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Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Commission Works by Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, Kiki Smith, and Andy Goldworthy for new de Young Museum
7/15/2005 San Francisco, July 15, 2005 -- As construction proceeded on the new de Young museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, artists Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), James Turrell (b. 1943), Kiki Smith (b. 1954), and Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956) were commissioned to create five site-specific works for the new building. These projects add works by five of the world’s leading contemporary artists to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s growing permanent collection, and they will be on view in the new de Young when it opens on October 15.
“The realization of this new building represents an unparalleled opportunity in the 109-year history of the de Young museum,” said Harry S. Parker III, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “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 facilitates direct engagement between the art and our visitors.”
The Commissions
Gerhard Richter’s Strontium
Gerhard Richter created a large-scale mural for the new de Young composed of digitally manipulated photographs that 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 piece, titled Strontium, is constructed of 130 digital prints mounted on aluminum with plexiglass coating. It spans a total of 31 by 29.86 feet and is installed in the Diane B. Wilsey and Alfred S. 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 building. This is a powerful and important addition to the collection, and a fitting focus for the 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. Strontium is a gift of Diane B. Wilsey in memory of Alfred S. Wilsey.
Ed Ruscha Triptych
Ed Ruscha was commissioned to create two large-scale paintings that flank his A Particular Kind of Heaven, 1983, which is in the museum’s collection, to form a spectacular, monumental triptych. Continuing the themes of the 1983 painting, the new panels each have the existing canvas’s dimensions of 90 by 136-1/2 inches, resulting in a stunning, combined work that measures more than 7 by 34 feet. The triptych is installed on the entry wall to the 20th- and 21st-century American art galleries, one of the most prominent locations in the new de Young.
A Particular Kind of Heaven is one of a series of related works Ruscha created in the mid-1980s in which words and phrases are silhouetted against the sky. The painting’s large-scale, panoramic format and lucent chromatic light effects relate to a long tradition of American landscape painting, represented by such Hudson River School artists as Frederic E. Church and Albert Bierstadt and other artists of the American West.
Ruscha’s westward-facing California sunset resonates with the symbolic associations of the American West, particularly the perception of California as an earthly Eden or El Dorado and the locus for the ultimate fulfillment of America’s “manifest destiny” to settle the continent. Ruscha’s words, “A Particular Kind of Heaven,” hover over the horizon like a form of geometric skywriting and dominate the sunset sky. Related to, but isolated from, the context of language and clear communication, Ruscha’s enigmatic words invite scrutiny and pose an implicit question by drawing the viewer’s attention to the disjunctions between words, language, and meaning, but ultimately defying precise definition.
Like much of his work over a long career, Ruscha’s two new panels re-visit and reinvent his earlier work -- an essential component of his art practice -- extending it both physically and conceptually. Ruscha’s new panels enhance the all-encompassing panoramic scope and scale of his earlier painting.
New “Skyspace” by James Turrell
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco also commissioned a new site-specific piece by renowned California artist James Turrell, best known for his visionary work with light. Created specifically for a site in the new de Young’s Barbro 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 features 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 is his first to adopt the stupa form. The sculpture is sited in a grass-covered hill in the Sculpture Garden. Viewers 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 are white concrete and the floor is red stone. At the center of this cylindrical space is a rough-hewn, black basalt stupa form. Entering the round stupa through a door, viewers can 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 are subtly altered by an L.E.D. lighting system inside the chamber and by the shifting light and weather outside.
Near by Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith created a large-scale sculpture, a gift of Dorothy and George Saxe and the Friends of New Art, that reinterprets David, Joanna, and Abigail Mason (1670), a holding of the de Young’s American Paintings Collection attributed to the Freake-Gibbs Painter. Reflecting her ongoing interest in representations of women and women’s bodies, Near incorporates in silhouette the images of Joanna and Abigail Mason from the painting using gilt and copper leaf. In the painting the two girls are wearing red coral jewelry, which was used as a talisman against evil or death. Smith’s images of the two girls recall milagro or santos religious tradition, in which votive images are used as intermediaries for supplicants seeking divine intervention. These elements resonate with the religious imagery in the original painting.
The sculpture consists of a cast-bronze framework that resembles an unfolded cardboard box, echoing the distinct nature of Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the new de Young. This metal framework surrounds the Freake-Gibbs Painter images and hangs suspended above an arrangement of glass teardrops. Timothy Anglin Burgard, Curator of American Art, notes, “Smith’s use of dozens of hand-blown glass teardrops beneath the bronze superstructure creates a cloudlike effect and simultaneously evokes feelings of solidity and permanence as well as the vaporous and ephemeral. Her installation physically crowns the Saxe Gallery [located on the main level of the museum], but also spiritually crowns the fragile humanity embodied by the Mason children.”
Andy Goldsworthy’s Drawn Stone
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, titled Drawn Stone, is inspired by the unique character of California’s tectonic topography. Working with the Appleton Greenmoore stone imported from Yorkshire, England, that surrounds the new de Young building, Goldsworthy has created 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 bisects -- and cleaves in two -- large rough-hewn stone boulders that serve as seating for museum visitors.
Says Timothy Anglin Burgard, the Ednah Root Curator of American Art, “This minimalist work has 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 has particular resonance in the cultural landscape of California, a historic locus of environmental sensitivity and activism. It will have added relevance in the context of landscape architect Walter Hood’s design for the de Young and in the natural environment of Golden Gate Park. Says Burgard, “The Goldsworthy commission for the new de Young resonates 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 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David 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.”
The Artists
Gerhard Richter
The work of Gerhard Richter has influenced 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.
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha is widely recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the post-World War II generation. Although his work initially was associated with the Pop movement of the 1960s, it increasingly has transcended its Pop origins and evolved to address issues pertaining to the American landscape tradition, minimalism, and conceptual art. Similarly, while Ruscha has often been perceived of as the quintessential Los Angeles or California artist, one whose works have been interpreted as representing a uniquely California sensibility, he is one of the few artists from the region to establish an international reputation. In 2005, Ed Ruscha was the official U.S. representative to the Venice Biennale.
James Turrell
A major figure in the Earth, Conceptual, Minimal, and Process Art movements, James Turrell is one of the founders of what was termed the California Light and Space Art movement. He uses light in his room-scale projections and installations and skyspaces to challenge viewers’ conventional assumptions regarding the nature of light, solids, and even perception itself. 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.
Kiki Smith
As a leading force in American contemporary art, Kiki Smith’s work is varied in both subject and media. With a specific focus on the human body, especially the female form, Smith often incorporates religious imagery and references to folktales in her acclaimed sculptures, prints, photographs, and multi-media works. Employing materials as diverse as glass, bronze, ceramic, beeswax, fiber, and human hair, Smith blends the line between art and craft and addresses important societal issues such as the marginalization of women and personal spirituality. Smith’s work was the focus of a comprehensive solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 2003.
Andy Goldsworthy
Using natural (and often ephemeral) materials, such as rock, wood, leaves, snow, and ice, Andy Goldsworthy 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. 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.
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 from the Pacific and Africa, as well as an important and diverse collection of textiles.
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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