Advance Exhibition Schedule Summer/Fall 2018

Upcoming

SEAN SCULLY: LANDLINE
SEP 13, 2018–FEB 3, 2019
Curated by Stéphane Aquin
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Second Level

A major highlight of the 56th Venice Biennale, Sean Scully’s acclaimed Landline series makes its U.S. debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Featuring never-before-seen artworks from the renowned series, Sean Scully: Landline presents a dramatic shift in the work of one of today’s most influential artists. With thick, gestural brushstrokes and loose bands of color, the Landline paintings show Scully’s transition away from his earlier hard-edged minimalism to his current, more expressive style, a style that no doubt elicits the beauty and brilliance of the natural world. 

Spanning a variety of media—including watercolor, oil painting, and sculpture—the works in the exhibition showcase the artist’s remarkable ability to deepen, mystify, and vary his relatively limited repertoire of motifs—largely comprised of vertical and horizontal stripes. With gestures toward the land, sea, and sky (and the indistinct lines between them), the works navigate the elemental relationships that compose our world, and in doing so reveal the sublime character of those interactions. Together, the works will transform the Hirshhorn’s Second Level inner-circle galleries into an unceasing current of color and energy.

This exhibition debuts more than twenty years after the Hirshhorn opened Scully’s first mid-career retrospective in 1995, a pivotal exhibition that cemented his status at the center of contemporary painting. Building on the narrative of this 1995 survey, Sean Scully: Landline affords viewers the opportunity to witness the next step in Scully’s artistic evolution, one that continues to impact the greater landscape of contemporary abstract art. Following its Hirshhorn debut, the series will travel to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in Spring 2019.

 

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER: PULSE
NOV 1, 2018–APR 28, 2019
Curated by Stéphane Aquin
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Second Level

Three major interactive installations from Mexican Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse series and six public-art documentaries come together for the first time in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse, which will fill the museum’s galleries with evocative, immersive environments that use heart-rate sensors to create kinetic and audiovisual experiences from visitors’ own biometric data. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Pulse will animate the vital signs of hundreds of thousands of participants in the Hirshhorn’s largest interactive technology exhibition to date.

With Lozano-Hemmer’s trademark sensitivities to audience engagement and architectural scale, each artwork detects the biometric signatures of each visitor, registering and recording them as repetitive sequences that are visualized as flashing lights, panning soundscapes, waves in ripple tanks and animated fingerprints. These “portraits” or “snapshots” of the visitor’s intimate electrical activity then gets added to a live archive of other recordings, creating a landscape of syncopated rhythms. At a time when biometry is increasingly used for identification and control, here agglomerated data presents a new form of anonymity.

The exhibition begins with Pulse Index (2010), which records participants’ fingerprints at the same time as it detects their heart rates, displaying data for the last 10,000 users on a Fibonacci-sequenced grid of massive projections. The second work visitors will encounter is Pulse Tank, featuring illuminated water tanks that show participants’ pulses through ripples on the water’s surface, reflected in shadow patterns on the gallery walls. The last installation, Pulse Room (2006), is an otherworldly space filled with hundreds of clear, incandescent light bulbs hanging from the ceiling in even rows, pulsing with the heartbeats of past visitors. Visitors add their heartbeat by touching a sensor near the beginning of the installation, transmitting their pulse to the first bulb, which then flickers to its rhythm.

Six short documentaries of Pulse works will also be exhibited, showing biometric public-art interventions in Abu Dhabi, Toronto, Hobart, New York and Urdaibai, Spain (2007–2015).

 

CHARLINE VON HEYL: SNAKE EYES
NOV 8, 2018–JAN 27, 2019
Curated by Evelyn C. Hankins
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Lower Level

The largest US museum survey of this pioneering artist to date, Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyesfeatures more than thirty large-scale paintings that reveal the artist’s considerable influence in the field of contemporary art.

One of the most inventive artists working today, von Heyl has earned international acclaim for continually rethinking the possibilities of contemporary painting. Her cerebral yet deeply visceral artworks upend longstanding assumptions about composition, beauty, and narrative. Drawing inspiration from a vast and surprising array of sources—including literature, pop culture, metaphysics, and personal history—von Heyl creates paintings that are seemingly familiar yet impossible to classify, offering, in her words, “a new image that stands for itself as fact.”

In studios in New York and Marfa, Texas, von Heyl combines a rigorous, process-based practice that demands each painting develop through the act of painting, itself. The spellbinding results invite you to explore a unique visual language, exuberant and insistent.

Organized in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, this major multinational exhibition highlights the artist’s groundbreaking artistic output since 2005, including recent works that point to new developments in her constantly evolving practice. Together, Snake Eyes shines an international spotlight on one of today’s most dynamic painters and demonstrates the vitality and limitless possibilities of painting.

