MetaModern

Modernist design—that radical and iconoclastic break with the past—is now itself a thing of the past, so much so that contemporary artists have been treating modernist designs as icons themselves and incorporating them, sometimes literally and often conceptually, into their own work. These recombinations and modifications result in an entirely unique mix: a meta-modernism in which the original source is changed, self-referential, abstracted. Using classic elements in new configurations, artists are making unique works of art that comment on the claims of the past in light of the complexities of the present.

The artists in this exhibition, most of whom were born in the 1960s, question the reverence accorded to classic modernism. Too young to have grown up eating their breakfast cereal from a Russel Wright spoon while seated in an Eames molded chair, these artists—working in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, in video, photography, and sculpture—appropriate the language of the modernist movement critically, using it to interrogate the meaning of style and its relationship to history.

Organized by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Curators: Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2-curatorsquared. Funding provided by Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Fox Development Corporation, Frances P. Rohlen Visiting Artists Fund / College of Fine + Applied Arts, and Krannert Art Museum Director’s Circle. Partial support provided by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Local funding provided by the John X. and June A. Jamrich Arts Endowment.

Exhibition Images