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Yek, do, se (1, 2, 3): Three Contemporary Iranian Artists
Ahmanson Building, Level 4
July 10, 2010–December 5, 2010
Iranian artists, including those in diaspora communities, visualize a society trapped between the present and the past in order to comment upon issues of gender, exile, history, and religion. Such is the case with the three contemporary artists represented here. Bahman Jalali's (1944-2010) career coincided and engaged with the dramatic socioreligious transformation of Iran in the late twentieth century. As a documentary photographer, teacher, historian, and artist, he employed the photographic image as evidence that can be rediscovered with the passage of time. Yassaman Ameri is a photographer and multimedia artist born in Iran but forced into exile, who now lives and works in Canada. Her series, of which six prints are displayed, was inspired by a group of late nineteenth-century photographs depicting prostitutes. She recontextualizes the women in fictive settings in order to afford them a new identity. Samira Alikhanzadeh is a painter and multimedia artist whose work also references the past, but only so far back as the first half of the twentieth century when Iran was transformed into a modern nation-state under the leadership of Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Shah undertook to bring both women and religious minorities into the mainstream of national life in order to create an ideal of modernity. In the pair of untitled pieces shown, Alikhanzadeh uses found images of women from this period and incorporates contemporaneous Persian carpets, which help to fix these young women in time and place.
This installation was made possible in part by the Art of the Middle East Council.
PUBLIC PROGRAM
Documentary Film: Pearls on the Ocean Floor
Thursday, July 22 | 7:30 pm
Bahman Jalali, Iran, 1944–2010, Untitled from the Series Image of Imagination, 2003-2005, silver bromide print, purchased with funds provided by Karl Loring.
LACMA's Treasures Revealed: Masterpieces of Mughal and Deccani Painting
Ahmanson Building, Level 4
March 21, 2010–March 16, 2011
Distinguished by its high aesthetic quality and comprehensive holdings, LACMA's Indian painting collection is world renowned. Among its strongest works are the opaque watercolor paintings produced under court patronage in the Mughal Empire of northern India and present-day Pakistan and in the Islamic kingdoms of the Deccan in southern India during the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. This exhibition presents the museum's finest examples of Mughal and Deccani painting, which are rarely displayed because of their sensitivity to light exposure and have not been shown as a group for many years.
Dutch and Flemish Galleries
Ahmanson Building, Level 3
January 17, 2010-
The first step in the reinstallation of the European collection at LACMA, the reopening of the Dutch and Flemish galleries celebrates the major gift of the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Edward William Carter. As the first president of the board of LACMA, Edward Carter and his wife Hannah lovingly assembled a collection of thirty-six Dutch seventeenth-century paintings with the intention of eventually presenting them to the museum. The internationally recognized collection of landscapes, still lifes, cityscapes, seascapes, and church interiors is complemented by major paintings by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, and Rubens, among others, acquired through the generosity of the Ahmanson Foundation and other sources.
Installation view, Dutch and Flemish galleries.
Art of the Pacific
Ahmanson Building, 1st Level
November 7, 2009–
In summer 2008 LACMA acquired one of the most significant private collections of the Art of the Pacific Islands to be assembled in the twentieth century. Representative of the wide range of arts from the Pacific regions and with historic provenance, the collection’s greatest strengths lie in the areas of Polynesia and Melanesia, and includes objects from Micronesia. The future display of these works will follow a variety of strategies. In this first exhibition, working with the Viennese artist Franz West, the museum has created geographical groupings following population migration patterns, west to east, in the general sequence of the settlement of the Pacific Islands.
Installation view, Art of the Pacific galleries, installation designed by Franz West.
Korean Art Galleries
Hammer Building, 2nd (Plaza) Level
September 10, 2009–
LACMA’s collection of Korean art is recognized as the most comprehensive outside of Korea and Japan, despite a relatively short history of collecting. Representing work from the fifth through twentieth centuries, the installation features a hundred objects from the Three Kingdoms, Goryeo, and Joseon periods, including Buddhist and literati art, ceramics, lacquer, paintings, and sculpture.
Tad Beck: Palimpsest
Art of the Americas Building, Level 2 (Plaza)
July 25, 2010–October 17, 2010
Tad Beck (b. 1968) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography and video installation. He is fascinated by the male body, artist-model dynamics, and queer history. One of his strongest influences has been the art of Thomas Eakins. This installation, which will be on view in Manly Pursuits, features photographs from Beck’s most recent series, Palimpsest—a response to Eakins’s Grafly Album, loaned from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and also on view in the exhibition. Eakins’s original photographs are of his students, nearly all nude and posed singly and in groups in various arrangements. They suggest choreographed productions. Beck restaged Eakins’s scenes, using models from his own social circle and photographed them and inserted the new figures into the original photographic settings, often leaving in anachronistic elements such as wristbands and hairstyles to subtly highlight his digital manipulation of the originals. He then surrounded the new photographs in silver repoussé frames to create a “fictional history” in which the images were affectionately displayed. The frames encroach on the scenes’ images and sometimes crop limbs and heads. Beck then indexically photographed each image with its frame against a monochromatic black field. Enlarging and printing the works in 42-inch squares, Beck juxtaposes the aesthetics and mores of the Victorian era with the era of conceptual photography and minimalist aesthetics. He foregrounds the Victorian era’s aesthetics of softness and ornamentation against the stark, flat, and modern background, creating a dense web of meaning and historical layering that comprises a twenty-first century palimpsest.
Tad Beck, United States, b. 1968, Palimpsest One, 2009, ultrachrome print, on loan from the artist.
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Yek, do, se (1,2,3): Three Iranian Artists
LACMA's Treasures Revealed: Masterpieces of Mughal and Deccani Painting
Dutch and Flemish Galleries
Art of the Pacific
Korean Art Galleries
Coming Soon
Tad Beck: Palimpsest
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