The first retrospective of Edward Kienholz’s work after his death, Kienholz: A Retrospective comprised over one hundred pieces ranging from intimate objects to room-scale environments, spanning both the artist’s individual work and his twenty years of collaboration with his wife and partner, Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Kienholz’s richly absurdist assemblages fuse American pop iconography with pointed social critiques, eroding the sleek aesthetics of consumer culture with corroded founded objects, abject, oozing materials, and grotesque configurations of bodily forms. Major sculptures and installations included Roxys (1961-62), Kienholz’s first assembled “environment,” recalling a small-town Nevada brothel with prostitutes made of household objects; Back Seat Dodge ’38 (1964), a car with an open door revealing a couple groping in the backseat; The Beanery (1965), in which patrons with clocks for faces wait at a classic Hollywood diner; and The Ozymandias Parade (1985), co-created with Nancy Reddin Kienholz, caricaturing government officials as a ship of fools.
Kienholz: A Retrospective was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and traveled to MOCA and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.