Nicole Eisenman / MATRIX 248
May 10–July 14
MATRIX 248 showcases the work of New York–based artist Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965), who became prominent in the 1990s and has been steadfastly expanding dialogues surrounding painting and drawing ever since. Having come of age in the East Village in the 1980s, Eisenman’s work reflects myriad sources both art historical and popular, culling from what writer and critic Lynne Tillman has referred to as a “vast image bank” that ranges from eighties punk ephemera to canonical works from the history of art. Parisian cafe settings found in late nineteenth-century paintings by Manet and Degas become open-air beer gardens one might find in present-day Berlin or Brooklyn, with the smartphones on the tables locating the scene in time. Intermixing styles associated with American Regionalism and the Italian Renaissance with German Expressionism, Eisenman brings history to bear in her canvases and drawings, yet twists the imagery to infuse these familiar forms with her own incisive social commentary and aesthetic voice.
 
Gender and suggestions of romantic liaisons remain open questions in most of Eisenman’s compositions. The articulated muscular (female) figure has predominated her oeuvre. She filters the heroic style of Michelangelo through her bold feminist and lesbian subject matter, yet in recent years her work has become more abstract and less overtly narrative, encompassing psychological ambiguity and looser painterly forms. Decidedly contemporary, her dark, moody genre scenes remain moored in universal themes of everyday life: politics, romance, the economy, social gatherings, and isolation. This exhibition focuses on a selection of paintings and prints that the artist has made over the last several years that coalesce around the theme of economic and social hardship.
 
In conjunction with MATRIX 248, BAM/PFA presents Ballet of Heads, a thematic group exhibition drawn from the collection that explores the polymorphous nature of the figure in art history (p. TK). The selection includes important Eisenman influences such as George Grosz and William Hogarth.

Ballet of Heads: The Figure in the Collection
May 17–August 25
The human figure has been a locus of artistic innovation and expression since the very first artworks were made. This focused presentation mines the permanent collection, bringing together paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that demonstrate the inexhaustable variety and texture of the human form in art. Seeking to explore the polymorphous nature of the figure, Ballet of Heads puts into dialogue the Baroque canvases of Peter Paul Rubens, the American Regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton, the colorful near abstractions of Asger Jorn and Hans Hoffman, the sharp angles and loose contours of George Grosz and Max Beckmann, the tormented personages of Francis Bacon, and the humorous critique found in the drawings of Raymond Pettibon.
 
The exhibition takes as its point of departure the work of Nicole Eisenman, on view in MATRIX 248, teasing out many of the threads found in her paintings and works on paper—a blending of seemingly oppositional categories such social realism, abstraction, folk art, and popular comics—and contextualizing it in the process. Eisenman cites many of the artists included as important influences, such as Michelangelo, Théodore Géricault, and Pablo Picasso, while the work of more recent artists, including as Joan Brown, Abraham Walkowitz, and Sue Coe, share striking affinities to Eisenman’s own.

Hans Hofmann: Rectangles is drawn exclusively from BAM/PFA’s unsurpassed collection of paintings by this tremendously influential Abstract Expressionist artist.
 
Known for his bold use of color, innovative approach to materials, and dynamic compositions, Hofmann (1880–1966) is perhaps most celebrated for paintings that use the rectangle as a primary motif. Loosely derived from Cubist approaches to defining form and space, Hofmann’s rectangles provide pictorial structure as well as a sense of motion, atmosphere, and mood. In Hofmann’s paintings of the 1950s and 1960s one can see in certain works vestiges of still-life forms, architectural elements, or even landscape features. However, the predominant sensibility is abstract, with a clear focus on color and form as the primary elements of the pictures.
 
Hofmann’s rectangle paintings have a classical feel, suggesting an ordered and harmonious universe. In most cases, the rectangles are perpendicular, resting atop one another like enormous building blocks. In some pictures, Hofmann introduced passages of gestural brushstrokes that, by contrast, emphasize the stability of the rectangular shapes. Occasionally, he would tip one or two of the rectangles on their side, creating an unexpected moment of disequilibrium. But it is the distinctive use of bold color that brings a powerful feeling of dynamism to these pictures. Juxtaposed blues, yellows, and reds generate the visual effect that Hofmann called “push/pull.”
 
