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AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot)

@aiccontemporary.bsky.social

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Sharing artworks from the Art Institute of Chicago's Contemporary Art department. Automated thanks to @andreitr.bsky.social and @botfrens.bsky.social

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AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 12h

Empathy Displacement/Loopy in Blue and Orange www.artic.edu/artworks/185048

Jacob and Bessie Levy Art Encouragement Fund; Mr. and Mrs. Frank H. Armstrong, William and Bertha Clussman, Mr. and Mrs. J. F. Brower, Martin B. Cahn, John G. Curtis, Jr., and Robert Rice Jenkins prize funds; Municipal Art League of Chicago Fund

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 14h

Sound Raga (Fall) www.artic.edu/artworks/246868

Bequest of Evelyn Statsinger Cohen

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AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 16h

A Group of Houses and Figures www.artic.edu/artworks/53023

Bequest of Maxine Kunstadter

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 17h

Glittering, the Being www.artic.edu/artworks/10161

Gift of Mr. Grant J. Pick

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

The Long Road to Mazatlán www.artic.edu/artworks/184186

One of England’s most important independent filmmakers and a founder of the pioneering Sankofa Film and Video Collective (1983–92), Isaac Julien creates highly seductive films and video installations that explore the representation of race and masculinity in visual culture. Conflating conventional cinematic structure with avant-garde techniques, Julien subverts stereotypical portrayals of black and gay subjects, forcing viewers to question accepted representational archetypes. Produced collaboratively with Venezuela-born choreographer Javier De Frutos, The Long Road to Mazatlán is a modern cowboy story. Shot in and around San Antonio, Texas, the film captures the erotically charged interchanges between a young Hispanic man and the emotionally unavailable cowboy he pursues. Shot in lush color and layered imagery, the protagonists play out, as actors and at times as dancers, the subtle drama of the everyday, performing within carefully constructed environments. Through selected editing and the use of a three-screen installation, the artist composes a mise-en-scène that explores the social construction of masculinity within mythic landscapes of the American West.

Gift of Donna and Howard Stone

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"Untitled" (March 5th) #2 www.artic.edu/artworks/180585

Gift of Judith Neisser

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Green Sea www.artic.edu/artworks/109692

Restricted gift of Mrs. Frederic G. Pick; Grant J. Pick, Charles H. and Mary F.S. Worcester, and Twentieth-Century Discretionary funds; and anonymous gift

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Reflection Paper no. 4 www.artic.edu/artworks/243223

Gift of the artist

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Treasure Hunt www.artic.edu/artworks/53039

Neison and Bette Harris Purchase Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Tall Figure www.artic.edu/artworks/9567

After first producing work associated with Surrealism, Alberto Giacometti began making his distinctive elongated, skeletal bronze sculptures in Paris in the late 1940s. His works struck a powerful chord with the Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who saw the isolated figures as a visualization of his own ideas about the loneliness and ultimate absurdity of the human condition at the end of World War II. For his part, Giacometti insisted that he was simply attempting to convey his own experience of looking at people, though his method of working was sympathetic to Sartre’s response. The artist often reworked his sculptures over long periods of time, building up a clay model and then stripping it down, until he gradually eroded the figure’s body to its essential, fragile core.

Gift of Lannan Foundation

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Untitled www.artic.edu/artworks/201654

Ann M. Vielehr Prize and Jacob and Bessie Levy Art Encouragement funds

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Museum without Ceiling www.artic.edu/artworks/157159

Restricted gift of Ruth Horwich; Ann M. Vielehr Prize Fund

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Hanging Drawing X www.artic.edu/artworks/255342

Gift of Artworkers Retirement Society

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

from the series I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous www.artic.edu/artworks/243616

Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Early www.artic.edu/artworks/187091

Gift of Nancy Lauter McDougal and Alfred L. McDougal

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Close Pin Prop www.artic.edu/artworks/111638

In the late 1960s, Richard Serra pioneered “antiform,” an approach to sculpture that challenged the reductive formalism of Minimalism by focusing on the process or act of creation. Capturing the raw, muscular energy of working with lead and steel, the artist utilized these materials to explore fundamental properties of sculptural tension. In 1968 Serra created his first “props,” consisting of plates and tubes in precarious configurations. Although these works are entirely stable, as all are carefully balanced, they employ gravity as their fundamental support and thus have an unnerving quality. The result is an aggressive sculptural experience evoking potential danger. The title refers to the artist Chuck Close, who visited Serra’s studio when this prop was being made.

