Pop Art meets modern vision: Aspen Art Museum’s winter showcase

Editor’s note: A version of this story appears in this year’s edition of the Winter in Aspen/Snowmass magazine

On the heels of closing the Pompeiian “In the House of the Trembling Eye,” the Aspen Art Museum’s four new exhibitions dazzle. Four artists who are leaders in their fields are yours to discover this winter.

“We’re hoping that it’s going to bring a lot of new names to Aspen,” said Daniel Merritt, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs.

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In a town filled with exhibitions of new works of art, the Aspen Art Museum brings this monumental, multi-artist extravaganza to all three levels, with forms ranging from photography and video to sculpture and painting.

Each show will stoke your curiosity conceptually, spatially, and architecturally within the broad theme of pop art.

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“Something that unites all of the artists across the museum is how they are attuned to popular culture and this very broad notion of lifestyle,” Merritt continued.

Pop art is more often than not historically associated with the 1960s, yet it still attracts contemporary artists.

“It’s a topic that many artists continue to build upon and engage with — and in their own ways,” he said, adding, “I do think these are artists who have an understanding of what pop might mean today.”

Chinese-born artist Shuang Li makes her institutional solo exhibition debut with “I’m Not,” on view through March 2.

“Shuang’s exhibition is really adventurous,” he said.

Merging video within larger sculptural structures, this co-commission with New York City’s Swiss Institute brings the show here after debuting last summer in New York.

“I knew that the show would be great in Aspen, and I wanted it to bring in younger audiences who I think would have a unique understanding of what Shuang is discussing in the show,” he explained.

Her works investigate how we communicate, how we understand one another, and how we move through the world via communication.

One of the works features screens, visible in varying degrees within the sculpture. Viewers see videos and hear the sounds, but it’s quite different than screening in the cinema or on television. In another piece, she projects the video into the water of a fountain from above so that viewers watch the video projected onto rippling waves. In another sculpture, she embeds a silent video within a monumental tower evocative of a skyscraper.

“It’s a bit of a hunt to find the video,” he explained. “It’s not immediately apparent or knowable.”

Also making a solo institutional exhibition debut in the U.S. is Heji Shin’s “America Part I,” a photography show, which runs through March 2.

“Heji is an elliptical figure in the art world,” Merritt said, adding that she’s “instrumental in shaping discourse around photography and portraiture.”

It has been quite some time since the museum has devoted a floor to photography. Shin has been out of the studio, traveling the nation photographing rocket launches and landscapes.

“It’s something that I think people will be able to really enter into,” he continued.

Opening on Dec. 12 and running through March 30, Switzerland-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone’s “the rainbow body” blends sculpture and conceptual painting in the museum gallery. For the show, every plane in the gallery was painted a different color.

“It creates this incredibly beautiful, site-specific psychedelic effect where the sculptures are in direct communication with the environment that’s engulfing it,” he said. “The scale of the works are harmonious with the space where they are shown.”

In the mid-2000s, Rondinone cast the bodies of dancers for a series of sculptures he had made and has returned to ever since. He has fashioned them with different materials over the years, such as earthen clay. In the present show, he renders the sculptures in fluorescent-colored wax.

“That’s a really beautiful further building of this series,” he said. “Ugo is a unique artist in that, rather than talking about a feeling or laying out the apparatus that makes you feel a certain way, what he does is he makes you feel the feeling. It’s a deep sensory engagement that he’s demonstrated over his legendary career.

Also on view from Dec. 12 through March 30 is New York’s East Village-based artist Megan Marrin’s “Austerity,” a focused painting exhibition that showcases five new works in the museum’s jewel box gallery space for the artist’s first institutional solo show in the U.S.

You may be familiar with Marrin’s largescale public artwork in the form of a mural titled “340 E. 9th Street” over St. Mark’s Place. For the show in Aspen, she has proved true to her signature oeuvre.

“She’s been very sensitive to the architecture and is creating some site-specific installations,” he said.

Throughout the winter, these exhibitions speak to the human experience.

“I think these shows call attention to sensations, traditions, or ways in which we live our lives,” Merrit explained. “There’s a lot of excitement behind the fact that these shows are driven by curiosity.”