current installation

Rotating installations of artwork in our Santa Monica facility offer art professionals the opportunity to study works from the Broad Collections not on loan elsewhere and to consider those works for display in their own institutions.

Our current installation highlights selected recent acquisitions and artists new to the collection. Through wide-ranging media, shared and interlocking concerns are expressed in many of the works, such as the expansion of the global economy, the resulting milieu of psychological dislocation and anxiety, challenges to certain dominant artmaking conventions and an ongoing critique of the media and its propagandistic capacities. Because the Broads began to collect during the era of postmodernism, when monolithic beliefs about art began to fracture, the preoccupation with instability and flux found in many of the artworks on view here today connects to a strong existing current in the collections.

German photography anchors the current installation beginning with the documentary innovations of Hilla and Bernd Becher. Known for technical innovation and for using conceptual strategies as ways of finding new aesthetic frontiers, their photographs and teaching produced many of the finest photographers working today. Perhaps their most famous students are Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, both on display. Struth’s important contribution to the German School is his interest in spectatorship and the creation of photographs which are sometimes unguarded and natural while at other times elaborately staged with specific purposes and goals. Gursky enhances and alters the structure of overwhelming visual situations, allowing viewers to assimilate and consume more than they are usually able with their eyes alone.

Representing a long Foundation interest in politically active art, Ellen Gallagher and William Kentridge each take different approaches to historical trauma produced by totalitarian regimes and racial and political conflict. Using his innovative erase drawing technique, Kentridge takes on dehumanization at a slant, presenting the personal stories of characters embedded in the turbulent and horrible landscape of South African Apartheid. Gallagher, instead of breaking with historical paradigms, uses accepted systems and rules in order to reactivate and critique history, especially the trauma and repressed horrors of slavery and racist stereotypes.

Some of these political concerns play out in the canvases of Neo Rauch and Franz Ackermann, both reinventing genres of painting through the lens of post-Berlin Wall Germany. Neo Rauch mixes historical painting, commodity culture, and social realism with his own dreams, visions of a world adrift in loose signs and burnt out ennui. Ackermann’s vision of landscape painting and global frenzy are often more dramatic, rendered in effusive brilliant colors collapsing into fracture, frisson, and collision. Ackermann's goal is to register the overwhelming quality of contemporary life with its excessive flows of information.

Rauch and Ackermann’s reinvention of landscape and history painting finds a counterpart in the abstract works of Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool. Oehlen’s work parodies and breaks down personal expression and systematic approaches to painting. He regards the canvas as an unfettered, lawless space for experimentation. Wool approaches the rules of painting in a similar way, trading on painting’s often-proclaimed ambition to transmit eternal ideas with sly irony and wit.

Jenny Saville, and Cecily Brown, together with other British painters in the early 90s, aimed at a revival of portraiture and figurative painting. Together, the work of these painters take a grotesque look at the human body as it becomes distorted by desire. Saville often takes the culture of beauty as her subject matter, presenting unflinching views of women and men subjected to the unkind scrutiny of society and often held in unspoken derision for their bodies. The large, slashing canvases of Brown take a similar approach with their expressive unraveling of sexually explicit imagery.

Pierre Huyghe and Paul Pfeiffer focus on the coded world of media and narrative cinema. Hughe’s video works present a mixture of fact and fiction, often exploiting the liberties with truth taken by Hollywood film in order to expose false portrayals of history and the fickle nature of representation. Pfeiffer, on the other hand, literally erases imagery from recorded events, fundamentally changing and expanding the content and the meaning of televised sporting events and cinema.

Other works on view include Stephen Balkenhol’s retooling of figurative sculpture and Mark Tansey’s elaborate mediations on representation and its theoretical underpinnings. Balkenhol is a humanist, using the meditations on scale introduced by minimalism to reintroduce humans into sculpture as bound up with their environments, psychically changed according to their situation and placement in the world. Tansey’s project is quite different. He produces paintings of theoretical conflicts over representation in art while affirming representation as a valid vehicle of ideas.