New Works

American and European prints, drawings, and collages acquired in the last half-decade dramatically document the kaleidoscopic diversity of the art of our time. For example, German printmaker Christiane Baumgartner begins with a photographic video image but cuts it in wood by hand, often on very large scale. Claes Oldenburg’s etching of Colossal Tea Bags in City Square (2004) wittily plays with fantasy and reality, and collage images range from pure abstraction to the gaudy space travel imagery of American artist Michael Oatman’s collage Exurbia (2004; shown here).

The sheer inventiveness of these artists is perhaps best characterized by American sculptor Tara Donovan’s Untitled (2008), a “glass drawing” in which a large sheet of glass shattered by the artist has been inked up and printed in black, suggesting a night sky full of lightning. Other artists include the British Frank Auerbach, Austrian Arnulf Rainer, Swiss/German Dieter Roth, and the Americans Bruce Conner, Jasper Johns, Julie Mehretu, James Siena, and Terry Winters.