Museum Acquisitions 2024

YAEL BARTANA
Two Minutes to Midnight, 2021

Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, CA
&
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, CA

“What if women ruled the world?” Yael Bartana asks in ‘Two Minutes to Midnight,’ in which a government of a fictitious country, led entirely by women, must address an imminent nuclear threat from a foreign nation.

Set in a ‘Peace Room,’ a stark foil to the toxically masculine ‘War Room’ from Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove, a roundtable of both real experts and fictional characters seek solutions to their quandary. Bartana’s visionary work is the synthesis of an interdisciplinary four-year process that analyses the geopolitical power game – and presents us with an alternative to the macho power discourse. 

COSIMA VON BONIN
TOTAL PRODUCE (MORALITY), 2010

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY

“Octopuses, famously brainy, are a frequent motif of Ms. von Bonin’s, and the stuffed one here is composed of a dozen fabrics, from floral patterns to neon-printed flags acquired in Japan...Her art is soft and sociable but dangerous underneath, as strange and as cute as a fish out of water.”

—Jason Farago, The New York Times

TOMOO GOKITA
James Brown, 2023

Portland Museum of Art
Portland, ME

Drawing on Pop Art, kitsch aesthetics, and music, Gokita’s crafted canvases are covered with multiple layers of paper for the first time, including paper sleeves of various vinyl records into the layers of his paintings. In doing so, the artist connects his latest series of paintings to a natural fluidity that underscores his versatile drawing practice. The hand-made ethos of his layered canvases also reflects Gokita’s longstanding affinity for vintage magazines and pulpy, printed ephemera, with his own Neo-expressionist, abstracted twist.

CHARLINE VON HEYL
A Child Telling a Joke, 2022

Portland Museum of Art
Portland, ME

“In her painting A Child Telling A Joke, the peculiar shapes seem to be visual puns for chattering away, with zigzags indicating laughter. She is not afraid to have fun, to depict animals, or to hint at the personal and the biblical. She includes faces and skulls – everything that touches her, from poetry to news to dreams to art history – which she mulls over in full view.”

—Barbara A. MacAdam, Two Coats of Paint

SEAN LANDERS
Arctic Fox, 2014

Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
Paris, FR

For over ten years, Sean Landers has been developing his series of tartan-furred animals. This incongruous, trompe-l’œil use of tartan is a reference to Magritte—to his so-called “La période vache” of 1948 when, in a deliberately coarse style, he undermined the notion of “good painting.” Clothing his wild animals in Scottish tartan and plaid patterns, Landers extends a visual, metonymic metaphor of “to coat,” coating the figures in paint, and inscribing within them movement, shape, and new representational meanings.

SETH PRICE
Thought Comes From the Body II, 2022–23

Museum of Modern Art
New York, NY

In Thought Comes From the Body II, Price merges gestural painting with various digital methods – evoking what he calls “human time” and “machine time.” Machine time refers to the longer and more intricate process of incorporating technical and digital art-making methods. Human time, on the other hand, is more instant: the nature of the artist’s brushstrokes, fingers, or footsteps on the black aluminum composite substrate; the gestural hand-painted elements which draw out details or emphasize shapes, or even connect areas of the computer-generated design. These two temporal dimensions collide in this painting, creating an interplay between digitally driven methods and human touch.

SETH PRICE
Ardomancy, 2022–23

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Price implements a chain of technical processes to create Ardomancy, working first with brushes, pens, and his fingers to apply paint, and suggesting words to an AI program to generate source imagery. Price applies this AI-suggested image to the painting using a reverse-transfer technique often used for shirts and stickers, before going back in with a brush. Then, “when the painting starts to feel like a problem,” Price photographs it, and adds virtual motifs in a 3D cinema program. Finally, he prints these back on to the real painting at a large industrial facility, which introduces an element of risk, as he writes, “one error can destroy something I’ve worked on for months.” For Price, this method demonstrates a formal push-and-pull, noting, “making art with extremely different tools and media helps you take control and lose it, back and forth, over and over.”