MOMA refreshes contemporary galleries

Even though the Museum of Modern Art inaugurated its new building just one year ago, it doesn't want visitors to grow complacent about the permanent-collection displays. MOMA plans to completely reconfigure and rehang the second-floor contemporary art spaces each year with an entirely new selection from the museum's vast holdings in the field.

On Sept. 14, the museum unveiled the revamped second floor with an exhibition titled "Take Two: Worlds and Views; Contemporary Art from the Collection." MOMA curators Klaus Biesenbach and Roxana Marcoci selected some 50 works in a variety of mediums and segmented the cavernous second-floor spaces into smaller, more compact exhibition areas. Highlighted in the display are recent acquisitions that have never before been exhibited at MOMA, including major pieces by Marina Abramovic, James Lee Bvars, Mona Hatoum, Janet Cardiff, Yinka Shonibare, Dana Schutz and Waltercio Calaas.

The walls of the atrium, surrounding Barnett Newman's monumental Broken Obelisk, are hung with new acquisitions, including Rauschenberg's 1955 Combine painting Rebus and several large, colorful 1993-94 paintings by Cy Twombly. The latter replace Monet's Water Lilies painting--a focus of recurrent criticism of the museum's inaugural hanging--which has been moved to a smaller fifth-floor gallery.

At the entrance to the main contemporary galleries, curators opted for the confrontational by placing near the doorway Charles Ray's Family Romance (1993), a painted fiberglass sculpture of members of a naked nuclear family: boy, girl, morn and dad, all the same height (about 41/2 feet). Greeting visitors, the full-frontal quartet stands before an enormous two-part black-and-white painting on paper by Mike Kelley, Defamation: Soft and Hard (1986). The family is flanked on the left by a 1965 Eva Hesse abstract relief painting and on the right by a row of untitled black-and-white photos from Rudolf Schwarzkogler's abrasive 1965-66 actions and performances.

Elsewhere, a 1992 wall relief by Richard Artschwager, Splatter Chair I, radiates from a corner, while glowing from a small gallery is the towering wall of video monitors comprising Dieter Roth's installation Solo Scenes (1997-98); each screen shows intimate images of the artist in his studio and at home. Among other striking pieces, Gilberto Zorio's Crystal Star with Javelins (1977) features a giant plate-glass star propped up on steel rods that protrude from the wall. Marina Abromovic's 1975 video Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful is proiected on a large screen near the high ceiling of one room. And the sole occupant of another gallery, a 3 1/3-foot-high cube, ostensibly made of marble, with rounded corners and covered in gold leaf, The Table of Perfect (1989) by James Lee Byars evokes a talismanic object. "Take Two: Worlds and Views" remains on view through July 3, 2006.

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