 

LEE UFAN
FALL 2019
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Plaza

The Hirshhorn has commissioned an ambitious site-specific installation by the celebrated Korean artist Lee Ufan, debuting fall 2019. The expansive installation will feature approximately 10 new sculptures from the artist’s signature and continuing Relatum series and marks the artist’s largest site-specific outdoor sculpture project in the US. It is the first exhibition of Lee’s work in the nation’s capital, and the first time in the museum’s 44-year history that its 4.3-acre outdoor plaza will be devoted entirely to the work of a single artist.

Each of the sculptures will be created in response to the museum’s unique architecture, and will continue Lee’s iconic practice of placing contrasting materials, such as stainless steel plates and boulders, in dialogue with one another to heighten awareness of the world, in Lee’s words, “exactly as it is.” Leaving the materials relatively unaltered, Lee arranges them with careful attention to the subtle nuances of the site in order to foreground the visitor’s encounter with the art as it unfolds in time and space. The Hirshhorn’s circular building further amplifies the experience by offering myriad viewpoints for visitors to encounter the artwork throughout the plaza.

A leading founder of the late 1960s Japanese movement called Mono-ha, or “School of Things,” Lee views art as an encounter between the viewer, the materials and the site. In his Relatum sculptures, each element is arranged with this greater network in mind, and Lee is especially cognizant of how the presence of contrasting materials can alter what and how we see. These works are rooted in contemplation and sensation rather than static representation, and in this way, Lee effectively strips away the world around people by appealing to their emotions and encouraging them to surrender to the experience of art.

 

On View

TINO SEHGAL: THIS YOU
SEP 1–OCT 14, 2018
Curated by Mark Beasley
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Sculpture Garden

This You—the first exclusively live work acquired for the Museum’s permanent collection in its forty-four-year history—will feature a solo female singer who will connect with visitors to produce intimate and memorable experiences. Expanding on the work of Conceptual artists, Sehgal employs the body, voice, and movement to create his works rather than traditional art materials.

This outdoor piece by Seghal will occur on the Hirshhorn’s Plaza and in the Sculpture Garden. Created in part as a response to the over-proliferation of objects, these intimate encounters will leave behind only personal memories. Referred to as “constructed situations” by the artist, they will not be documented through recordings, photographs, or videos but remain ephemeral. An interpreter will be present and performing any time the Museum is open during the work’s entire run.

 

BASELITZ: SIX DECADES
THROUGH SEP 16
Curated by Stéphane Aquin
Organized in partnership with Fondation Beyeler – Second Level

Baselitz: Six Decades is the first major US retrospective in more than twenty years of one of Germany’s greatest living artists, marking the artist’s 80th birthday. With more than 100 works—including iconic paintings, works on paper and wood and bronze sculptures­—highlighting every phase of Baselitz’s six-decade career from the 1950s to today, this milestone exhibition features work never before seen in the U.S. and cements Baselitz’s reputation as one of the most original and inventive figurative artists of his generation.

For the first time, US audiences can experience the full scope of Baselitz’s powerful explorations of the human figure, as well as the influence of American artists on his early work and his continued impact on contemporary American painting and sculpture. Baselitz’s creative genius, combined with his message about the inherent strength of the everyday human condition, make this exhibition particularly compelling.

The exhibition will include one of Baselitz’s most notable works of that period, The Naked Man (1962), in which the artist used a shocking image of a male figure to express the pervasive discontent with Germany’s socialist politics. The image was so controversial it was confiscated by authorities. Additional highlights will be the celebrated paintings from his iconic Helden (Heroes) and Fractureseries (1965–1966), which underscore the strength of the German people following World War II. Additionally, the exhibition will present Baselitz’s groundbreaking upside-down paintings—an innovative practice that first brought Baselitz to international fame in the 1970s.

Organized in partnership with the Fondation Beyeler, the exhibition is curated by Hirshhorn chief curator Stéphane Aquin and the Beyeler curator at large Martin Schwander. The Hirshhorn hosted Baselitz’s first-ever career retrospective in 1996, and this new exhibition builds on that milestone with an expanded look at his exceptional career.

 

TONY LEWIS: ANTHOLOGY 2014–2016
THROUGH SEP 16
Curated by Betsy Johnson
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Third Level

Anthology 2014–2016 is an installation of thirty-four original collage-poems by the Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis. Exhibited at the Hirshhorn for the first time in its entirety, this series of evocative black-and-white works draws on an unlikely source—Calvin and Hobbes comic books.

Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is part of an exciting generation of artists working to collapse the boundaries between different art forms. He has quickly established himself in the contemporary art world by forming a distinct visual vocabulary that integrates poetry and text with the properties of abstraction. His monochromatic drawings pull from various visual and written sources, ranging from the personal to the political. Separating, rearranging, and erasing text, he shifts the way we read to open up new and unexpected meanings.

To create Anthology 2014–2016, Lewis deconstructed hundreds of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, reordered them, and ultimately shaped them into poems through a process of erasing, editing, and rearranging dialogue. Each poem is assembled as a collage of individual drawings that explores the collaborative nature of creativity and authorship, leaving meaning open to a range of interpretations.

