SAMANTHA FRIEDMAN: The first thing that you notice when you walk into this gallery is the fact that there's a car in the middle of the room. And at the same time, you have this sculpture by Lee Bontecou, a kind of a relief, a combination of a painting and sculpture. So you have these two ideas happening: one that's very luxurious, that has to do with Pop, that's optimistic, and one that's a lot scrappier, that's more raw.
PAULINA POBOCHA: What's interesting to me is that there's very few traditional oil paintings in this room. At this moment in the history of art, artists are really experimenting and bringing in things from their daily lives, things that they find on the street and incorporating them into their sculptures.
SAMANTHA FRIEDMAN: So you have this Donald Judd relief that's a baking pan that's embedded into the surface of the work.
PAULINA POBOCHA: Also important is this aspect of performance that so many of these objects have in their background. So the Jasper Johns painting, at first glance, it's a work made of encaustic. It's a medium that's been used for centuries. But upon close inspection, you'll see that there's a literal bite taken out of the surface. And that conjures up this whole situation or context in which these works were made.
SAMANTHA FRIEDMAN: You'll see a work that is by Robert Rauschenberg that has a big tire coming off of it. It's connected to the wall but is jutting out into the real space of the viewer. And Rauschenberg famously said that he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, and I think that that's a thought that you see in all of the works in this gallery.
