Harn Museum features contemporary greats in newest exhibition

May 25, 2006

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The work of world-renowned contemporary artists can be seen in “American Matrix: Contemporary Directions for the Harn Museum Collection, Part II,” which opened this week in the Mary Ann Harn Cofrin Pavilion at the Harn Museum of Art.

This is the second installment in the pavilion’s inaugural exhibition, which honors the extraordinary contributions of American artists. It celebrates the growth of the Harn Museum collections and the October 2005 opening of the Cofrin Pavilion, a new exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art.

The exhibition is organized in five sections. The first, “Pop Inspired,” features work from artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg that focus on consumer culture, media and advertising and the icons of everyday life.

“Materials and Methods” features artists such as Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella and John Chamberlain whose multimedia approaches engage with systems of production and process.

Art represented in “Painterly Perspectives” juxtaposes abstract expressionist work from artists such as Elmer Bischoff in the 1950s with work that reignited the tradition of expressive painting during the later part of the century, such as “neo-expressionist” painter Eric Fischl.

Photographs in “Strange Space” blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the local and the global, and the strange and the familiar. Artists such as Catherine Opie and Sergio Vega suggest ruptures in time and space as well as in the realm of aesthetic and social experience. Allan Sekula, Richard Misrach, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher address geo-political issues that highlight the unsettling contradictions of technology and progress.

The fifth group in the exhibition features the work of Laylah Ali, an artist who creates extraordinary and intense narratives in small-scale and detailed drawings where imaginary characters engage in ambiguous struggles for power. Also featured is work by Yvonne Jacquette, whose aerial views of urban life explore the tensions between realism and abstraction as well as the natural and the manmade.

A cornerstone of both installations is the work of Abstract Expressionist artists, many among the most influential of the 20th century. On view are sculptors Alexander Calder and David Smith, whose playful work reflects an interest in the subconscious mind and includes biomorphic shapes and the weightless illusion of drawing in space. Also represented is a seminal work by Barnett Newman, who pushed the medium of painting to new levels of abstraction and emotional power.

The exhibition, curated by Harn Curator of Contemporary Art Kerry Oliver-Smith, is on view through Oct. 29, 2006. Lenders to American Matrix, Part II include Norman and Irma Braman, Dr. Robert and Nancy Magoon, Stephen and Carol Shey and 303 Gallery. Sponsors of the exhibition include Northern Trust Bank, Nationwide and the Nationwide Foundation, Shands Health Care, Inc., PPI Construction Management, Christie’s, Thomas and Jennifer McIntosh, Ed and Jan Baur, and the Eloise R. Chandler Program Endowment.