Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen: Thinking Big (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Don Ross

6 Curator’s Picks from Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10

by Claire Bradley, March 2026

Ted Mann, project assistant curator of the Fisher Collection, offers his top six highlights from across the expansive reinstallation.

1. Object Play

Floor 3, Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen: Thinking Big

“Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s nearly eight-foot-tall Geometric Apple Core (1991) has been a perennial favorite of SFMOMA’s visitors. In a new display on Floor 3, the apple is joined by a range of other works by the pair — both sculptures and models for several of their large-scale projects, such as San Francisco’s own Cupid’s Span — in which commonplace objects are blown up and transformed into uncanny monuments (or, more accurately, anti-monuments).”

Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen: Thinking Big (installation view, SFMOMA); photo: Don Ross

2. John Chamberlain's Twisted Auto Parts

Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists

“On Floor 4, we are presenting all of Chamberlain’s works in the Fisher Collection together for the first time. Using scrap metal from automobiles and other industrial sources that he crushed and fit together, Chamberlain produced dynamic, colorful assemblages. In later years, Chamberlain added his own colors, but I especially love how in his early works, such as Bijou (1961), Chamberlain relied on the preexisting colors of his found materials. The crumpled and twisted metallic surfaces of Chamberlain’s works look spectacular in the natural light of the Snøhetta wing’s City Gallery.”

John Chamberlain, Bijou, 1961; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © John Chamberlain / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

2. New Calder Gallery

Floor 5, Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form

“I’m very excited to see Alexander Calder’s works in the Floor 5 sculpture gallery, where the ceiling is higher and there is more room for his mobiles and other sculptures to breathe. The centerpiece is the colorful — and, occasionally, soundproducing — Double Gong (1953). The eleven-foot-long mobile hangs high over visitors, just as it was installed in the seaside home of the Venezuelan photographer and art critic Alfredo Boulton, who commissioned it.”

Alexander Calder, Double Gong, 1953; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

4. Ellsworth Kelly's Curves

Floor 5, Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form

“Kelly’s paintings are not truly finished until they go on the wall; decisions about how to install them in relation to the architecture, and to one another, are crucial. For the new Kelly galleries on Floor 5, we consulted with Jack Shear, the artist’s widower and head of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. One room is dedicated to a range of paintings and reliefs featuring sections of circles, ellipses, and fan shapes — forms that Kelly explored following his move from Manhattan to Upstate New York in 1970.”

Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Panel, 1985; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

5. Louise Bourgeois's Spider, 1995

Floor 6, Memory and Matter: Personal and Collective Histories

“Bourgeois’s towering arachnids stand out among the most iconic and powerful sculptures of the 1990s and 2000s, and the roughly 11-foot example in the Fisher Collection is no exception. Simultaneously menacing and maternal, Bourgeois’s spider is partly autobiographical, alluding to the artist’s mother, a skilled needleworker who restored antique tapestries. It also taps into a web of cultural associations that extend back to Greek myth.”

Louise Bourgeois, Spider, 1995; the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, NY; photo: Katherine Du Tiel

6. Anselm Kiefer's Mann im Wald (Man in the Forest), 1971

Floor 6, Memory and Matter: Personal and Collective Histories

“This enigmatic, dream-like self-portrait is the perfect anchor for the Kiefer galleries on Floor 6. The artist, then just 26 years old, has depicted himself in his nightshirt, standing in the clearing of a dense wood. Kiefer was born in Germany’s Black Forest Region in the last months of World War II, and the forest as a highly charged symbol of German history, myth, and nationalism is something that runs through much of his work. So is the motif of fire, represented here by the burning branch he holds aloft.”

6 Curator’s Picks from Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10

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Claire Bradley

Claire Bradley