Through prior gift of Mary and Leigh Block

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Monk (Mönch) www.artic.edu/artworks/154232

Katharina Fritsch roots her work in the personal, often drawing from childhood memories of familiar circumstances or chance encounters. At the same time, her references engage broad aspects of German folklore and culture through meticulous reproductions of quotidian objects, many of which she formally manipulates with shifts in scale and color. Her process is intensely time-consuming: molded by hand, each object is cast in plaster, reworked, and cast again, often in polyester or aluminum. The completed forms are then painted with highly saturated, matte, nonreflective colors that create a sense of otherworldliness. In Monk the artist took up the lone, brooding figure of a friar to encapsulate her fascination with Christian traditions and rituals and the mysterious medieval towns, such as Nuremberg and Bamberg, that she frequented in her youth.

Restricted gift of the Anstiss and Ronald Krueck Collection

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Abesti Gogora III www.artic.edu/artworks/27612

Grant J. Pick Fund

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Lorsch II www.artic.edu/artworks/228849

For over 50 years, Raimer Jochims has remained committed to painting contemplative, process-based abstractions. His mature work evolved out of his participation in monochromatic and optical painting movements in the 1960s and ’70s. Started in 1973, his uniquely shaped paintings originate from studied observations of wide-ranging source materials such as Buddha statues, Polynesian ancestor figures, Aztec pottery, Egyptian sculptures, and Chinese paintings. He uses small traces of these objects to create autonomous works lacking any obvious references to their origins. Ignoring historical and geographical differences, Jochims’s approach assimilates the resulting forms into innovative abstract statements.
Jochims manipulates his painting supports as much as he does their surfaces. He contemplates each shape and selectively activates its edges by chipping the wood with tongs. Jochims then patiently chooses color gradations that seem to respond to the particular demands of the form: some shift quickly and dramatically, while others dissolve slowly and subtly. He later adds an open-ended title that does not necessarily relate directly to his source material but may trigger other associations such as cities, ancient cultures, influential artists, and mythical beings. Finally, he selects the placement and hanging height of each individual work according to color, dimension, and orientation. Using a distinctive methodology, Jochims creates new, autonomous pictorial forms with their own intricacies and self-reflexive logic.

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

parallel occurrence www.artic.edu/artworks/160223

Restricted gift of The Buddy Taub Foundation, Jill and Dennis Roach, Directors

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

After Franz Marc www.artic.edu/artworks/103448

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley M. Freehling

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

TICK-TOCK JELLY CLOCK COSMOTRON www.artic.edu/artworks/109890

Restricted gift of Janss Foundation; Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Blume www.artic.edu/artworks/185064

Louise Lawler first rose to prominence in 1984, when she photographed the renowned collection of modern and contemporary masterworks owned by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine as it was installed in their Connecticut home. Since that time, Lawler has focused her camera on the installation of works of art to examine the institutional frameworks that determine their significance. The resulting photographs transcend pure documentation, occupying a key position within conceptual discourse. Blume, a recent icon in Lawler’s oeuvre, documents a Jeff Koons sculpture on display at Galerie Max Hetzler’s booth at Art Basel in 2003. Due to its highly reflective surface, the artwork becomes a vehicle for advertising other objects for sale; like the artist, it reflects and records the installation of surrounding art. Finally, Koons’s polished surface yields an unavoidable self-portrait of Lawler, with her camera, at the moment of photographic capture.

Through prior bequest of Marguerita S. Ritman

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Pictograph-Symbol www.artic.edu/artworks/181775

Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictograph series, created between 1941 and 1951, represents the artist’s early efforts at reconciling elements of abstraction with an exploration of the subconscious. To make these works, the artist laid down a grid as an organizing structure. Using a process of free association and intuition influenced by the Surrealist technique of automatism, or automatic drawing, he decided to employ symbols to fill the grid. Mining eclectic source material from non-Western cultures and modern art, Gottlieb invented a pictorial language that aimed to represent and convey universal ideas to the viewer.

Through prior gift of Society for Contemporary American Art

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Leaning Tower of Touhy www.artic.edu/artworks/97398

Gift of the Robert A. Lewis Fund in memory of William and Polly Levey

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Blood Pool www.artic.edu/artworks/122231

In sculptures such as Blood Pool, Kiki Smith created uncomfortable, life-size figures that challenge and extend the tradition of human representation by treating the body as the site of biological, genetic, social, and political battles. Composed of wax, which Smith favors for its malleability, Blood Pool evokes the texture and color of flesh. Although the point of departure for her pieces is literal—she always works from casts of live models—the figure, with its fetal pose and exposed spine, becomes a primal emblem that engages viewers in issues of individual and collective health and disease, heroization and victimization, and life and death (particularly because of the dual potential of human blood in the era of AIDS).