This exhibition also provides an opportunity for us to celebrate the completion of a comprehensive Hofmann painting conservation project, funded by The Renate, Hans, and Maria Hofmann Trust and Save America’s Treasures, a now defunct program of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, and executed by Alina Remba and the painting conservation team of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Conservation treatments varied from extensive stabilization of insecure paint areas on some works to simple surface cleaning on others. We are excited to once again exhibit a large body of these extraordinary works.
 
Hans Hofmann: Rectangles is organized by Director Lawrence Rinder.

Joyful and sensual sculptural figures of Indian deities and dancers join radiant images of enlightened beings from Tibet and Nepal in Deities, Demons, and Teachers, which presents a rotating display of works by anonymous Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan artisans. A tenth-century sandstone figure of Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity worshipped by Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists, graces the entrance to the exhibition, a site appropriate to Ganesha’s role in removing obstacles and blessing any new endeavor. Whether viewed as a cosmic dancer or a cavorting adolescent, this image of Ganesha is confirmation of the wonder and delight to be found in the sculpture and painting of these ancient cultures.
 
Hindus and Buddhists both revere and celebrate female deities and often depict goddesses in idealized form with exaggerated marks of beauty. In Dancing Devi, a twelfth-century buff-sandstone sculpture from central India, the beauty of the bejeweled and crowned figure is accentuated by the larger-than-life proportions of breasts and buttocks. A more reserved but no less beautifully idealized feminine form is seen in Tara, a seventeenth-century Nepalese bronze, where the figure is surrounded by a fanciful garden of birds, musicians, and garlands.
 
Very early images of the Buddha are rare, so it is quite exceptional that in addition to the massive bronze fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddha in the center of the gallery, this exhibition also features a stone image of a third-century seated Buddha from the Swat Valley and a tenth- or eleventh-century bronze Standing Buddha from Western Tibet. An array of bodhisattvas and attendant deities from these regions, including a painting of the Thirteenth Karmapa (at left), believed to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, fill out the gathered celestial realm of the Buddhist cosmology.
 
Deities, Demons, and Teachers is organized by Senior Curator for Asian Art
Julia M. White.

MATRIX 249 showcases the work of Oakland-based artist Zarouhie Abdalian (b. 1982), an artist whose work often responds to the specific attributes of a given location, architectural setting, or social landscape. Abdalian typically employs modest materials to produce subtle conceptual or formal effects that stage an alteration, or a shift of perception, within the immediate environment. Her work inspires careful examination of its surroundings, as it typically resides on the threshold of visibility.
 
For MATRIX 249, her first solo exhibition in a museum, the artist has created new sculptures specifically for Gallery A that explore the interrelated, yet distinct, states of noise, silence, and the absence of sound. In one, a bell rings continuously in a vacuum, so that, while visible, the sonorous effects are not audible. In another, hammers audibly articulate the sound and space of a hollow, opaque, rectilinear shape. In these works Abdalian challenges what is perceptible and understood through multiple physical senses.
 
Abdalian received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2010 and since then has exhibited solo projects and participated in several group exhibitions, both in the Bay Area and abroad. She made a site-specific architectural work for the international exhibition Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), 2011 that also utilized the properties of sound. Modifying the architecture of the biennial building, she affixed transducers to the backs of the gallery’s drywall, causing the room to literally vibrate—a sensation that could be both heard and felt; a plumb bob hanging from the far wall rattled against the surface, rendering the vibrations of the wall visible. More recently, Abdalian was awarded SFMOMA’s 2012 SECA Art Award; as part of that exhibition, she will have a sonorous public artwork on view in downtown Oakland beginning in September.

Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013
 
August 21, 2013 - December 8, 2013
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Although widely unknown in the United States, Yang Fudong (born in 1971 in Beijing, lives and works in Shanghai) is one of the most important figures in Chinese contemporary art and independent cinema. For his first midcareer survey, BAM/PFA presents twenty years of the films, multichannel videos, and photographs that reflect the ideals and anxieties of Yang's generation, a generation born during and after the Cultural Revolution that is struggling to find its place in the rapidly changing society of the new China. Yang has curated a special film series in conjunction with the exhibition that highlights his ongoing engagement with the aesthetics of film noir.
 
