Selections from the Contemporary Collection
Galleries 288, 289, 291–299, and 186

Boasting in-depth holdings of works by today’s most acclaimed artists, the museum’s collection of contemporary art can only be matched in depth and quality by the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Paris’s Georges Pompidou Center. Occupying the entire second floor of the Modern Wing’s east pavilion, the Art Institute’s new installation of contemporary art allows the museum to feature more art from this collection at one time than ever possible in its history.

The installation encompasses almost every significant art movement from 1945 to the present. Featuring painting, sculpture, installation art, and video, these new galleries showcase the museum’s strengths in collecting art made in Chicago and around the world. Some of the collection’s most notable holdings include works by Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Willem de Kooning, Bruce Nauman, Jackson Pollock, and Gerhard Richter. A significant majority of the works on view has rarely, if ever, been seen by our audiences on a regular basis. Many new and recent acquisitions—by artists such as Mel Bochner, Robert Gober, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Kerry James Marshall, Charles Ray, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, and others—will be presented for the very first time.

In a combination of both thematic and single-artist groupings of objects, the new installation has been guided by the unique strengths of the museum’s outstanding collection. A first-floor gallery devoted solely to the display of electronic media complements the space. Inaugurated by the 2001 work Girls, Tricky by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, the state-of-the-art Donna and Howard Stone Film, Video, and New Media Gallery gives venue to one of the largest and most significant collections of film and video in any encyclopedic museum.

View more works from this collection.

_{Robert Gober. Untitled, 1994–95.Watson F. Blair Prize Fund.}