The Hirshhorn, Ai Weiwei and Other Great Exhibits

The Hirshhorn Museum is a free museum of art on the mall in Washington D.C. and inside that round building on concrete curving legs I  saw some amazing art. I loved it!






The building is actually donut-shaped because the center is open. Outside at ground level there is a fountain in the center. So of course most of the walls curve. The artwork can potentially relate to the circularity, and that is what one sees in the current exhibits at the Hirshhorn.

Two exhibits not only relate to the encircling walls, but in one case the art is painted and in the other drawn directly on the wall.






Linn Meyers drew large scale, graceful, very linear drawings that suggest bird feathers, water, or air. Whatever they suggest to you, in any case, they flow beautifully.





I don't know what tool she used to draw with, I see some evidence of underlining with pencil, but it looks like brush or marker and black ink. The lines are parallel, but grow closer and more distant creating ripples and a feeling of movement. The drawings are elegant and evocative.













The second artist who worked directly on the wall was the Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Quite different from Meyers, Party's paintings are representational, yet clearly imaginary landscapes.












Called "sunrise, sunset," the exhibit has paintings which show sky, with sun or without, in the colorful time at the beginning or end of day. Each section of wall is painted a different background color before the paintings were executed.


Smaller paintings near the entrance give way to larger ones at the opposite end and return again to small scale as you round the turn.

There are Seuss-like trees, Miro-like boulders and cloud shapes, simple shapes, making up wonderfully imagined and colorful scenes from the arctic to the tropics.

A candy shop of color really, a happy world, but with no people, and if I remember no sign of any. The lack of animal and human life gives them an otherworldly feeling. Where are we? Is this another planet? It almost seems so.

Perhaps it is an expression of the artist's personality. Is he a quiet, reclusive type, I wonder?

Barbara Kruger's contrastingly brash exhibit of statements, equations or questions in block letters was also directly applied to walls, and the floor as well, but her room, at the underground level of the Hirshhorn, had flat walls. Every surface was plastered with words.









I have seen her work in other places over the years and always am titillated and provoked, and enjoy her blunt and blaring messages. I bought her postcards and a refrigerator magnet at the museum store - her work translates so well to those formats, which in her case, is not an insult.

Finally, we come to Ai Weiwei, the famous Chinese dissident artist. Come to think of it, he used the wall too, with this incredible, graphically sharp wallpaper, part of the exhibit called, oh so cryptically, "Looks Like a Llama but it's Really an Alpaca."

Part of the exhibit's wallpaper was black and white and part a golden version, but each contained the same imagery. Can you see the motifs?  

The theme is political prisoners, something Ai Weiwei knows about first hand. He is restricted from traveling out of China, his phone is tapped and he is routinely followed by police. He has been jailed, all for expressing his views and making art that is offensive to the government.











On the floor are murals made out of legos depicting political prisoners around the world.

Yes, legos. Why legos? He explains in a video in the the last room of the exhibit that he chooses, as often as he can, materials that anyone could use.





There are room after room of the lego images that use the colors of the flag of the prisoner's country. Some are large images, and some only a couple of feet in size. Along with the wallpaper showing surveillance cameras, handcuffs, chains and Twitter birds (Twitter as the communication tool important to the cause), Ai Weiwei seeks to make the world aware of the magnitude in number and scope of prisoners who have been jailed for expressing themselves.

Washington D.C. is the best place to have this displayed, he said. May the world take note.



My day of art in Washington, D.C. is to be continued...