Trisha Donnelly

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is pleased to present the first U.S. solo museum exhibition of Trisha Donnelly’s work, on view January 18 – August 3, 2008. Using sculpture, drawing, photographs, text, sound, video, and painting, Donnelly will compose a new installation in the second floor gallery with works made between 1998 and 2007.  This installation yields a new work of art, one thoughtfully hewn from the past. In keeping with the performative function of her work, from drawings to demonstrations, Donnelly casts the exhibition as an agent. On display for an extended period, the show will transform as time passes with works rotating on and off display.

Trisha Donnelly’s ineffable body of work resists simple characterization. A lexicon of imagery and action relies on the power of suggestion: what precise, economical gesture can evoke a moment, a place, a feeling? How does sound create form? With a word, can the artist embed herself in our conscience? These potent gestures are catalysts, and this is the crux of Donnelly’s work. What unite her media-diverse work are gestures of altered time, shifters, dimensional explorations, evocation, perception, and belief structures.


Time, literally and metaphorically, is a signature of Donnelly’s work: a drawing may request slowness, a sound piece may stretch a phrase interminably, a video presents an action in slow motion, a photograph freezes a turn of the torso. This pause generates shifts, fractures, and collapses in time, both in the present and in time’s historical reverberations. This exhibition, too, requests time.

Donnelly is a San Francisco-based artist (b. 1974, San Francisco). Her work is well known in the contemporary art world, but is still seldom seen outside highly defined contexts. As most of her major exhibitions have occurred in Europe, this exhibition allows viewers who have not experienced firsthand much of her work to see it for the first time. And seeing this work firsthand is crucial to the questions Donnelly’s work pursues. The work requires your presence.

Since completing her MFA at Yale in 2000, Donnelly has had solo projects at Modern Art Oxford (2007), Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2006), Kunsthalle Zurich (2005), Kolnischer Kunstverein (2005), and ArtPace, San Antonio (2005). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions: “Uncertain States of America,” Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (traveled) (2005); “Day for Night,” 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; “Of Mice + Men: 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art,” Berlin (2006); and 54th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004). She teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and is a visiting critic at Yale. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum, Walker Art Center, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, among others.

This exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Jenelle Porter and is accompanied by a catalog publication documenting the installation and will be available after the exhibition opens.

We gratefully acknowledge generous support of the American Center Foundation, the Harpo Foundation and ICA’s Leadership Circle: Robert Kirkpatrick & John Wind, Meredith & Bryan Verona, Floss Barber, Inc., Ellen & Stephen Burbank, Cecile & Christopher J. D’Amelio, Mary & Anthony B. Creamer, III, Barbara & David Farley, Glenn R. Fuhrman, Fury Design, Inc., Suzanne & Jeffrey Koopman, Gabriele W. Lee, Margery P. Lee, Paul Pincus, Marguerite Rodgers, Ltd., Leah Popowich & Andrew Hohn, Alec Rubin & Phillip Chambers, Cindy Shaffran & Gary Schwartz and Dina & Jerry Wind.

Additional funding has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Dietrich Foundation, Inc., the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art, friends and members of ICA, and the University of Pennsylvania. (Information complete as of 12/14/07.)

Images, top, l to r: Trisha Donnelly, Untitled II (Peralta), 2007, C-print, 62 1/2 x 44 inches, edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and Air de Paris, Paris...Trisha Donnelly, Satin Operator, 2007, C-prints, 62 1/2 x 44 inches each (13), Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist,Casey Kaplan, New York, and Air de Paris, Paris...Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2005, C-print, 7 x 5 inches, Edition of 4. Courtesy of the artist, Casey Kaplan, NY and Air de Paris, Paris




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