Through this series, Lewis realized that one can write through drawing. He says, “This is the clearest form of writing I’ve done to date, transferring authorship from Bill Watterson’s dialogue to a distinct writing process. Calvin and Hobbes was a literary and artistic savior growing up in the ’90s. By physically destroying it, appropriating it, editing it and rebuilding its narrative, I find new language and ideas that culminate with an intimate collection of poems.”

 

THE MESSAGE: NEW MEDIA WORKS
THROUGH SEP 23
Curated by Mark Beasley
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Lower Level

The Message: New Media Works is a transformative journey through five contemporary film and video installations that use music, film and pop culture to reveal profound truths about life in the 21st century.  It’s also the first chance for D.C. audiences to discover leading international video artists Camille Henrot, C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska, Frances Stark, Hito Steyerl, and Arthur Jafa, an award-winning cinematographer known for his collaborations Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Solange, and whose seminal Kanye West-backed Love is the Message, The Message is Death inspired the exhibition’s title.

Each video appropriates a common method of communication in today’s media-saturated world—the sermon, the web lecture, the concert, the music video, and the online sex chat room—and uses its familiar format to question and provoke ideas around information overload in the global digital age. Music and language appear as common threads to weave all five works together, as artists use them as tools to rewrite traditional narratives around theology, race, and sexuality.

According to curator Mark Beasley, “In an increasingly digital society, we keep seeing that language, humor and music triumph as timeless and universal. As you walk through The Message, the exhibition unfolds as a musical LP, with each work as an individual track on a record connected by similar themes.”

 

MARK BRADFORD: PICKETT’S CHARGE
THROUGH NOV 12
Curated by Evelyn Hankins and Stéphane Aquin
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Third Level

Internationally renowned artist Mark Bradford (b. 1961) debuted one of his largest works to date with Pickett’s Charge, a monumental new commission that spans nearly 400 linear feet.

Bradford drew inspiration for this new work from French artist Paul Philippoteaux’s nineteenth-century cyclorama, currently on view in Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania. Philippoteaux’s cyclorama depicts Pickett’s Charge—the final charge of the Battle of Gettysburg, which historians cite as the critical turning point of the Civil War and, consequently, of American history. Working with a combination of colored paper and reproductions of the original, Bradford transformed the historic Gettysburg imagery into a series of eight powerful, abstract paintings. By cutting, tearing, and scraping through the layers, Bradford reveals the hidden textures and complexities lurking just beneath the surface. Each painting is more than forty-five feet long, and together they encircle the entire Third Level inner-circle galleries.

The resulting work weaves past and present, illusion and abstraction, inviting visitors to reconsider how narratives about American history are shaped and contested. Posed with his trademark fearlessness, Bradford’s open questions—or rather, the deliberations his work elicits—are particularly timely in contemporary America. And considering that the Hirshhorn is situated on the National Mall, these questions are made even timelier.

Pickett’s Charge is Bradford’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, and his first major American solo show following his presentation as the US representative for the 57th Venice Biennale, a selection made possible by the US Department of State.

 

WHAT ABSENCE IS MADE OF
THROUGH SPRING 2020
Curated by Gianni Jetzer
Organized by the Hirshhorn – Third Level

What does absence look like? How can loss—of objects, of memory, of yourself—become a tool for artistic expression? In the face of today’s increasingly noisy consumer culture, What Absence Is Made Of answers these questions and more as it mines the Hirshhorn’s extensive collection in search of the mind-bending ways that artists surmount the limits of the material world.

Spanning more than seven decades and seventy works, the exhibition explores the many ways artists express absence. Some use frame of reference, or mirroring effects, that trigger the imagination of the viewer; others create work on a massive scale, yet with the barest materials. Despite their variance, all of the works reward viewers with unexpected and mind-bending glimpses into the spaces left behind when something disappears, or when something has even yet to be.

What Absence Is Made Of marks the first chance for Hirshhorn visitors to encounter groundbreaking new acquisitions by Annette Lemieux, Ed Atkins, and Huang Yong Ping alongside well-known favorites by Constantin Brancusi, On Kawara, Ana Mendieta, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and John Baldessari. Tracing parallel developments in art from the 1960s to today, the exhibition draws on five key themes that chart the rising appeal of immateriality: “The Dematerialization of the Art Object,” “The Body in Pieces,” “Close to Nothing,” “Memento,” and “The Posthuman Body.”

“Absence is far more than nothing,” said Jetzer. “In an era of increasing consumerism, [absence] has become a compelling way for contemporary artists to surpass the limits of the material world, the latest in the long tradition of expressing transcendental ideas through art.” With this exhibition, “We’re able to investigate the ways artists make visible the invisible, bringing to light common threads not previously explored.”

 

BARBARA KRUGER: BELIEF+ DOUBT
ONGOING
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.