Next month, the Dallas Museum of Art will present three contemporary art exhibitions. September 14 brings two premieres: “Slip Zone: A New Look at Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia” and “Bosco Sodi: La fuerza del destino.” Those will be followed on September 26 by “What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared,” an exhibition by the New York artist Naudline Pierre.
“Slip Zone” is a mix of 91 works from the museum’s collection of contemporary art and loans from local private collections. It is curated to inform visitors about how national and international artists adapted their techniques after World War II. The postwar era sprung a series of international art movements in metropolitan areas like New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, and Buenos Aires. The exhibition displays the artists’ development of new, nontraditional art and painting methods, like the incorporation of performance and nontraditional materials, while encouraging visitors to reexamine the canon of radical art in the postwar era. Several of the works are on display for the first time in the museum, which is also using the exhibit to evaluate the role of art institutions in shaping historical narratives.
On the same day, Bosco Sodi’s “La fuerza del destino” debuts in the museum’s sculpture garden. The installation features 30 terracotta sculptures, produced in Sodi’s personal studio in Oaxaca, Mexico. For generations, terracotta vessels were constructed by the Zapotecs, indigenous people native to Oaxaca. Sodi adapts the generations-old technique to produce grandiose textured clay sculptures. His adaptation pays respect to the relevance of clay in Indigenous American cultures as well as Arte Povera (Italian) and Gutai and Mono-ha (Japanese) postwar art movements.
One of Sodi’s sculptures will be in dialogue with works from “Slip Zone” in the museum’s outdoor green space.
“By encouraging visitors to leave the museum and enter the garden to experience these sculptures, he draws attention to our dependence on the contingency of nature, which shapes the appearance of the work over time,” says Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. “Moreover, these archetypal forms, with so many historical resonances, speak to our shared human experience across cultures and periods.”
Both exhibitions are on view until July 10, 2022.
On September 26, “What Could Be Has Not Yet Appeared” displays Naudline Pierre’s vivid, fantastical paintings. Pierre’s exhibition includes “Lest You Fall,” a 2019 acquisition by the Dallas Museum of Art. The eight foot tall oil-on-canvas painting draws upon the spiritual themes of angels, halos, and redemption.
The Brooklyn-based artist reimagines historical Renaissance and religious art to produce mystical and elusive depictions of Blackness and femmehood through a series of five new works. The series follows the narrative of a protagonist on a journey through Pierre’s worlds of care, tenderness, and liberation. The worlds, characterized by Pierre’s signature jewel tones, color gradients, and the fluidness of identity, reflect her unique approach. Hilde Nelson, the DMA’s Curatorial Assistant for Contemporary Art, described her exhibition as “awash in crimsons, ochres, and violets, her worlds offer a much-needed space for escape and transformation, in which the artist, the protagonist, and we as viewers can be full and expansive.”
That exhibition runs until May 15, 2022.
