movements in graphic design and street art, her work has moved fluidly between white-cube galleries and urban spaces, being equally at home printed on matchbooks, T-shirts, billboards, shopping bags, magazine covers and the sides of buses.

Since the 1990s, Barbara Kruger has focused increasingly on creating environments that encompass the viewer in language, either through sound and video projection or, as at the Hirshhorn, the enclosure of a space with text. In recent years, her site-specific vinyl installations have been mounted at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her room-sized multichannel video work The Globe Shrinks (2010) has been shown in Berlin, New York, London and Los Angeles. In 2005, Barbara Kruger was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 51st Venice Biennale.

The materials for this project have been donated by 3M. Additional funding was provided by L&M Arts and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's website: www.hirshhorn.si.edu

Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977 at Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

February 24 – May 15, 2011

The Hirshhorn is  the premiere East Coast venue for the first U.S. retrospective of work by noted postwar abstract painter Blinky Palermo (German, b. Leipzig, 1943; d. Maldives, 1977). Although the artist’s reputation is well established in Europe and he has influenced generations of American artists, his work has rarely been shown in North America. “Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964–1977” introduces viewers to the full range of the artist’s practice. Organized by Dia Art Foundation, where an in-depth selection of Palermo’s works are featured in its permanent collection, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, the retrospective began a yearlong tour at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall (Oct. 31, 2010–Jan. 16) and, following the Hirshhorn’s presentation, will make a final stop for concurrent exhibitions at Dia:Beacon’s Riggio Galleries and CCS Bard (June 25–Oct. 31). The curator is Lynne Cooke.

“Like Yves Klein, Blinky Palermo received critical acclaim in Europe for his contribution to the development of 20th-century art,” said Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s deputy director and chief curator. “Yet despite the fact that Palermo lived in the United States for several years and engaged with the work of American abstract artists such as Brice Marden, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, he has not received due recognition here. The Hirshhorn is delighted to be a part of this national tour, which gives the American public a comprehensive picture of Palermo’s achievement.”

Blinky Palermo investigated and challenged the fundamentals of painting throughout his brief yet prolific career—he died suddenly at age 33—questioning not only its conventional materials and traditional format and structure but its very definition. His practice is notable for his steadfast commitment to the medium during a period and in a context in which it was widely contested as a viable art form. He was known for engaging with the work of both European and American abstract painters as well as for his openness to the ideas and techniques of other artists, including his teacher, Joseph Beuys, fellow students Sigmar Polke  and Gerhard Richter, diverse predecessors like Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Kasimir Malevich and Barnett Newman, as well as American contemporaries Marden, Martin and Ryman. This exhibition presents approximately 70 works, predominantly on loan from private and public lenders in Germany, many of which have never before been on view in North America, that reveal his influences and the independent course he charted. The pieces are installed in roughly chronological order, providing an in-depth examination of the evolution of Palermo’s aesthetic, and include examples from all of his major series: “Objects” (1964–74), Stoffbilder [Cloth Pictures] (1966–72), documentation of site-specific wall drawings and paintings (1968–73) and examples of his late Metallbilder [Metal Pictures] (1974–76).

Shortly after joining Beuys’ class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1964, Blinky Palermo began making what he termed “Objects”: painted entities, often using found materials, that take on quasi-sculptural properties. In each of these works, the interaction between the piece and the space in which it is installed is integral to the viewer’s experience of it. Begun in mid-1966, the Stoffbilder constitute a second distinctive body of work. These disarmingly radical pieces, some monochromatic and others comprising multiple hues, are made from lengths of fabric purchased in department stores. They reveal him to be a gifted colorist and a singular successor to artists such as Henri Matisse and Mark Rothko. In his installation work, the artist engaged with specific sites making wall paintings and drawings that engaged the architectural context, animating its spaces. These concurrent modes more or less came to an end in 1973 when Blinky Palermo relocated to Manhattan, where he set up a studio that he would maintain for the remainder of his life. Here, he began to create multipartite painted compositions on aluminum panels that were anchored slightly off the wall to enhance the works’ vivid palette. Blinky Palermo’s signature series of acrylic paintings on metal culminated in his most monumental work,“To the People of New York City” (1976).

Blinky Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in 1943 in Leipzig, where he and his twin brother, Michael, were raised by an adoptive family with the name Heisterkamp. In 1962, Palermo entered the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1964, he adopted the moniker Blinky Palermo, the name of the American boxing manager and Mafioso, whom he supposedly resembled. While Heisterkamp’s decision to change his identity likely had multiple causes, it reflects his fascination with American culture, which at that time included a particular interest in Beat literature and Abstract Expressionist painting. He visited the United States for the first time in 1970 and died in 1977 while traveling in the Maldives. Though short-lived, Blinky Palermo’s career continues to influence a variety of artists working today. Exhibition curator Cooke said, “Although Palermo’s work may not be well known to American audiences at large, he is nonetheless an ‘artists’ artist,’ admired by generations of artists of many different persuasions, from Zoe Leonard to Sharon Lockhart, David Reed to Josiah McElheny, Julian Schnabel and Liliana Porter—a tribute to the extraordinary range of possibilities his innovative practice has opened up.”

