current installation

The Broad Art Foundation celebrates 25 years of building its collection and lending its artworks to venues around the world. The current installation includes selected acquisitions of the past decade, as well as presentations displaying our commitment to artists we collected in our founding years.

Built in 1929, The Foundation building functioned as a telephone switching station before being renovated into an art space by Los Angeles based architect Fredrick Fisher in 1988. The renovation provided many unique spaces for art, mixing the rough hewn floors and high ceilings of an industrial workspace with the clean white walls of a modern museum.

The 1st floor is a perfect setting for work by Christopher Wool, who has mixed the edge and grit of urban printing and ephemera with the complex language of painting for over two decades. The Foundation has followed Wool’s career from the beginning, making its first acquisition in 1989. On view are early text and pattern works including the iconic Untitled, 1989, an aggressive stencil of PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE in rapid fire down an aluminum panel, less a sign and more language reduced to rudimentary, punchy abstraction. The Foundation collects Wool into the present and the installation includes the large abstraction, over ten feet in height, Untitled, 2008 and the silkscreen Untitled, 2008, both purchased in the last year.

The 2nd and 3rd floors offer glimpses into new directions and trends that will guide the Foundation into its next 25 years. Greeting the viewer on the 2nd floor are two Jeff Koons works, Kiepenkerl, 1987 and Wishing Well, 1988. Koons has been collected in depth by the Foundation for 15 years and these important works, from the famous Statuary series and the Banality series respectively, provide an increasingly complete view of Koons’ career. Chris Burden’s Batteau de Guerre, 2001, a large battleship made of Meccano parts, toys, and gas cans, leads visitors into a gallery featuring works by Doug Aitken, Thomas Ruff, and Diana Thater. Tony Oursler’s large installation Dust, 2006 presents a dystopic vision in the final 2nd floor gallery, an immersive video environment revolving around a cloud of smoke and disembodied mouths.

Tom Friedman’s Zombie, 2008 opens a 3rd floor featuring works by the Nigerian artist El Anatsui, Elliot Hundley, Richard Prince, and Lari Pittman, a portrait gallery displaying contemporary takes on the human form by Cindy Sherman, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Johns Sonsini, and Jenny Saville, and a gallery devoted to the recent recipient of the MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Mark Bradford. A highlight of the floor is El Anatsui’s Strips of Earth Skin, 2008 elaborate sheets of bottle caps, reused aluminum commercial packaging, copper wire, and other materials creating giant shimmering sheets of what he calls “cloths.” Bradford’s Corner of Desire and Piety, 2008, brings the legacy of Hurricane Katrina into sharp relief -- 72 collages form a grid across the wall made with FEMA posters for propane. Each poster is literally “roughed up” through Branford’s practice of applying multiple layers of paper and found materials to a surface and then grinding and sanding it down.

Taking advantage of the natural light pervading through the 4th floor, a large monographic presentation of Anselm Kiefer anchors the floor, accompanied by two other approaches to German painting by Neo Rauch and Imi Knoebel. Kiefer’s monumental canvases are charged with burnt earth and frustrated progress, with German heroes caught between their artistic achievements and their conflicted history. Rauch grew up in Communist East Germany and was closely regulated by the state during his art education about the content and form of his paintings. Rauch’s unusual style, which renders contradictory and often competing sensibilities intelligible and seemingly unified, bridges art’s totalitarian treatment under communism with new uncensored freedoms brought forth from capitalism. Knoebel, taking a third approach, revives the purity of utopian modernism, using pared down forms of Constructivism to take his painting to a zero point. He attempts expression without representation or the restrictions of ideological painting programs. The goal is to purify and cleanse the present from the baggage of the past and to start fresh, to rely on new materials and new aesthetic forms to move forward.

The basement features the work of Cady Noland, Tony Oursler, and Gregory Crewdson. Noland’s work deals with the dark edges of American life, using industrial materials and rough or handbill printing techniques to explore tough subjects like the glamour of high-profile criminals or the extremes of politics. Oursler’s darkly comic video displays speaks to both Crewdson’s and Noland’s work, dealing with the fringe or extreme of human consciousness. His works employ technology for a haunting display of hidden, present, or future traumas. Crewdson’s work often dwells on the flashpoint between the domestic and unusual or extraordinary circumstances. The Broad Art Foundation includes Crewdson’s work both shot on location in Massachusetts with large production crews and on a sound stage at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.