Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Untitled (Green), 1986/2015

Untitled is from a series included in the artist’s 2015 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro for which Dominique Gonzalez Foerster recreated works from her early years. Characteristic of her continuous play with temporal displacements and the subjectivity of experience, Untitled conflates past and present. On the one hand, the combination of ready-made objects is indebted to the artistic discourse from the time of its first execution when items from daily life were introduced into an art context to question the nature of an artwork. In a post-Duchampian act, this was less intended to elevate the everyday but rather to question the hierarchical distinction between high and low. On the other hand, the work evokes formal issues associated with modernist and post-modernist discussions. Thus placed in front of the rectangular shape the column covered in the same material creates the optical effect of partially disappearing or fusing. Perhaps in reference to the traditional distinctions between sculpture and painting (and its reprise in modernism of three-dimensionality vs. flatness), the dynamic contrasts the sculptural presence of the columnar shape with the two-dimensionality of the wall.