Gallery Talk
Michelle Barger
Gallery 3
Included with museum admission
How do museums handle, preserve, and display artworks whose very materials were not built to last, such as the rubber, cheesecloth, and polyester resin Eva Hesse frequently incorporated into her sculptures? Michelle Barger, deputy head of conservation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is frequently called upon to preserve the ephemeral in contemporary art, requiring a deep study of and involvement with artworks in ways most of us don't consider. Barger treated BAM/PFA’s own large-scale 1968 Hesse sculpture, Aught, in her studio at SFMOMA, sufficiently stabilizing this fragile work for further exhibition. To see the results, visit Aught in Abstract Now and Then, on view in Galleries 5 and 6 beginning in mid-February. In this gallery talk, Barger offers a uniquely close observation of the strikingly tactile objects in Studiowork to expand our understanding of Hesse's materials and working techniques.
