Aspen Art Museum announces winter exhibitions

Aspen Art Museum has announced a lineup of upcoming winter exhibitions in anticipation of the season.

For those interested in exploring the new works, admission to the museum is free for all visitors. See below for what’s coming soon to 637 E. Hyman Ave.

Glenn Ligon: Break It Down

• Opening Nov. 21

“Break It Down” brings together prints, multiples, and works on paper made by the artist since the early 1990s. According to a press release, Ligon is a preeminent voice in American art, recognizable for incorporating language into his work to “examine the ways in which identity and culture are constructed against the backdrop of the nation’s complex and insidious past.”

He appropriates writing from literary passages, quoting authors such as James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Gertrude Stein, and Zora Neale Hurston as well as disclosures from confidants and strangers. He utilizes stencils or templates to lay the ground for his works, intentionally choosing clinical tools to contradict the intimate and vulnerable content of the text.

“I am interested in the border between what is mechanical, repetitive, impersonal, and what is autobiographical,” Ligon said in the release. “This exhibition inhabits and troubles that border to reveal a chimeric self-portrait of the artist, one comprising photographs, reports, annotations, and stories that resist understanding.”

Shahryar Nashat: Raw Is the Red

• Opening Nov. 21

“Raw Is the Red” aims to transform the roof terrace of the Aspen Art Museum into a “sculptural confrontation” with the backdrop of Aspen Mountain. At its center will be a vitrine encasing a “meat object,” an image of raw flesh on powder-coated steel, covered in a translucent layer of acrylic gel.

Behind it, a pink marble obelisk that matches the artist’s own height will rise.

“Together, they evoke the body as both physical presence and mental projection,” the press release states, “as a carrier of both empathy and distance.”

Jacqueline Humphries

• Opening Dec. 12

The paintings of Humphries blend modes of expression and communication. Intentionally concealing the process itself with dense, layered compositions, “symbols, logos, emojis, and code mingle with brush marks, paint splatters, and drips, forging links between traditions of abstract painting and life cycles of technology,” according to the release.

This will be Humpries’ largest presentation of new and unseen work to date, aligning paintings with machines to reflect the drives and doubts of people.

An installation of paintings and cast objects will be illuminated by black lights across the museum’s lower level. This series was first presented by Humphries at New York’s Nyehaus gallery in 2005, “a time of both disillusionment and experimentation for the artist in the years following 9/11.” Viewers will encounter this work in darkness.

“Pigmented resin sculptures made to mimic piles of chopped logs rest on the gallery floor,” the release reads. “They are campfires with no flames, emitting an acidic glow in lieu of warmth.”

Victoria Colmegna: Play Technique

• Opening Dec. 12

Colmegna, who lives and works in Buenos Aires, “explores artifice, kitsch, fraught psyches, and the materiality of memory through an art practice unbounded by any single medium.” Her work is influenced by histories, psychoanalysis, and astrology.

Colmegna approaches artmaking as a process of classification and analysis, according to the release, with an examination of how traits, behaviors, and roles get constructed and repeated.

“Colmegna weaves together watercolors, readymades, textiles, and tools of intervention, both clinical and chemical, which act like miniature psychoanalytic chambers,” the release states, “exposing unconscious urges.”