Sam Gilliam on view in MFA Houston's Material Presence

Material Presence will feature artists from the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia who have rejected traditional media and genre boundaries. In their hands, the material support— be it plaster, plastic, canvas, or rice paper—has an active presence, transcending formalism to engage the viewer in the processes of creation and the phenomenology of perception, as well as enlarging the meaning of the work. Anchoring the first installment of this collection rotation are several works on view in Houston for the first time: Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies #4, which uses LEGO® bricks to reinterpret Claude Monet’s most beloved series; Sam Gilliam’s sweeping Double Merge (Carousel I and Carousel II)(1968), which liberates painting from the wall; and James Turrell’s mural-scaled General Site Plan, Roden Crater (1986), an early rendering of the artist’s life-long project to expand our understanding of the universe around us. Also on view will be two of Carlos Cruz-Diez’s signature Physichromies (1974 and 2014), Los Carpinteros’s critical assessment of Cold War memorials made from LEGO® bricks, and Rachel Whiteread’s monumental Untitled (Fire Escape) (2002), among other works.