The Broad, L.A.’s new contemporary art museum, has obtained for its collection works by UCLA art professors Barbara Kruger, Lari Pittman and Charles Ray.
Kruger is known to address media and politics by utilizing media effects and strategies to express her own sexual, social and political messages that challenge the stereotypical ways mass media influences society’s views on gender, social relationships and political issues. “Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground),” currently on view in the Broad's inaugural exhibition, demonstrates her manner of addressing political issues. The photograph shows a woman’s face split in positive and negative exposures that has been obscured by text. In splitting the woman’s face, Kruger critiques the standard of symmetry that is applied to feminine beauty and maintained by the media and advertising.
Pittman counters the aesthetic of minimal art by creating dense pictures that use multiple layers to convey themes and reveal information at every inch of the canvas. “Like You” exemplifies his abundant use of symbols and decorative motifs. It consists of five mahogany panels, each filled with imagery that serves a decorative and narrative purpose. Critics have offered the interpretation that “Like You” depicts “a riot or a parade with androgynous thong-wearing revelers and hands that could be praying or clapping," and that “the city portrayed may even be Los Angeles in the aftermath of the 1992 riot.”
Ray often takes familiar situations and objects and people from the real world and modifies them in his work. As a commentator on sculpture’s history, Ray instills the tenets of classical sculpture — beauty, proportion and facture — in his work, but makes slight alternations by inserting slippages, imperfections or over-perfections. “Fall ’91” is a sculpture of a woman standing in the common contrapposto pose in which most of the weight is put on one foot. Modeled on a mannequin scaled to eight feet tall, the sculpture looms large in a pink power suit fashionable in the fall of 1991. The result is both physically and psychologically daunting.
Tickets to the Broad are free but must be reserved in advance. For more information, visit the Broad.
