ARTS

February 12 – June 17, 2012

MAM Hours: Wednesdays - Sundays, Noon - 5 p.m.
Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, and major holidays.

The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) presents Look Now: Modern and Contemporary Art from Private Collections, offering a rare opportunity to view nearly 40 works by 31 20th- and 21st-century artists who have extended the boundaries of art making. The exhibition includes works from 17 lenders, from northern New Jersey and Manhattan.

Look Now is co-curated by Gail Stavitsky, chief curator, and Alexandra Schwartz, curator of contemporary art.

The exhibition displays a variety of media—including painting, sculpture, video, photography, drawings, and prints—and a diversity of artists in both style and age, demonstrating the range of what is collectible and highlighting the personal visions of the individual collectors.

Look Now features such early 20th-century masters as Andrew Dasburg and Morton Livingston Schamberg; midcentury innovators such as Louise Bourgeois, Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol; and cutting-edge contemporary artists such as Rachel Harrison, Ryan McGinness, and Bill Viola. Their works and those of the others explore many of the major themes and preoccupations within modern and contemporary art, from the development of abstraction in the early 20th century, to the impact of popular culture on the art of the midcentury, to the influence of globalism on contemporary art.

In the first decades of the 20th century, modernists such as Hilla von Rebay and Emil Bisttram developed visual languages of form, color, and line to create abstract compositions, communicating universal aspects of modern life that could not be conveyed through realistic treatments.

Beginning in the 1960s, many artists privileged the ideas behind making art over the creation of physical objects, resulting in the pioneering conceptual work of artists such as Joseph Kosuth, who used verbal language to question what art can be and do.

Reflecting radically shifting gender roles over the past century, many artists have explored issues of gender and sexuality, as in the work of Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Mickalene Thomas, and Rachel Perry Welty. Issues of cultural identity also play an important role in modern and contemporary art, as in the work of Mark Bradford, Jacob Lawrence, and Winfred Rembert. Since the 1980s, large-format photography has emerged as a major medium for contemporary art, as can been seen in the work of Louise Lawler and Michael Eastman, among others in the exhibition.

Recently, contemporary art has become increasingly global in scope, and this exhibition features several artists who live and work internationally, such as A. Balasubramaniam, Yayoi Kusama, and Jim Lambie.