Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection Works by Mary Bauermeister, Yayoi Kusama, and Niki de Saint Phalle
@ Wrightwood 659
659 W Wrightwood Avenue, Chicago
On view through Saturday, December 19th
Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection features the work of three trailblazing women artists who rose to international acclaim for their distinct yet resonant approaches to perception and embodiment: Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002), and Mary Bauermeister (1934–2023). Born in Japan, France, and Germany, respectively, within a five-year span from 1929 to 1934, all three artists rejected cultural archetypes traditionally imposed on women and made their way to New York by the early 1960s.
These artists came of age in a period defined by economic instability and the rise of fascism. They lived through the devastation of the Second World War in their respective countries, leading them to engage with the fragments of buildings, culture and spirit left behind. Amid the destruction they relied on their subjective worlds to construct something new. By developing highly personal visual languages characterized by expansive proliferations of pattern and repetition, these artists contributed to the flourishing movements of the postwar avant-garde, including Neo-Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Fluxus and Pop art. Seen together, their artwork attests to the strength of a generation of female artists who achieved acclaim against great odds, forever altering the trajectory of twentieth-century art.
Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection is curated by Betsy Johnson, assistant curator at the Hirshhorn and presented by Halsted A&A Foundation at Wrightwood 659.
On view will be two of Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms and a pumpkin sculpture; three of Bauermeister’s intricate optical and stone-laden assemblage boxes; and a large-scale mixed-media collage and two works on paper by Saint Phalle. Together, they illustrate how these oeuvres overlap and converge by exploiting the possibilities of pattern and tapping into the latent expressiveness of repetition.
This focused presentation features works drawn from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the national museum of modern and contemporary art, in Washington, DC. Founded by an act of Congress and opened to the public in 1974, the Hirshhorn presents groundbreaking exhibitions and programs featuring the most important global art and artists of our time.
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Tags: Inner Worlds: Visions from the Hirshhorn Collection, Lincoln Park, Mary Bauermeister, Niki De Saint Phalle, Yayoi Kusama
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