Yang’s films and film installations have an atemporal and dreamlike quality, marked by long and suspended sequences, dividing narratives, and multiple relationships and storylines. Many of his images recall the literati paintings of seventeenth-century China, made by artists and intellectuals who, faced with political suppression, pursued spiritual freedom by living in reclusion. Self-consciously evoking the literati, Yang calls his protagonists “intellectuals”; they are similarly confronted with the choice of participating in or abstaining from worldly affairs. In his series of photographs, for example, Yang brings the literati’s impassive attitude, emptied of any suggestion of agency or of the immediacy of experience, to the consumerist contexts of contemporary urban China: the fancy hotel room or restaurant, the swimming pool, the brothel. In other works Yang focuses instead on rural China, on the sense of isolation and loss as traditional villages are dissolved and communities scattered.
 
In his recent installations, Yang reflects on the process of filmmaking, creating spatially open-ended multichannel films that he calls a contemporary form of the Chinese hand scroll. These news works push further his theory that “anything which has been filmed can be shown.”
 
Also on view in the BAM/PFA galleries, Gazing into Nature: Early Chinese Painting places Yang’s work in the context of historical Chinese painting.
 
Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013 is organized by Adjunct Senior Curator Philippe Pirotte and co-organized by BAM/PFA and the Kunsthalle Zürich. The exhibition is made possible in part by ShanghART Gallery; Marian Goodman Gallery; the Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; and Dr. Rosalyn M. Laudati and Dr. James Pick.

Beauty Revealed: Images of Women in Qing Dynasty Chinese Painting investigates a relatively unexamined area of Chinese art history: meiren (beautiful women) paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The exhibition brings together approximately thirty paintings from public and private collections in the United States and Europe, as well as works from the BAM/PFA collection, in order to present a broad selection of this genre for the first time and to suggest new interpretations. Organized by BAM/PFA Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White, in collaboration with UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus James F. Cahill, one of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese painting. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that will include essays by Cahill, White, Sarah Handler, and Chen Fongfong.

MATRIX 250 features the work of Los Angeles–based artist Linda Stark, and will be her first solo exhibition in a museum. The presentation showcases approximately twenty paintings made by the artist over the last two decades, highlighting her Adornment and Branded paintings, which conflate the surface textures of the painting with various aspects of the female body, primarily flesh. The artist drips and meticulously builds layers of thick oil paint in her modestly scaled works, the largest of which measure three feet square. The artist often spends several years building up the luscious surfaces of her tactile paintings, merging the temporal and material properties of oil paint.

The Possible will explore contemporary art practices that thrive at the intersection of fine art, craft, performance, and pedagogy. With a special focus on hybrid creative practices flourishing in the Bay Area, the exhibition will create a dynamic environment of making, learning, performing, and listening.
 
This major show will occupy four BAM/PFA galleries and feature artwork, craft objects, creative workspaces, and research materials. Over the course of the exhibition, artist-participants will engage in overlapping residencies of varying lengths, allowing the installation to evolve and grow as the project progresses. The exhibition will also include historical works selected for their influence on and resonance with current practice: the exhibition will contextualize current work in relation to the collaborative and interdisciplinary experiments of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College among other precedents.
 
The Possible is co-curated by Director Lawrence Rinder and Oakland-based artist and curator David Wilson, whose own practice involves organizing events and installations that bring artists into unique situations for collaborative encounters.

Forrest Bess (1911–77) is a unique figure in the history of American art. For most of his career, Bess lived an isolated existence in a fishing camp outside of Bay City, Texas, eking out a meager living by selling bait and fishing. By night and during the off-season, however, he painted prolifically, creating an extraordinary body of mostly small-scale canvases rich with enigmatic symbolism. Despite his isolation, Bess was known to a number of other artists and championed by dealer Betty Parsons, who presented six solo shows of Bess works at her fabled New York gallery. Organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, Seeing Things Visible it is the first museum exhibition to focus on Bess’s work in over twenty years.
 
Bess taught himself to paint by copying the still-lives and landscapes of artists he admired, such as Vincent van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Beginning in early childhood, Bess experienced intense hallucinations that both frightened and intrigued him; in 1946, he began to incorporate images from these visions into his paintings. After discovering Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, Bess began to understand painting not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to an end. By meticulously recording and studying the dream symbols captured in his artwork, Bess hoped to uncover their universal meaning.