Two new controversial art exhibits to open at ICA

The Institute of Contemporary Art is challenging the traditional for the second time this year. Beginning next week, it will feature the works of Judith Schaechter and Rachel Whiteread, two female artists known for their non-conventional approach, according to Judith Tannenbaum, one of the museum's curators. Earlier this year, ICA exhibited the works of Andres Serrano, a highly controversial artist whose works included a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. Schaechter's exhibit, "Heart Attacks," has a quality that "draws in and repels" at the same time, Tannenbaum said. She explained that the beauty of Schaechter's work attracts the viewer's attention while the graphic violence depicted in it creates the reverse effect. With the exception of one painting, all of Schaechter's pieces are etched in stained glass. With titles such as Rape Serenade, A Little Torcher, and Cupid's Juvenile Delinquency Tendency Exposed, most of her pieces use bright and vivid colors in depicting tortured and bleeding women, Tannenbaum said. But she added that their visual beauty makes them attractive despite their gory themes. Rachel Whiteread's exhibit "Sculptures," on the other hand, hardly uses color at all. She creates her sculptures from negative space. Some of her untitled works are cast in the space underneath an amber bed, in the inside of a closet and in the interior of a bedroom. Whiteread's most acclaimed work is titled House, according to Patrick Murphy, another museum curator. She, along with Arch Angel Trust Co. in London, cast an entire old English home in the middle of a park out of liquid cement. For this feat, she was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 1993, becoming its youngest recipient, Murphy said. He added that her work represents "an idea of absence, of death." Murphy described the mood of her work as "like the quiet when you're at home in the middle of the afternoon and no one's there -- that domestic quiet." Like Schaechter, Whiteread also uses mediums that stray from artistic norms, Murphy said. In her sculpture titled Slab, she used rubber to cast the space underneath an autopsy table. According to Murphy, Whiteread's concept of negative space forces us to recognize "the space that helps us to move."

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