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Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Commission Works by Gerhard Richter, James Turrell, and Andy Goldsworthy for New de Young Museum
6/11/2004 Richter Mural, the Future Centerpiece of the New Building’s Main Public Gathering Space, is a Gift of Diane B. Wilsey in Memory of Alfred S. Wilsey;
Turrell Sculpture a Gift of Barbro and Bernard Osher;
Goldsworthy’s Site-Specific Stone Work a Gift of Lonna and Marshall Wais
San Francisco, June 11, 2004—As construction continues on the de Young Museum’s state- of-the-art new building in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, Director Harry S. Parker III has announced that artists Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), James Turrell (b. 1943), and Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956) have been commissioned to create three site-specific works for the new building. These projects add works by three of the world’s leading contemporary artists to the de Young’s growing permanent collection.
"The realization of this new building represents an unparalleled opportunity in the 109-year history of the de Young Museum," said Director Parker. "It is thrilling to collaborate with three of the leading artists of our time, and engage their talent and vision to create something entirely unique for the new de Young. These commissions are the latest achievements in an ongoing program to grow our broad-ranging collections of world art and present them in a space that will facilitate direct engagement between the art and our visitors. I am deeply grateful to Dede Wilsey, Barbro and Bernard Osher, and Lonna and Marshall Wais for their continued generosity and visionary appreciation of art."
Gerhard Richter Mural
Gerhard Richter will create a large-scale mural for the new de Young that is created from digitally-manipulated photographs, which together form a geometric black and white motif representing the atomic structure of strontium titanate, a synthetic substance often used to create artificial diamonds. The monumental untitled piece is constructed of 156 digital prints, each one measuring 27-1/2-x 37-1/4 inches, mounted on aluminum with plexiglass coating. It spans a total of 31 x 29.86 feet and will be installed in Wilsey Court, the central public gathering space inside the new de Young Museum. "Because the units that compose Richter’s mural are photographs based in the realm of nanotechnology, it has tremendous resonance for San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, the capital of the High Tech industry," said Daniell Cornell, Associate Curator of American Art. "The piece also relates wonderfully to the museum itself in that the pattern of circles throughout the mural is reminiscent of the perforated copper cladding on the new de Young building. This is a powerful and important addition to the collection, and a fitting focus of the building’s main lobby."
The mural for the de Young reflects Richter’s interest in the dialectic of opposites and his longstanding artistic and philosophical investigation into the relation between the window and the mirror of representation. Using his signature blurring of images, Richter manipulates existing photographs of strontium titanate and thereby underscores the impermanence of these atomic structures. By organizing the photographs into a monumentally scaled mural, he calls attention to the aggregate experience of the discrete yet undetectable instants that make up our experience of reality.
New "Skyspace" by James Turrell
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has also commissioned a new work of art by renowned California artist James Turrell (b. 1943), best known for his visionary work with light. Created specifically for a site in the new de Young’s Osher Sculpture Garden, it is a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Osher. This "skyspace," titled Three Gems, is the first work by Turrell to enter the museum’s collections. It is a subterranean installation that will feature a view of the sky altered by L.E.D. lighting effects, and that highlights changing light and weather conditions outside.
Although Turrell has created other skyspaces, his project for the de Young will be his first skyspace to adopt the stupa form. The sculpture will be sited in a grass-covered hill in the Osher Sculpture Garden. Viewers will walk through a short tunnel cut into the hill, and then enter into a cylindrical space carved out of the hill. The retaining walls of this cylindrical space will be white concrete and the floor will be red stone. At the center of this cylindrical space will be a rough-hewn, black basalt stupa form. Entering the round stupa through a door, viewers will sit on a stone bench that runs around the circumference of the skyspace and view the sky through an oculus cut in the roof of the chamber. Viewers’ perceptions of the sky color will be subtly altered by an L.E.D. lighting system inside the chamber, and by changing light and weather conditions outside the chamber.
Andy Goldsworthy’s Site-specific Stone "Faultline"
In 2003, the Fine Arts Museums asked Andy Goldsworthy to develop a proposal for a site-specific work that could be incorporated into the new de Young Museum. Like the intersecting diagonals of Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the museum building, Goldsworthy’s work is inspired by the unique character of California’s tectonic topography. Working with the Appleton Greenmoore stone imported from Yorkshire, England, that will surround the new de Young building, Goldsworthy will create a continuous crack running north from the edge of the Music Concourse roadway in front of the museum, up the main walkway, into the exterior courtyard, and up to the main entrance door. Along its path, this crack will bisect--and cleave in two--large rough-hewn stone boulders that will serve as seating for museum visitors.
Says Timothy Anglin Burgard, the Ednah Root Curator of American Art, "This minimalist work will have a subtly subversive quality, challenging the viewer’s notion of what constitutes a work of art by blurring the distinction between the natural and the man-made, while also drawing attention to nature’s potential to undermine or destroy the works created by humans."
Goldsworthy’s work will have particular resonance in the cultural landscape of California, an historic locus of environmental sensitivity and activism. It will have added relevance in the context of landscape architect Walter Hood’s landscape design for the de Young and in the natural environment of Golden Gate Park. Says Burgard, "The Goldsworthy commission for the new de Young will resonate with American art traditions represented by objects already in the de Young's permanent collection, including Hudson River School paintings that were influenced by the reverence for nature of Emerson, Thoreau and John Ruskin. An Andy Goldsworthy work, itself embodying the transformative power of nature and culture, serves as an apt metaphor for the transformation of the new de Young Museum."
Gerhard Richter
The work of Gerhard Richter is widely acknowledged as being of defining importance to an entire generation of contemporary artists. The subject of the 2002 retrospective, Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting organized by the Museum of Modern Art, Richter was born in Dresden, Germany, and first studied art under the social and political disciplines of the East German communist government. In 1961 he moved to West Germany to continue his studies at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he was inspired by Joseph Beuys and first encountered the movements of Art Informal, American and British Pop, and Fluxus.
James Turrell
James Turrell, one of the most important contemporary artists, is a major figurehead in the Earth, Conceptual, Minimal, and Process Art movements. Turrell’s works are included in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Andy Goldsworthy
Best-known for his work with natural (and often ephemeral) materials such as rock, wood, leaves, snow, and ice, Andy Goldsworthy is an important and influential contemporary artist, whose work has contributed to the histories of Earth, Environmental, Conceptual, Minimal, and Process art. Goldsworthy’s work has been published in a dozen major monographs and has been included in over 200 solo and group exhibitions, including a current installation on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born, in Sale Moor, Cheshire, England, Andy Goldsworthy studied art at the Bradford College of Art (1974–75) and Preston Polytechnic, Lancaster (1975–79), where he first admired the works of Mark Boyle, Ben Nicholson, Yves Klein, Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Christo.
Although Goldsworthy works exclusively with natural materials, he arranges and orders them into forms and arrays that lie just beyond the realm of the possible in nature, thus height-ening the viewer’s awareness of the fine line between the natural and art/artifice. His works typically emphasize the processes of nature--including creation and transformation--often achieving a near-transparency of his role as an artist.
About the New de Young
Founded in 1895 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the de Young Museum has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city and a cherished destination for millions of residents and visitors to the region for over 100 years. In fall 2005, the de Young Museum will re-open in a new facility designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco. The new de Young will provide San Francisco with a landmark art museum to showcase the museum’s significant collections of American art from the 17th through the 20th centuries, art from Central and South America, and art from the Pacific and Africa.
The de Young Museum and its sister museum, the Legion of Honor, together comprise the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the largest public arts institution in the city and one of the largest art museums in the United States.
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