The retrospective is accompanied by a full-color publication, co-published by Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press. The catalog includes essays by Cooke and art historians Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Suzanne Hudson, Susanne Küper and James Lawrence, and features an introduction by Dia Director Philippe Vergne and CCS Bard Executive Director Tom Eccles.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Independence Ave. at 7th St., SW, Washington, DC

www.si.edu

Guillermo Kuitca Retrospective at Hirshhorn Museum - "Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008"

Guillermo Kuitca
Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 
1980-2008
Hirshhorn, Washington, D.C.
October 21 - January 16, 2011

For more than 30 years GUILLERMO KUITCA (Argentinean, b. Buenos Aires, 1961) has forged a distinctive path as an artist, creating visually compelling works that reflect his intense and often ambivalent relationship to his primary medium: painting. “Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008,” presents over 45 canvases and 25 works on paper, spanning the artist’s career. The exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in the United States in more than 10 years and is co-organized by the Hirshhorn, Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y. and Miami Art Museum in Miami, Fla. Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator at Albright-Knox, is the organizing curator, and the presentation at the Hirshhorn is coordinated by Evelyn Hankins, associate curator. 

“Part of the Hirshhorn’s commitment to international contemporary art has always been a focus on the artists of Latin America,” said Kerry Brougher, the museum’s deputy director and chief curator. “The Hirshhorn acquired its first work by Kuitca back in 1995, when he was still an emerging figure, and we have watched his reputation continue to grow ever since. We are pleased to have co-organized this retrospective and to be able to present the full spectrum of this insightful artist’s work in Washington, and we look forward to the upcoming year featuring exhibitions with some of the most influential Latin American artists of our time.”

Guillermo Kuitca’s work is characterized by recurring imagery, most notably spatial and mapping systems such as seating charts, architectural plans, road maps and numerical sequences, as well as theater sets, beds and baggage-claim carousels. Through these Kuitca explores universal themes of migration and disappearance, the intersection of private and public space, and the significance of memory. “Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008” includes pieces from all of the artist’s major series, as well as a broad range of his works on paper, which have played an important role in the evolution of his painting. At the Hirshhorn, coordinating curator Hankins will work closely with the artist to install the show. This venue, with its distinctive circular layout, provides a unique opportunity for Guillermo Kuitca to explore his ideas about public architectural space.

The exhibition begins with works from the 1980s inspired by the artist’s involvement in theater during the early part of the decade. One of Guillermo Kuitca’s formative artistic influences was the avant-garde theater of legendary choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch (German, 1940–2009). Kuitca’s canvases from this period bear titles inspired by plays, literature and popular music. Works such as “El mar dulce” and “Siete últimas canciones,” both completed in 1986, are reminiscent of stage sets viewed from a distance, with tiny figures acting out seemingly mysterious and disturbing dramas. Ideas about absence inform later paintings in this period: haunting scenes populated with overturned chairs, sullied beds that appear to be on fire and spotlit microphones abandoned by the speaker. 

Guillermo Kuitca’s works of the late 1980s and early 1990s, purged of figures, explore architecture and geography, as well as domestic and communal spaces. Working with the floor plan of a one-bedroom apartment inspired the artist to foreground other representations of spaces—plans of public institutions; city, highway and topographic maps; and reimaginings of road maps and star charts. The floor plan, normally thought of as an objective depiction of a location, and the map, ostensibly a navigational tool, become, in Kuitca’s hands, vehicles for poetic musings about place and non-place, memory and loss, migration and displacement.

Guillermo Kuitca further explored organizational systems inspired by plans, maps and public spaces throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. In the “Neufert Suite” paintings (1999) the artist references diagrams and data contained in an architect’s handbook to create a blueprint devoid of architectural signs and focusing solely on the objects such spaces would contain. “L’Encyclopédie” (2002), a series of works on paper, reconsiders the work of French philosopher Denis Diderot, who attempted to condense the whole of human knowledge into a single set of books. The “Global Order” drawings (2002) fuse a map of the world with building plans for domestic spaces, identifying borders and notions of “place” as the changing products of human invention. The paintings “Terminal” (2000) and “Trauerspiel” (2001), based on airport baggage-claim carousels, serve as metaphors for tragic journeys without end. (“Trauerspiel” is a monumental work that is part of the Hirshhorn’s collection.) More recent works, such as the “Desenlace” series (2006–07), demonstrate Kuitca’s dramatic departure from previous paintings by referring to the history of abstraction. 

This exhibition not only demonstrates Guillermo Kuitca’s relationship to painting but also his affinity for drawing. The act of drawing stands out as an important part of Kuitca’s creative practice, taking forms such as linear articulations on paintings and notations scrawled on sheets of paper. These works, along with large collages and small manipulated digital prints, reveal how certain ideas are sustained, reinvented and abstracted across media, especially when seen in the context of his paintings. This prolific and diverse body of work inspires viewers to contemplate their relationship not only to the object in front of them but also to their place within the larger world.

