Advanced Exhibition Schedule Fall/Winter 2016/17
Upcoming
OCTOBER 14, 2016–JANUARY 8, 2017
Curated by Leila Hasham for the Barbican Centre
Curated by Stéphane Aquin for the Hirshhorn
Organized by Barbican Centre, London – Second Level
The first U.S. survey of celebrated Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (b. Reykjavík, 1976) charts his wide-ranging practice across film, performance, painting, and drawing. Kjartansson’s work draws from a varied history of stage traditions, film, music, and literature. His performances, video installations, drawings, and paintings explore the boundary between fact and fiction, as well as constructs of myth and identity. Donning various guises, which include that of a knight, a Hollywood crooner, and the incarnation of death, Kjartansson both celebrates and derides the romanticized version of the artist as cultural hero.
Music, repetition, and endurance are key ingredients in Kjartansson’s video and performance works. Among the highlights of this survey is his celebrated video installation “The Visitors” (2012), which compromises a series of nine life-size video tableaux.
YAYOI KUSAMA: INFINITY MIRRORS
FEBRUARY 22, 2017–MAY 14, 2017
Curated by Mika Yoshitake – Second Level
A worldwide phenomenon, Yayoi Kusama’s (b. Nagano, 1929) Infinity Mirror Rooms are coming to the Hirshhorn in an ambitious survey exhibition that launches the celebrated Japanese artist’s first North American tour in nearly two decades. Organized chronologically, the exhibition will present an unprecedented six of the artist’s iconic kaleidoscopic installations against the backdrop of her decades-long career. It culminates in “The Obliteration Room” (2002), in which visitors will be invited to cover every surface of the space with stickers in the shape of Kusama’s trademark polka dots. More than 60 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper—including several of Kusama’s lesser-known collages—will also be on view, tracing the themes and cultural consequences of her work from the early 1950s to the present.
Just Opened
JIMMIE DURHAM, “STILL LIFE WITH SPIRIT AND XITLE,” 2007
OPENED AUGUST 6, 2016
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Front Plaza
Jimmie Durham’s (American, b. 1940) “Still Life with Spirit and Xitle” (2007) makes its DC debut as a new addition to the Hirshhorn collection. In keeping with the artist’s exploration of the complexities of the physical and metaphoric weight of stone, the 2007 creation of “Still Life With Spirit and Xitle” re-enacted a 2,000-year-old eruption of the volcano Xitle, or “spirit,” as a boulder quarried from the archaeological site was dropped by crane onto the roof of a 1992 Chrysler Spirit, and later graffitied with a smug, human expression.
Despite its comedy, the piece carries a complex gravity, capturing the moment at which the spirits of ancient and modern collide. Durham, born in Washington, Arkansas, has travelled widely outside the U.S., and exhibited at many venues throughout Europe, including most recently the Serpentine Gallery, London (2015); MuHKA, Antwerp (2012), and the Glasgow International Festival (2010).
Final Weeks
ROBERT IRWIN: ALL THE RULES WILL CHANGE
THROUGH SEPTEMBER 5, 2016
Curated by Evelyn Hankins
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Second Level
Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change is the first museum exhibition to focus exclusively on Irwin’s (American, b. Long Beach, California, 1928) extraordinary trajectory between 1958 and 1970. The show charts the artist’s remarkable course from the early small abstractions and larger “pick-up stick” paintings, through the line paintings and dot paintings, into the aluminum and acrylic discs, the acrylic columns, and, finally, to ephemeral installations that responded to the specific circumstances of a given site. By bringing together multiple examples of each painting series alongside later sculptural artworks, including key works from the Hirshhorn’s collection, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to reconsider Irwin’s process of meticulously working through aesthetic and phenomenological issues, which culminated in the artist abandoning both the medium of painting and a traditional studio practice.
YOKO ONO, “WISH TREE FOR WASHINGTON, DC,” 2007
THROUGH SEPTEMBER 5, 2016
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Sculpture Garden
This summer, the Hirshhorn opened celebrated artist Yoko Ono’s interactive “Wish Tree for Washington, DC,” in time for Independence Day weekend. While visitors are encouraged to whisper their wishes to the tree year-round, from July 1 through Labor Day the Wish Tree blooms with paper tags, as the artist invites museumgoers to write and hang written wishes from its branches.
Hirshhorn staff will collect, or “harvest,” nearly 8,000 wishes throughout the summer, sending them to become part of Ono’s “Imagine Peace Tower” in Reykjavík, Iceland. “I hope Imagine Peace Tower will give light to the strong wishes of world peace from all corners of the planet and give encouragement, inspiration and a sense of solidarity in a world now filled with fear and confusion,” Ono has said.