Twentieth-Century Discretionary Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Becalmed www.artic.edu/artworks/243925

Samuel A. Marx Endowment; through prior acquisition of Robert Alexander Waller Memorial Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Detumescence and/or its Opposite (from Torment of Follies) www.artic.edu/artworks/226527

Restricted gifts of Eric Ceputis and David Williams, Stephanie Skestos Gabriele, Larry and Julia Antonatos, David Egeland and Andy Friedman, Mary Frances Budig and John Hass, David Nelson and Randall Kroszner, Dirk Denison and David Salkin, Ed and Betty Harris, Kate Neisser and Stephen Burns, William Padnos and Margy Kane, and Patty and Mark McGrath

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Television Room with Vanishing Points www.artic.edu/artworks/182400

Gift of the artist

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Interlock www.artic.edu/artworks/250603

Maren Hassinger began taking dance classes even before she started formal schooling. While at Bennington College, her interest in dance and choreography shifted to a focus on sculpture informed by her prior exploration of movement and an object’s relationship to space. Hassinger was the first student to specialize in fiber-based art within the Sculpture MFA program at the University of California in Los Angeles. During that time, she began working with wire rope, which she described as “open to innovation.” She combined steel cable with tree branches to create sculptures that, in her words, “resembled living, breathing things.” By juxtaposing these materials, Hassinger sought to maintain a balance between the natural and the made, between fragility and strength—and also to express equality, by joining the sculpture’s opposing ends.
Hassinger collected the material for Interlock in a salvage yard on Alameda Street in Los Angeles. As is characteristic of Hassinger’s early wire-rope sculptures, Interlock visibly reflects the process of its production; the artist combined the found materials with industrially produced elements, revealing the tension between technology and nature. This work is also a key example of how Hassinger uses bodily movement to make artistic production possible and distinctive. Scaled to her own body, Interlock shows how Hassinger’s sculptural practice is rooted in her dance and performance background, collapsing these genres into the physical space in and around the work.

Gift of the Society of Contemporary Art

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The Uffizi I, Florence www.artic.edu/artworks/111633

Solomon B. Smith Endowment

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Black Light Series #7: Ego Painting www.artic.edu/artworks/244905

Wilson L. Mead Trust Fund; Claire and Gordon Prussian Fund for Contemporary Art; Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; Ada S. Garrett Prize, Flora Mayer Witkowsky Purchase Prize, Gordon Prussian Memorial, Emilie L. Wild Prize, William H. Bartels Prize, William and Bertha Clusmann Prize, Max V. Kohnstamm Prize, and Pauline Palmer Prize funds

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Chicago Installation www.artic.edu/artworks/181102

Wolfgang Tillmans’s photographic installations— in conjunction with the magazines, artist’s books, and postcards that disseminate his work—challenge conventional ideas of photography and the way it is exhibited. Tillmans often juxtaposes unframed images of varying sizes and formats, placing inkjet prints alongside glossy chromogenic prints, and recombining material from prior installations with new work. As the artist explained, “half my work is in the photograph, and half is in the installation.” This configuration, designed specifically for the Art Institute, presents a selection of images taken between 1993 and 2003, intermingling ephemeral moments of contemporary life with abstract studies of surface textures. Tillmans subverts traditional photographic hierarchies by focusing on complex interrelationships between images and the materiality of photographic objects. In many respects, the artist chooses to spatialize the aesthetic of a magazine or book layout on the wall.

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Two by four by eight, two by four by ten www.artic.edu/artworks/154132

Gift of Hudson

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Raised Rock www.artic.edu/artworks/241460

Gift of Adam Peiperl

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Untitled www.artic.edu/artworks/257330

Elisabeth Wild’s colorful and abstract collages emerge from her rich life experiences and the artistic practice she has developed over the past six decades. Born in Austria to Jewish parents, Wild escaped the Nazi regime and fled to Argentina in 1938. She worked in textile design, marrying textile industrialist August Wild. Due to the volatile political climate in Argentina, the family moved to Basel, Switzerland, in 1962. Wild returned to South America in 1966 and joined her daughter, artist Vivian Suter, in Panajachel on Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. While their home at the edge of the rainforest may have appeared serene, violence caused by natural disasters and drug trafficking continually impacted their life.Evoking the still-life paintings that were foundational to her early practice, Wild’s later collages balance figuration with abstraction. The rich colors and patterns recall her work in textile design and are often inspired by the visual traditions of Argentina and Guatemala. Making collages became a daily meditative ritual for Wild. She would leaf through fashion and lifestyle magazines and take fragments from their commodified context, combining them with cutouts from colored cartons and glossy paper and rearrange them into complex compositions that visualized the artist’s inner experience. Part of a series titled Fantasías, the collages are, indeed, fantastical spaces to encounter, our eyes moving from the light-blue wall (its color chosen by Wild herself) into the artist’s kaleidoscopic world.

