MetaModern

Date

Jan 20 2016 - Mar 27 2016
Expired!

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

  • Artists Included:: Conrad Bakker, Constantin Boym, Kendell Carter, Jordi Colomer, William Cordova, Elmgreen & Dragset, Fernanda Fragateiro, Terence Gower, Olga Koumoundouros, Jill Magid, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Dorit Margreiter, Josiah McElheny, Edgar Orlaineta, Gabriel Sierra, Simon Starling, Clarissa Tossin, Barbara Visser, James Welling

Hourly Schedule

Related Events

Thursday, March 24,7pm, AD 165
Artist's Lecture
Speakers:
Conrad Bakker
Conrad Bakker
Conrad Bakker makes carved and painted sculptures of everyday objects and positions them specifically to reveal their political economies and relational networks. Bakker has exhibited his work extensively, including Tate Modern (London), Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (France), Galerie Analix Forever (Geneva), Fargfabriken Center for Contemporary Art and Architecture (Stockholm), the New Museum (New York), the Renaissance Society (Chicago), the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Salt Lake City), in Cabinet Magazine, in stranger's mailboxes and on his own front lawn. His work has been the subject of articles and reviews in Frieze, Contemporary, Flash Art, Art Forum, Art World Magazine, ArtUS, Art Papers, Sculpture, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Conrad Bakker has been awarded individual artist grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, The Illinois Arts Council, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant Program. He teaches in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. More info about Bakker can be found .