Contemporary Greats at The Harn Museum of Art

Written by Marcus Teague Tuesday, 22 February 2011 22:10

Gainesville, FL - - The Harn Museum of Art brings world-renowned contemporary masters to Gainesville when American Matrix: Contemporary Directions for the Harn Museum Collection, Part II opened May 23 in the Mary Ann Harn Cofrin Pavilion.  American Matrix Part II, the second installment in the Pavilion’s inaugural exhibition, honors the extraordinary contributions of American artists.  It celebrates the growth of the Harn Museum collections dedicated to contemporary art.

The exhibition is organized in five sections.  The first, “Pop Inspired,” features work from artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg that focus on consumer culture, media and advertising and the icons of everyday life. 

“Materials and Methods” features artists such as Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella and John Chamberlain whose multimedia approaches engage with systems of production and process. 

Art represented in “Painterly Perspectives” juxtaposes abstract expressionist work from artists such as Elmer Bischoff in the 1950s with work that reignited the tradition of expressive painting during the later part of the century, such as “neo-expressionist” painter Eric Fischl.

Photographs in “Strange Space” blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the local and the global, and the strange and the familiar.  Artists such as Catherine Opie and Sergio Vega suggest ruptures in time and space as well as in the realm of aesthetic and social experience.  Allan Sekula, Richard Misrach, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher address geo-political issues that highlight the unsettling contradictions of technology and progress. 

The fifth group in the exhibition features the work of Laylah Ali, an artist who creates extraordinary and intense narratives in small-scale and detailed drawings where imaginary characters engage in ambiguous struggles for power.  Also featured is work by Yvonne Jacquette, whose aerial views of urban life explore the tensions between realism and abstraction as well as the natural and the manmade.

A cornerstone of both installations is the work of Abstract Expressionist artists, many among the most influential of the 20^th century.  On view are sculptors Alexander Calder and David Smith, whose playful work reflects an interest in the subconscious mind and includes biomorphic shapes and the weightless illusion of drawing in space.  Also represented is a seminal work by Barnett Newman, who pushed the medium of painting to new levels of abstraction and emotional power.

The exhibition, curated by Harn Curator of Contemporary Art Kerry Oliver-Smith, is on view through Oct. 29, 2006.

Visit The Harn Museum of Art at : http://www.harn.ufl.edu/