To make art at a time when knowledge of the past is only a click away carries an enormous weight and responsibility. With Gratitude: Contemporary Artists Address Influence presents works by artists who face that challenge head-on and make legacy one of the primary subjects of their art. In their paintings, videos, and installations, these younger artists address the influence that their artistic precursors have had—and continue to have—on their work, exploring the complicated love-hate relationship between their own generation and the preceding one. All the works reveal the “anxiety of influence” inherent in the act of creating— a tangled web of admiration and antagonism, emulation and competition.

While artists throughout history have continually investigated the subject matter, styles, and techniques of earlier masters, never before has the nod to previous creation become so apparent, so deliberate. The artists featured here directly address the individuals who influence them rather than just the objects of influence. Jill Miller dances in front of a video of John Baldessari and adds rap music, drawing attention to the pressure of making original art in the wake of that contemporary master. In a video work that is part-Hollywood, part art-world bravado, Joe Sola confronts Yves Klein’s persona, playing out his relationship to the provocative French artist by completing the action of Klein’s photograph, Leap into the Void. Michael Schmelling has made a photographic portrait of Conceptual artist Richard Prince, one of the pioneers of appropriation art in the 1970s and ’80s, who, along with Sherrie Levine and others, paved the way for the current generation to challenge and question cultural assumptions about creativity.

With Gratitude captures the need of artists today to acknowledge their debt to the past while at the same time striving to eclipse the burden of legacy.

The exhibition is curated by Jane Simon, curator of exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, in Madison, Wisconsin.

Claire Fontaine, Untitled (One is no one), 2007