Based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Guillermo Kuitca has garnered international attention since the mid-1980s. His first solo exhibition took place in 1974 at the Galería Lirolay in Buenos Aires. In 1985 he represented Argentina in the XVIII São Paulo Biennal. His work was first shown in the United States in 1989, in a group exhibition at the Americas Society of New York, “New Image Painting: Argentina in the Eighties.” In 1991, he had his first solo museum exhibition, a “Projects” show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He continued to exhibit internationally at museums and galleries throughout the 1990s in cities such as Amsterdam; Valencia, Spain; and Paris. 

The most recent survey of Guillermo Kuitca’s works, covering the period 1982–2002, was organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and traveled to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires in the summer of 2003. Kuitca was chosen to represent Argentina at the Venice Biennale in 2007.

“Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008” is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully illustrated CATALOG that includes essays by Dreishpoon; Olga Viso, director, Walker Art Center; Terence Riley, former director, Miami Art Museum; and Andreas Huyssen, Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The book explores the artist’s career and in particular addresses his relationship to drawing, a previously under-examined aspect of his practice. It also features a series of interviews with the artist by Graciela Speranza, professor of Argentinean literature at the University of Buenos Aires, recorded between 1997 and 2008.

With the opening of this retrospective, the museum is launching a year of exhibitions featuring the work of Latin American artists working in a diverse range of media, including “Directions: Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres,” opening in November, and “Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space,” with pieces by Carlos Cruz-Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Jesús Rafael Soto, which opens in June 2011. 

Ron Mueck, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Directions--Ron Mueck
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC
July 18 - October 27, 2002

“Directions--Ron Mueck,” featuring four startlingly hyperrealistic, out-of-scale figures by the Australian-born, London-based artist (b. 1958), opens at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. 

The exhibition is the artist’s first American museum solo show and marks the return of the popular “Untitled (Big Man)” (2000) from the Hirshhorn’s permanent collection. Also on view are sculptures of a miniature newborn and a colossal sleeping mask, as well as of a diminutive old woman in bed that has never been exhibited in the United States.

“Ron Mueck’s sculptures, though inanimate, seem alive---eyes are wet, vessels swell with blood, and you can almost feel the heat and breath emanating off the body,” says Sidney Lawrence, exhibition curator. The skewed sizes of the figures give this realism a psychological edge, which, according to Lawrence, “stirs our imagination while grounding us in the physical world.”

Born in Melbourne, the artist has practiced his craft since childhood, when he fabricated his own playthings. Although never formally trained as an artist, Ron Mueck continued to develop his considerable skills working as an animatronics technician and model maker for children’s television, motion picture special effects and the advertising industry first in Australia (from the late 1970s to mid-1980s) and then Great Britain (from the mid-1980s on).

Ron Mueck turned to sculpture in the mid-1990s after making a half-size Pinocchio figure, which served as a model for the painter Paula Rego, his mother-in-law, and was displayed beside Rego’s Disney-inspired canvases in the exhibition “Spellbound: Art and Film” at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Among the first public exhibitions of the artist’s work was “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” a 1997 London show also seen in New York, that included Mueck’s unforgiving “Dead Dad” (1997). More recently, Ron Mueck created a 15-foot-high crouching “Boy” to fill the cavernous space of London’s Millennium Dome (2000); it reappeared at the multinational Arsenale section of the Venice Biennale in 2001. During the summer of that same year, Ron Mueck first exhibited his work in the United States in a New York gallery.

Although the artist has largely relied on photographic sources, a current residency at the National Gallery in London has enabled him to work from live models. “Untitled (Big Man),” a hairless, glaring figure with ponderous rolls of blotchy skin, was a product of such a life study; other works have evolved differently. The alien-looking, wall-mounted “Untitled (Baby)” (2000) was influenced both by family experiences and devotional masterpieces in the National Gallery. “Mask II” (2001), measuring nearly 4 feet from chin to furrowed brow, is a self-portrait of the artist’s slumbering head on its side. “Untitled (Old Woman in Bed)” (2000) is Ron Mueck’s poignant remembrance of the final days of his wife’s much loved grandmother.

The artist spends months modeling his figures in clay on armatures built from metal and chicken-wire to create forms which he eventually casts in fiberglass resin or silicon. Ron Mueck completes a work by painting in specific details like blemishes, and adding elements such as resin eyeballs and strands of monofilament, which are drilled or punched individually into surfaces to represent eyelashes, eyebrows, stubble and hair.

As part of the Smithsonian’s Thursday “Art Night” festivities on July 18, Sidney Lawrence, exhibition curator and Hirshhorn head of public affairs, will discuss Ron Mueck’s (pronounced Mew-ick) sculpture in a gallery talk at 7 p.m. On Sunday, Sept. 22 at 3 p.m., curators Merry Foresta and Arthur Wheelock and critic Blake Gopnik will join Lawrence for a panel discussion titled “What is Realism?,” inspired by the artist’s work.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM & SCULPTURE GARDEN
Independence Avenue and Seventh Street S.W., Washington, DC
www.hirshhorn.si.edu