Contemporary Exhibition at the Harn Museum Explores Art, Technology and the Natural World

Harn Musem of Art
Aug 25, 2014 4:49PM

The Harn Museum of Art is displaying photography, prints, sculpture and video by 30 international artists addressing the intersections of biology, technology and art in the new exhibition Art, Technology and the Natural World. Works in the exhibition are organized in diverse installations which include “Repurposing the Wunderkammer” featuring artists’ responses to Renaissance Europe’s cabinets of curiosities, and work by famed-artist Andy Warhol who once claimed “I want to be a machine.” Art, Technology and the Natural World is on display through July 26, 2015.

The installation, “Repurposing the Wunderkammer,” is based on 16th-17th century cabinets of curiosities that contained natural specimens, scientific instruments, ethnographic items, illustrations and art. For this installation, Kim Abeles, Jason Benedict, Mark Dion, Katerie Gladdys, Art Guys, Dana Levy, Tea Makipaa, Sean Miller, Eugene Parnell, Ben Patterson, Softday, Sergio Vega and Andrew Yang have each developed work inspired by the wunderkammer or created contemporary versions of these early museums.

Thirty-eight works by Andy Warhol are also on view in the exhibition, seven of which are screenprints recently given to the Harn Museum of Art by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in October of 2013. The gift included iconic works such as Beethoven, Sitting Bull and the Dollar Sign. The prints date from 1970 to 1989, the last year of his life. The remaining Warhol works are polaroids, also given to the Harn by The Andy Warhol Foundation, but in 2008. Andy Warhol is one of the most legendary and influential figures in contemporary art and culture. His work celebrates mass media, consumer culture and the technology and techniques of mass production.

Additional works in the exhibition include four bronze sculptures depicting figures who are part human, animal and machine by William Kentridge illustrating social and political life in South Africa; and Olafur Eliasson’s Fivefold Sphere Projection Lamp which compels us to view ourselves in relation to space as well as time.

image credits:Sergio Vega, Tuning into the Crocodilian Brain, 2014, onloan from the artist

Olafur Eliasson, Fivefold Dodecahedron Lamp, 2006, gift of Debra and Dennis Scholl
Harn Musem of Art