WILLIAM MORROW - Rehang DAM details

Reinstallation of the Contemporary Collection Galleries

March 2014 | Denver Art Museum

Curated by William Morrow, Curator Contemporary Art, DAM

Brad Kahlhamer

American, born 1956, Tucson, Arizona; lives in New York City

Eagle Claws

2001

Oil paint on canvas

Department acquisition funds, 2001.483

“My work is all about what I call the third place,” says Brad Kahlhamer. “I’m adopted so there was another life available to me which might have been on a reservation or with my natural parents, whom I’ve yet to find. Then there’s the life that I’ve lived, which is the adopted life. The third life is melding these two lives with lots of fantasy and personal revelation.” The multiple faces and skulls that seem to float over the canvas in Eagle Claws suggest this third space, as does the tower of audio speakers that represents Kahlhamer’s parallel career as a country-rock musician.

Jimmie Durham

American, born 1940, Washington, Arkansas; lives in Berlin

Untitled

1992

Wood, paper, paint, bone, tooth, and plastic

Funds from Modern and Contemporary Collectors and Native Arts Acquisition Fund, 1993.4

Jimmie Durham employs assemblage art and a satirical sense of humor to chip away at decades of social denial about the plight of Native Americans. Since his involvement in the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council in the 1970s, Durham has fought the art world’s tendency to label him an “Indian artist.”

This work is an example of Durham’s use of more abstract associations of his Wolf Clan Cherokee heritage in order to create an aesthetic that is not recognizably Indian. Subtle references such as buttons in the torso area may recall traditional Indian dress. The figure’s bloody limb is made of real bone and the hand holds real teeth, perhaps an allusion to Indian burial sites desecrated by grave robbers looking for artifacts to sell.

Yang Shaobin

Chinese, born 1963, Tangshan, Hebei Province, China; lives in Beijing

Untitled (1999-4)

1999

Oil paint on linen

Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2001.882

Similarly to Zeng Fanzhi’s masked figures (on your right), the emotional contact with the viewer that we are accustomed to in Western portraiture is deflected in Yang Shaobin’s self-portraits. The unheard screams and contorted faces of Yang’s work distance the viewer from his struggle. We view this brutal portrait not as a glimpse into the artist’s soul, but as an expression of the collective consciousness of the Chinese people and the lasting psychological repercussions of the Cultural Revolution (1960s-1970s).

Gottfried Helnwein

Austrian, born 1948, Vienna; lives in Kilsheelan, Ireland, and Los Angeles

Epiphany (Adoration of the Magi)

1996

Oil and acrylic paint on canvas

Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2001.741

Since his earliest performance work in the mid-1960s, Gottfried Helnwein has attempted to push the limits of art beyond the realm of pure aesthetics and individual emotion toward a universal critique of political and social injustice.

This contemporary version of the Adoration of the Magi (the biblical visit of the three kings to the infant Christ) is based on a historical photograph of Hitler surrounded by SS officers. The singular blue palette could allude to the Nazis’ totalitarian mindset that the world must adhere to an order in which no variations or independent thinking are acceptable.

Zeng Fanzhi

Chinese, born 1964, Wuhan, Hebei Province, China; lives in Beijing

Mask Series No. 10

1998

Oil paint on canvas

Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan, fractional and promised gift to the Denver Art Museum, 2001.888

The painted facial expressions on Zeng’s masked figures are contrary to Chinese rules of politeness, which discourage one from letting happiness or despair show on one’s face. The seemingly distant seated figures and the coy exchange of the rose evoke a sense of the loneliness and difficulties of being homosexual in China during the post–Cultural Revolution era.

The suit and tie is a recurring motif in this series and is symbolic of the clash of Eastern and Western traditions. For Zeng, Beijing in the 1990s was a time of intense isolation in a society that was odds with its identity and traditions.

Louise Bourgeois

French-American, 1911–2010, born in Paris

The Quartered One

1964–65, cast 1990

Patinated bronze, edition number 4 of 6

Funds from Ginny Williams, 1991.49

Louise Bourgeois was fiercely independent in her approach to art, rejecting the styles and techniques of her contemporaries. One of the foremost artists of her time, Bourgeois is celebrated for tackling issues of gender, sexuality, freedom, and individuality throughout her seventy-year career.

This sculpture is a bronze cast of a 1964 plaster version. The cavelike cavities of the sculpture were inspired by the artist’s travels to the world’s oldest cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Made almost thirty years after the original, this work is an example of how Bourgeois looked at the materiality of bronze to convey “permanence” and “stability.”

Additional information was created an in gallery pamphlet for additional information about The Quartered One.

Chuck Forsman

American, born 1944, Nampa, Idaho; lives in Boulder

Cheryl

1973

Oil paint on Masonite

Funds from Polly and Mark Addison, 1986.454

Well known today for his realist landscape paintings and photographs, Chuck Forsman painted Cheryl soon after returning from the Vietnam War, at a time when the women’s movement was coming into full bloom. Forsman says that Cheryl was his way of depicting “the ‘new’ self-assured woman” of the 1970s. He purposely wanted to assault the viewer with the straight-on gaze of the model: proud and uninhibited.

Kent Monkman

Fisher River Band Cree, b. 1965), "History is Painted by the Victors," 2013. Acrylic paint on canvas; 72 x 113¼ x 1½ in. Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2016.288. © Kent Monkman.

Wes Hempel

American, born 1953, El Monte, California; lives in Denver

Fatherhood

1997

Oil paint on canvas

Funds from Mark and Polly Addison, Suzanne Farver, Jim Robischon, Jennifer Doran, and the artist, 1998.297

Wes Hempel’s paintings challenge traditional readings of Western art in order to question history’s role in forming contemporary prejudices.

Fatherhood is modeled on a painting by the academic French artist William-Adolphe Bougeureau. Replacing Bougeureau’s bare-chested Madonna with a bare-chested man, Hempel draws attention to the representation of the male nude in both traditional and contemporary art and implicitly questions how masculinity has been defined throughout art history.