On Tuesday the High Museum of Art in Atlanta announced the acquisition of a 38-foot-long installation by Sarah Sze— her last major commission before the 2013 Venice Biennale, at which she’s representing the U.S. — and a large Julie Mehretu painting responding to the Arab Spring uprisings. These two major pieces, plus another newly acquired Sze print, “Day” (2003), deepen the institution’s commitment to two of the most prominent contemporary female artists working today.
“One of the things I’m excited about in terms of our collection is that these two acquisitions really do increase the representation of women in our collection, and that’s really important to me,” the High Museum’s curator of contemporary art, Michael Rooks, told ARTINFO. “It wasn’t the reason that I acquired the works, because I’m a huge fan of both of these artists and they also support areas of opportunity and strength in our collection that I’ve been building on, but it’s a happy coincidence too that it does increase our stock in terms of great women artists in the collection.”
The High Museum commissioned the Sze installation, “Book of Parts (Centennial)” (2012), for its recent collaborative exhibition with the Museum of Modern Art, “Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 >> 2013.”
“When Sarah and I were talking about the commission, the context of the show was a chronological survey of the 20th century, and we discussed how these kinds of really ambitious, rambling, historical exhibitions are always doomed to fail in terms of providing a narrative or some kind of story about modernism or about art because there are so many multiple, overlapping, crisscrossing narratives, that any one person can reorder or reorganize those histories any number of ways,” Rooks said. “That’s why she started thinking about this piece as an assembly of bits of information to represent how history — especially art history — is often collected and sorted and categorized, and that becomes the definitive history until it’s challenged.”
The Mehretu painting, “Mogamma (A Painting in Four Parts) (Part II),” is 15 feet tall and 12 feet wide, and responds to events whose history is still being determined.
“The series title, ‘Mogamma,’ is specific to Tahrir Square in Egypt, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, referring to a government building on the square,” Rooks said. “But there are a lot of other elements overlaid in terms of the imagery of the painting that are architectural, that are site-specific to hubs where social change has been taking place in the Middle East over the last three years.”
The pieces by Mehretu and Sze, both of whom are known for their works’ incredible formal complexity and multi-layered imagery, make for a very complimentary set of acquisitions.
“In some ways you can think of Sze’s work, this piece especially, as an extrusion of a Mehretu painting, formally speaking,” Rooks said. “They come from two different places entirely, but one thing they have in common, besides the formal aspect, is that they’re both about collections of knowledge that are placed into a new context. I think it’s interesting that those bits of data and knowledge that have been created take the shape and appearance of these marks and forms and objects in both their work.”
The Mehretu piece is part of a four-canvas piece that she presented at last year’s Documenta 13. Currently on view in London as part of the solo exhibition “Liminal Squared” at White Cube, the four panels will split up after that show, and the High Museum will hang its section in its contemporary galleries this summer. These new pieces aren’t the High’s first acquisitions of these artists’ works — they join a 12-panel print by Mehretu and a dimensional print of a fire escape by Sze, both of which the High acquired in 2010 — and they certainly won’t be the last.
“We look forward to continuing to acquire works by both of them,” Rooks said. “One of the things that we tend to do at the High Museum is to acquire in depth where it’s possible. So for example we have five paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, we have five major works by Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close — all guys, until now. We're going to be building a collection of these two artists over time.”