This weekend is the unofficial kick-off of a new art season, which means it is time we look ahead to the most anticipated upcoming art shows. Over on Glasstire, they’ve beat us to the punch, the Texas-wide publication featuring six DFW shows in its Spring preview. I’ve mixed some of their picks here with my own to give you an overview of some of the art that we’ll be talking about in 2013.
Angela Kallus: New Work Marty Walker Gallery Jan 12 – Feb 16
Kallus returns to her native Texas after a stint in Las Vegas for a job at TCU. From GT:
There’s a clever irony in them that belies the deep cut that Kallus makes into ideas of romance and femininity and their iconic visual conceits. Her skill in making these paintings is masterful, with a clear, enunciated proficiency in paint and its potential to visually and conceptually confound us.
Colette Copeland: Reflections on the Way to the Gallows (2010 – present) 500X Jan 12 – Feb 2
A show that is three years in the making, featuring music by Chicago-based composer William Harper. From GT:
The six-part narrative video installation highlights the public executions of 21 women in Pennsylvania from 1682 – 1834, as well as the gallows sites of public lynching of women in Texas. . . . Copeland’s work also includes a web-based component which uses Google map software to create “dark tourism sites” where visitors can watch a short narrated video at each historical site on the map.
Regional Quaterly Vol. 1 – Crosstalk: Sterling Allen and Brad Tucker Circuit 12 Contemporary Jan 12-Feb 12
The design district gallery is launching a new program that promises to pit Texas-based artists, curators, and collectives in conversation with each other with a series of exhibitions. The first installment features a couple of Austin artists, with curator and former Austinite Nathan Green tapping his fellow Okay Mountain pal Sterling Allen for a show alongside Brad Tucker.
Focus: Gary Simmons Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth January 13 – March 14
Simmons’ show was postponed last fall due to Hurricane Sandy. It now will open Sunday. From GT:
Highlights of the Focus show will be an enormous blackboard-paint and chalk-drawing mural called Subtlety of a Train Wreck (1998), which depicts two trains trapped in the moment before impact as they careen toward each other head-on.
Charles Mayton The Power Station Jan 19-Mar 22
The Power Station has tapped another young painter, the Dallas-born and New York-based Charles Mayton, to go nuts in collector Alden Pinnell’s raw brick exhibition space. The Power Station has proven a tricky place to show art. The building itself has an almost sculptural appeal, so much so that it can upstage or confuse the art that’s put inside it, muting it or diluting it. For me, Matias Faldbakken’s installation has still been the highlight of the space’s young exhibition program perhaps because it was able to embrace something of the essential theatricality of the historic structure. That said, I’m curious to see what a painterly painter like Mayton does here.
Los Americanos Dallas Contemporary Jan 19-Mar 31
Here, before you read this, get this going on your headphones. Chicago house master Derrick Carter will be DJing the Dallas Contemporary’s Phenomenon event on February 9. On the walls? Video work that is part of the group show Los Americanos, featuring video by six Texas-based artists hailing from throughout the state. They are: Morehshin Allahyari (Dallas), Joshua Bienko (College Station), Chivas Clem (Paris), Hillary Holsonback (Dallas), Bogdan Perzynski (Austin), and Jason Reed (Eagle Pass).
Stuffed: Hillerbarnd + Magsamen at Brand 10 Art Space Jan 25-Mar 23
Houston-based Hillerbarnd + Magsamen are a married couple and artistic duo that leverage their relationship and familial life into an artistic practice that incorporates the material of the domestic, mundane, and suburban into work that engages ideas of contemporary art and life, American culture, and medium-conscious reflections on photography, representation, consumption, and architecture. As much as their work is about the idiosyncratic frameworks of normality, there is also a critique of desire, a disarming ambivalence.
Nasher 360: Artist Mark Dion, Nasher Sculpture Center Jan 26, 1 p.m.
Remember Dallas’ Wunderkabinett phase? Well, maybe it wasn’t quite a phase, but in late 2011 (or somewhere around there) we were hit with a smattering of odd-ball collections. Mark Dion employs the 16th century motif to explore systems of understanding, cultural undercurrents, and questions of authority, science, and public policy. He’ll be speaking about his work as part of the Nasher’s 360 series.
“2013 UNT Nasher Lecture Series: Artist Kiki Smith” at the Nasher Sculpture Center Jan 29, 7 p.m.
The only really disappointment here is that along with the annual UNT Nasher Lecture featuring artist Kiki Smith, we’re not getting an exhibition by artist Kiki Smith.
Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective at the Nasher Sculpture Center Feb 9 – May 12
The late-Ken Price’s retrospective, which debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year, lands at the Nasher in early February. For a taste of what’s in store, here’s a video preview that was put together by LACMA:
Chagall: Beyond Color Dallas Museum of Art Feb 17- May 26
The Dallas Museum of Art is the only venue in the United States that will host this curious exhibition by the artist Marc Chagall, which will place the artist’s paintings alongside works in a variety of media, including ceramics, sculpture, collage, and most significantly, a number of costumes designed by the Frenchman.