One of many Wish Trees around the world, the Hirshhorn’s is the only permanent tree in the U.S. The artist donated the white flowering Japanese dogwood in 2007, honoring Japan’s gift of cherry blossom trees a century prior.
Also On View
THROUGH MARCH 12, 2017
Curated by Gianni Jetzer
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Lower Level
Nearly one hundred years after the first animated film, the Hirshhorn presents six installations by a selection of emerging, international artists who use computer animation in their work (Ed Atkins, Antoine Catala, Ian Cheng, Josh Kline, Helen Marten, and Agnieszka Polska). The artists in the show share an interest in the analysis and development of animation. They use digitally generated images as both artwork and tools to question concepts of reality. The exhibited works range from borrowed footage, to games and simulators, to newly produced animations, some of them interactively generated and directly altered by the presence of the viewer.
The exhibition is accompanied by lectures and talks with artists and theorists throughout its run.
BETTINA POUSTTCHI: WORLD TIME CLOCK
THROUGH MAY 29, 2017
Curated by Melissa Ho
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Third Level Inner Ring
German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi (b. Mainz, Germany, 1971) has often contemplated systems of time and space. Over the course of the last seven years, she traveled around the globe creating World Time Clock, a serial work that consists of twenty-four photographs taken in twenty-four different time zones, in cities as far-flung as Bangkok, Auckland, Mexico City, and Tashkent. At each location, the artist created a portrait of a public clock at the same local time: five minutes before two. Displayed together, these images suggest both a sense of suspended time and, in the artist’s words, “imaginary synchronism.”
Installed for the first time as a complete set in the Hirshhorn’s Third Level Inner Ring, Pousttchi’s images take the viewer along a circular path that recalls the artist’s circumnavigation of the globe, or the motion of a clock’s hands around its face. The hollow cylinder form of the building itself furthermore acts as a natural timepiece, literally framing the sun’s passage across the sky. The progressive shift in sunlight and shadow through the gallery over the course of the day provides a fascinating counterpoint to the mechanized and politically regulated version of time suggested by World Time Clock.
LINN MEYERS: OUR VIEW FROM HERE
THROUGH AUGUST 20, 2017
Curated by Stéphane Aquin
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Second Level Inner Ring
Linn Meyers (American, b. Washington, DC, 1968) created her largest work to date, Our View from Here, at the Hirshhorn this spring. This site-specific wall drawing, which occupies the entire circumference of the inner ring galleries, covers nearly 400 linear feet.
Meyers creates her works by hand-drawing thousands of closely spaced, rippling lines, each nested beside the one that came before it. Drawing alone for long hours each day with a type of marker often used by graffiti writers, she welcomes the imperfections that are a natural part of working without templates or taped lines. The resulting patterns flow and pulse with energy. The drawing is temporary and will be painted over at the end of the exhibition’s yearlong run.
MASTERWORKS FROM THE HIRSHHORN COLLECTION
THROUGH AUGUST 6, 2017
Curated by Stéphane Aquin
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Third Level
This new rehanging of the third-level permanent collection galleries features highlights of Joseph Hirshhorn’s original gift alongside some of the newest additions to the collection. Featuring more than 75 works in virtually all media, the exhibition includes several major artworks returning to view after more than a decade, such as Jean-Paul Riopelle’s 1964 Large Triptych, as well as in-depth installations devoted to some of the most important artists in the collection. More than a dozen paintings and works on paper by Willem de Kooning are exhibited alongside sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, creating a riveting conversation between two of the 20th century’s greatest figurative artists. Other cornerstones of the collection on view are Constantin Brâncuşi’s Sleeping Muse I (1909–10), Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M. (1926), Ed Ruscha’s The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965–68), Louise Bourgeois’ Legs (1986/cast 2008), and Ron Mueck’s Untitled (Big Man) (2000).
BARBARA KRUGER: BELIEF AND DOUBT
THROUGH MARCH 2018
Curated by Melissa Ho
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Lower Level
Part of an initiative to bring art to new sites within and around the building, this installation by Barbara Kruger fills the Lower Level lobby and extends into the newly relocated Museum bookstore. Famous for her incisive photomontages, Kruger has focused increasingly over the past two decades on creating environments that surround the viewer with language. The entire space—walls, floor, escalator sides—is wrapped in text-printed vinyl, immersing visitors in a spectacular hall of voices, where words either crafted by the artist or borrowed from the popular lexicon address conflicting perceptions of democracy, power, and belief.
At a moment when ideological certitude and purity seem especially valued, Kruger says she’s “interested in introducing doubt.” Large areas of the installation are devoted to open-ended questions, while the section occupying the bookstore explores themes of desire and consumption. At once addressing the individual, the museum, and, symbolically, the country, Kruger’s penetrating examination of the public sphere transforms one of the Hirshhorn’s key public spaces.
The materials for this project have been generously donated by 3M
