SFMOMA is commemorating its 75th year as a pioneering force in art, locally and globally. To celebrate their anniversary, they are presenting a series of exhibitions and events that illustrate the stories of the artists, collectors, cultural visionaries, and community leaders who founded, built, and have animated the museum. A suite of exhibitions highlights the unique strengths of SFMOMA’s collection and moments when the museum broke new ground, expanding the conventional wisdom of what an art museum should present and collect.

Featured contemporary artists include:

Nicholas Nixon’s
Brown Sisters
series of thirty-one portraits of his wife and her sisters that he’s made since 1975

Jeff Koons
Michael Jackson and Bubbles
1988; porcelain

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
“Untitled” (Golden)
1995/2008

Richard Prince
Untitled (Cowboy)
1991-92

Sol LeWitt
Steel Structure
1975/1976; sculpture; aluminum and enamel

Bruce Nauman
Wall/Floor Positions
1968. Video (black and white, sound), 60 min

The issue of sexuality and transcendence touches on a fundamental conflict in art in general because, beyond mere appearance, behind it hides the general question of the relationship between reality (life) and imagination (image). And so the relationship between form and vision becomes a crucial issue for any artist dealing with sexuality and transcendence.

Which direction is a particular work going for? Does it answer the challenge with a praise of distance (form/transcendence) or with a demonstration of intimacy (life/sexuality)? The answers to these questions are so varied because, in addition to the paradigms inherent in the theme, the concept of desire is of central importance here. The general idea is kept open, both in respect of a desire for an ideal mental clarity, intellectual penetration and clarified form, and in respect of a desire for an ideal of realism, emotional directness and dissolution of form. Something Janus-like clinging to desire means that the two poles of sexuality and transcendence can be reflected within each other. The desire for the two things, sexuality and transcendence, dominates our existence; it is the driving force behind our earthly performance and, especially for artists, the search for an appropriate form.

Jeff Koons – Baloon Rabbit (violet), 2005-2010

The exhibition presents nineteen work groups with a total of 150 individual works in twenty rooms on four floors of the PinchukArtCentre. The staircases of the building are used as art spaces for the first time with installations by Jenny Holzer; the central stairwell features an in-situ piece with her famous texts from the series Inflammatory Essays and a second staircase houses a work with LED.

Takashi Murakami – Hiropon, 1997

In addition, for the first time ever, the PinchukArtCentre utilised the historical Bessarabskiy market hall located opposite for an eighty-meter-long frieze by AES+F, a group of artists from Moscow. With its intense sociocultural flavour and distinctive architecture, this historical site, which is of great importancse for Kiev, provides an ideal public counterpoint to the artistic message propagating a new hybrid aesthetic of fusion.

Takashi Murakami – Lonesome Cowboy, 1998

Artists in this show include among others: AES, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman and Hiroshi Sugimoto.