Promised gift of Lynn and Allen Turner

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Inner eye www.artic.edu/artworks/37384

Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Irving Forman

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The Alcoholic www.artic.edu/artworks/105699

Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore met in 1967 as students at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. By 1969 they dropped their surnames in order to rid themselves of their separate artistic identities and became a collaborative unit. Although they work in a variety of media, including performance, photography, film, and video, Gilbert & George refer to all of their work as sculpture. Early on, they performed as “living sculptures,” making themselves their own subject matter. In 1971 Gilbert & George made their first multipanel photographs, which have remained their dominant form of expression. In the 1970s, they gradually shifted the emphasis of their art away from their own experiences to larger social issues, scrutinizing the inner-city realities that confronted them on the streets of London.

Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Untitled www.artic.edu/artworks/54800

Gift of Isamu Noguchi

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Hilton Head Island, S.C., U.S.A., June 24, 1992," from Beach Portraits www.artic.edu/artworks/180792

Gift of LaSalle Bank

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Broadway www.artic.edu/artworks/105533

John and Mary Gedo Purchase Fund

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

birthday party I www.artic.edu/artworks/181109

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Red Stripe Kitchen, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home www.artic.edu/artworks/195591

Through prior gift of Adeline Yates

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Some Thames - Group N www.artic.edu/artworks/184595

Restricted gift of Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation; through prior gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison, and Muriel Kallis Newman in memory of Albert Hardy Newman; Oscar L. Gerber Memorial Endowment; and Robert and Marlene Baumgarten Memorial Fund

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Untitled www.artic.edu/artworks/145288

Since the 1980s, Jessica Stockholder has engaged in an ongoing dialogue about the possibilities of painting and the pictorial potential of sculpture with idiosyncratic pairings of found materials, architecture, and broad swaths of paint in vibrant colors. Called “the reigning queen of the found object”, Stockholder “gives a single bare light bulb a classic purity and a crumpled parasol the weight of withdrawal.” Her pioneering site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.”

Gift of Society for Contemporary Art

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Burn One www.artic.edu/artworks/254340

Promised gift of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Ballet of the Left-Handed Piano www.artic.edu/artworks/17458

Joseph N. Eisendrath Purchase Prize Fund

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Still Life www.artic.edu/artworks/75097

Pauline Palmer Prize Fund

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Seven www.artic.edu/artworks/209967

Gift of the Stenn Family Collection

000

AIC: Contemporary Art (Bot) @aiccontemporary.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Untitled (Agon) www.artic.edu/artworks/196409

Elad Lassry’s films and photographs are distinguished by a rigorous formalism and a profound engagement with theories and histories of representation. Eschewing the labels of photographer and filmmaker, Lassry adopts the conceptual conceit of an artist using a camera; he is inspired by picture making in the tradition of practitioners such as Jack Goldstein, whose films, which resemble “moving photographs,” reject narrative altogether. Based in Los Angeles, Lassry creates elegant and economical compositions that take advantage of professional actors, animal trainers, and camera crews—works that at once draw upon and slyly critique the structures and institutions of Hollywood and the art world.
Untitled (Agon) features dancers Megan LeCrone and Ask La Cour of the New York City Ballet performing the last sequence of George Balanchine’s Agon (1957). Lassry’s silent film further abstracts Balanchine’s decidedly modernist choreography by removing Igor Stravinsky’s accompanying musical score. The film begins with a close-up of LeCrone’s face as she internally rehearses the steps she is about to perform on the floor; her subtly shifting eyes and head allude to the body movements to come. Once the couple has completed the pas de deux, the camera hones in on La Cour’s face, and the film comes full circle as he mentally reviews his routine. Using a predetermined visual approach that nods to the work of structural filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Lassry positions his camera according to an instructional diagram from dancer and choreographer Doris Humphrey’s groundbreaking book The Art of Making Dances (1959). As in Zebra and Woman, and many of his other works, the artist explores the function and parameters of portraiture—in this instance, not only of the dancers, but of the dance itself.

Wilson L. Mead Fund; Contemporary Art Discretionary and The Orbit funds