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 who were born in the 1960s, question the reverence accorded to classic modernism. Too young to have grown up eating breakfast cereal from a Russel Wright spoon while seated in an Eames chair, these artists—working in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, and in diverse mediums including 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.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.