Guggenheim exhibition audio guide

Many of Ann Hamilton’s works involve amassing identical or similar objects. Between taxonomy and communion, 1990 – comprising 14,000 human and animal teeth – explores the interconnectedness between human and animal worlds.

Known to avoid interviews by sending a proxy, and escaping his own exhibition openings by stealth, Maurizio Cattelan and his work are complex characters to get to know.

This alluring pile of individually cellophane-wrapped candy is known as Untitled (Public Opinion), 1991. Felix Gonzalez-Torres first executed the work in the USA in 1991 as a protest against the first Gulf War.

These photo-realistic paintings by Jeff Koons overwhelm the viewer, ensuring, like the advertising world, that there is little time to recognise one’s desires before another product is thrust upon us.

Painter Nigel Cooke and photographer Elger Esser play with our comprehension of their work when viewed from near and far, emphasising the act of reflection, rather than the recognition of location.

Thomas Demand toys with our faith in photographs and the historical events that we remember through them. In Archive, 1995, he reconstructs the personal inventory of Nazi propagandist and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Masculinity, penetration, escape, ego, transcendence and metamorphoses are just some of the concepts investigated in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle film series.

The relationship between truth and fiction is played out in this selection of works from Sarah Anne Johnson’s series Tree Planting, 2003-2005, while Gregory Crewdson’s work Untitled (family dinner), 2001-2002, centres on uncanny human behaviour.

Untitled (to Jan and Ron Greenberg) (1972–1973) illustrates Dan Flavin’s habit of naming his artworks as a tribute to friends, family or historical figures, the only personal element in what is otherwise an entirely industrial environment.

Donald Judd disliked the term ‘minimalism’ but most of his works are so described. Untitled, 1971, is an investigation of space, volume, the repeated unit, and the void.

Bruce Nauman explores the capacity to trick human perception and elicit strong emotional and intellectual responses with his propositions as evidenced in this work Floating Room, 1972 (Light Outside, Dark Inside).

Sol LeWitt was a pioneer of conceptual, minimal and process art. His geometric Wall Drawing No. 264, 1975, was produced for this exhibition by an assistant who studied with LeWitt.

While many Pop artists maintained the manufactured identity of the objects they worked with, Claes Oldenburg casually undermined them as can be seen in his work Soft Pay-Telephone, 1963.

The electric chair, then a common device for capital punishment in America, first featured in Warhol’s art in 1963 as part of his Death and Disaster series.

"Nose" (1947) by Alberto Giacometti, "Two" (1943-45) by Karel Appel and "Two Heads" (1953) by Jackson Pollock were shaped by numerous influences, among them Surrealism, Existentialism, Picasso and primitive art.

“Everything in this painting was psychological” said Chilean artist Roberto Matta of his painting Years of Fear which he created following the outbreak of war in Europe. “It was a deep wish to measure what can be felt.”

Yves Klein strives to depict space without limits in his painitng Untitled red monochrome (1959) while Lucio Fontana manipulates the canvas as an independent spatial entity in his painting Concetto spaziale, Attese (1965).

The evocation of the infinite is evident in both Jackson Pollock’s Untitled (Green Silver) (c.1949) and Mark Rothko’s Untitled (1947).

Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis worked with methods of staining their canvases, allowing paint and unprimed surface to become one, as can be seen in Frankenthaler’s Canal (1963) and Louis’s Saraband (1959).

The maker’s mark and emotive gesture are typically dispensed with in Minimalist art and both White Flower (1960) and Untitled No.14 (1977) exemplify Agnes Martin’s mature expression of this style.

Narrator Geraldine Doogue introduces the exhibition Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now and the diversity of artists and artworks it presents.