Galleries 150-155
Main Building
This exhibition highlights contemporary artists who use video, photography, painting, installation, and works on paper to explore repeated gestures, circular movements, and recurring motifs. These works, made primarily from the 1990s to the 2010s, use repetition as a compositional strategy—repeating images, words, movements, and sounds—while they also look to its conceptual potential. Cyclical and lyrical, they draw on familiar themes and specific references, finding new meaning as they are aggregated, multiplied, or experienced over time.
Begin Again: Repetition in Contemporary Art will feature collection works and select loans by Anri Sala, Lorna Simpson, Bruce Nauman, Melik Ohanian, Marepe, Sherrie Levine, Trisha Brown, On Kawara, Francis Alÿs, and Gabriel Orozco, among others. Many of these artists expand upon the legacy of Conceptual Art of the 1960s, asking what happens when their works reflect and reveal the very methods and conditions of their making. They invite us into their creative process as they probe traditional boundaries between draft and final form, original and copy, and performance and documentation. The works on view meditate on universal themes such as time, nature, the human body, counting and numbering, language, and possibilities of reproduction. In each instance, artists return to foundational ideas to generate revelatory works of art that create anew as they begin again.
The exhibition is organized into three themes: Actions and Echoes, Time Lapses, and Repeated Gestures. Visitors are invited to explore these broad categories as they circulate through the galleries. In Actions and Echoes, for example, installations by Bruce Nauman and Anri Sala appear to document the rehearsal or repetition of movements or phrases in video footage. Tracking the dates, environment, and weather, works by On Kawara, Rosemarie Trockel, and Anthony Campuzano turn cycles of charting time and landscape into material for their works in Time Lapses. In Repeated Gestures, artists Marepe, Matt Suib, Gabriel Orozco, and Fiona Banner recompose recognizable imagery to examine patterns of visual culture, cinema, and sports, while Melik Ohanian and Trisha Brown use performance to create drawings and videos. Throughout, the artists in Begin Again harness repetition to heighten the impact and messages of their works.