Getting To Know You: Terri Thornton The Reading Room March 9 – April 14
Terri Thornton, who curated last year’s where is the power, will have a solo show of her ephemeral, beautifully haunting work at The Reading Room. From GT:
Thornton’s interested in how art relies on image, and unpacks the idea through work that uses text as image and image as text for this show.
Cindy Sherman Dallas Museum of Art March 17-June 9
The much-anticipated and massive Cindy Sherman retrospective finally hits Dallas in March. During its run at the Museum of Modern Art, Roberta Smith called it “magnificent if somewhat flawed.” Jerry Saltz admitted he came to Sherman’s work late and says the new work in the exhibition are “as strange and strong as anything she has ever made.” Peter Schjeldahl called the installation in New York “theatrical:”
“But a particular cruelty pervades all her art—along with a wafting compassion that falls some degree short of reassuring.”
Suspicious Utopias: Mathew Collings and Emma Biggs Fort Worth Contemporary Arts Mar 23-May 11
Mosaic artist Emma Biggs and her husband, the British artist, writer, critic, and broadcaster Mathew Collings make collaborative abstract paintings. The artists explain their work in this interview:
[We] Paint abstract paintings that have a lot of content to do with the following – how things in the world actually look; colour relationships; the way light works, and the fact that colour is light; finding convincing visual metaphors in an improvised abstract language for the way perception of tone affects form, as in graded tones on a body or a bit of architecture (etc); the way in which nature is perceived, even if its often unconsciously, to be structured and patterned, and the way that visual traditions built up over centuries (in all sorts of different types of art) are really about finding and refinding metaphors for that sense of structure and pattern.
Keri Oldham: The End Series Kirk Hopper Fine Art Mar 30 – May 4
According to the Glasstire write-up, Oldham is keen on “deep space and deep mind,” to which I say, totally.
Andrew Douglas Underwood: The Fall of Bonnie and Clyde, McKinney Avenue Contemporary May 18 – June 29
Anything that offers the opportunity to revisit and rethink the enduring legacy of America’s favorite lover-bank robbers, I’m up for. From the Glasstire write-up:
Andrew Douglas Underwood makes research-based artwork that sends him trekking all over the globe to gather information for the beautiful paper works, photographs, sound installations and objects that make up each body of work. Underwood is after romantically infused historical stories that point to wider ideas about grandeur and human fallibility
Homeland Security, DTFU, SCAB, et al
I hope you don’t mind if I lump all of the projects by the name-trading crew of artists — who occasional present work at a variety of homespun locations and take the form of a number of collectives, all of whom are part of the super-collective S.C.A.B — into on blob-graph. The crew has a couple of interesting programs in the works. In May, at Homeland Security (a Cedars house/art space), Kelly Kroener and Eli Walker will curate an open-call, juried exhibition called May Flowers, which will feature work about flowers. That’s it. Just flowers. A floral free-for-all and a pretty irresistible idea.
The studio Don’t F*ck This Up crew (that’s the gallery that’s in the living areas of Lucy Kirkman and Justin Hunter Allen’s Expo Park apartment) plans two publications. One is a new online journal called Empire, which is being launched in conjunction with the intriguing prospect of a “DTFU research facility.” In addition, DTFU says they are also opening a exhibition in the Dallas Museum of Art (small caveat: “via augmented reality”). A small book will be published to aid in the viewing experience of Early American/sƃuıʍɐɹp uɐɔıɹǝɯ∀, featuring work by KITNFACE and LUCKyirkman. So, um, stay tuned.
OUT OF TOWN HAPPENINGS:
Engines of War, curated by Cynthia Mulcahy and Charles Dee Mitchell at Gasser Grunert Gallery Opens Mar 28
Curators Cynthia Mulcahy and Charles Dee Mitchell put together a staggering exhibition of war photography at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center back in 2011. The two will be collaborating on a similar exhibition featuring photography, video and maps at Chelsea’s Gasser Grunert Gallery. Opening March 28, the show will feature the work of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Heather Ainsworth, Lisa Barnard, David Cotterrell, Balazs Gardi, Benjamin Lowy, Christopher Morris, Eugene Richards, Jamel Shabazz, Anthony Suau, Teun Voten. In addition to the artists’ work, the exhibition will also include the United States Military-designed war video game America’s Army and the US Army-designed digital comics for the iPad and Android tablets, “the military’s most effective recruiting tools to date,” Mulcahy says.
The Dallas Pavilion at the Venice Biennale May 29-31
The artist and chair of SMU’s visual arts department is working on a publication with Jaspar Joseph-Lester called “The Dallas Pavilion ” The plan is to distribute the publication at the Venice Biennale 2013 during press and artist previews (May 29-31), and then reconvene in Dallas in the fall of 2013 for an exhibition. Stay tuned for more on this project.
Image at top: Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Comfort, 2012 (detail) 50″X60″, Photo Printed On Fleece
