Ana Mendieta, Birgit Jürgenssen & Hannah Wilke
in ‘Vital Signs: Artists and the Body’, Museum of Modern Art, New York
31 October 2024 – 22 February 2025
Ana Mendieta, ‘Untitled’, 1981, colour photograph, 74 x 55.6 x 3.2 cm © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Birgit Jürgenssen, ‘Untitled (Olga)’, 1979, 34 x 29 cm © Estate Birgit Jürgenssen, Vienna; photo: Michael Brzezinski
Hannah Wilke, ‘Untitled’, c. 1965-66, pastel, pencil on paper, 45.7 x 61 cm © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles. Licensed by VAGA at Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACs, London
Throughout the twentieth century, artists have imagined the body and ideas of the self as fluid and open to ongoing transformations. Vital Signs includes over 100 works by artists who question what it means to be an individual within a larger society—and how socially sustained categories such as gender, race, and sexual identity are rooted in abstraction.
The exhibition suggests fresh perspectives on celebrated works from MoMA’s collection by artists such as Ana Mendieta, Birgit Jürgenssen, Hannah Wilke, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, and Senga Nengudi as well as works on view at the Museum for the first time by artists including Belkis Ayón, Ted Joans, and Rosemary Mayer. Vital Signs illuminates some of the ways that artists reflect on abstraction in its broadest social senses while expanding ideas around what it means to be alive and to connect with others.