Art Foundations

Art Foundations explores how various art forms have been produced throughout the last two centuries. It presents a succession of artwork groupings across multiple media and disciplines, bringing together works not usually shown in the same space. Meant to be visited clockwise, each gallery provides a different angle on what we consider art, with each grouping questioning how art is made, why, where, and by whom.

This presentation shifts the lens through which we look at art, allowing us to explore gallery after gallery, the conception and the material of artmaking, and the spaces where it is created. Art Foundations brings together academically trained and untrained artists as well as visual arts, architecture, design, and glass, displaying the breadth and interconnectedness of the museum’s collection.

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This gallery features trained artists who approach art from the angle of craft. These artists master or repurpose techniques like weaving, folding, knitting, and assembling, which are often a part of daily life. In employing these techniques in their artmaking, artists investigate the disruptive possibilities of craft in contemporary art, exploring the tension between tradition and technology. By taking up and reframing typically gendered or traditional techniques in their work, these artists raise political and social statements in their work.

The groupings or art in this gallery explore artmaking through the angle of a given concept, with each wall dedicated to a single concept: pure color, automatic painting, text as a motif, or ready-made. Some of the artists explore color and its relationship with two-dimensional surfaces. Other artists employ their minds to produce automatic works, thereby pursuing the Surrealist Movement’s focus on the subconscious. Still, others choose to use words or light as their primary material. Finally, in the area of the ready-made, artists place ordinary, everyday objects in museums, thereby giving them the startling status of artwork.

This gallery showcases artists’ exploration of the human figure through painting, photography, and sculpture, set against the backdrop of figures as the most ancient and often represented motif in art. The artworks in this gallery explore various ways artists have layered representations of the human figure: in its physical likeness, as a social representation, or as an archetype. The juxtaposition of these works helps showcase the tension between classical ways of representing the figure and contemporary artists’ subversions of these classical methods.

In this grouping of artworks, the human body is represented through the symbolic employment of body parts—hands, feet, or heads—or using the body itself as the medium. Artists experimented with abstracting the human figure by simplifying or distorting elements of the body or by adding non-human elements to their works.   Exaggerated features or body parts convey symbolic meanings. They can inspire fear or ridicule or remove the subject’s “reality” or “humanity” by making them unrecognizable to the viewer. Rather than the body as a motif, other artists in this gallery use their own bodies to create their work.

This gallery features a selection of works produced by self-trained artists or by academically-trained artists looking into the immediate and low-technique approach of street artists. During the 19th Century, the distinction between “high or fine art” and “low art” was easy to make. High art was a product of the academy and represented training, skill, and tradition. Low art was designed in a practical fashion; it required skill and design but was not elevated to the level of fine or high art. Since the mid-19th Century, these lines blurred when trained artists started to embrace the techniques and aesthetics of non-academically trained artists.

This section assembles various explorations about art and space. It examines, from two vantage points and across disciplines, how space is produced by artists and where art is made and shown. Some artists in this section explore the studio, the exhibition space, the art fair, and the space enclosed or delimited by the artwork. This gallery also showcases the great variety of artists’ attempts to render space through different media and technologies.