Private Universes
Dallas Museum of Art
Through August 30

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the participation of Dallas art collectors in the local art scene: whether they do enough to be seen, buy enough art to keep galleries afloat, and in general, pull their well-endowed weight. Whatever anyone’s opinion on all that business, there is no debate when it comes to the amount of excellent contemporary art from elsewhere that Dallas collectors have brought home. In that respect, they’ve done a lion’s share, hauling some serious art booty back to Dallas.

Some of these treasures are on view at the Dallas Museum of Art through August 30 in a lucid and measured show called Private Universes. Curated by the Hoffman Family adjunct senior contemporary curator, Maria de Corral, the exhibit brings together eighty or so contemporary works that are the museum’s recent acquisitions, promised gifts or important loans from Dallas collections. Ms. de Corral has gathered work from these disparate collections and put them into thematic groups that create a focused and particular dialogue between the works of art: private universes, if you will. In that, Ms. de Corral is shaping our view of the zeitgeist running through the work here, calling attention to the similarities in movements of the imagination between the represented artists in this particular age.

Conversations (Detail) by Ravine Neuenschwander

On my tour of the show, I began in a room with work by Latin American artists that Maria de Corral described, in her quiet, richly Spanish-accented voice, as “talking without talking,” a description that gets at the legacy of oppressive regimes in that part of the world. The Cuban team Los Carpentieros has a piece here called Estrantería — a bookshelf that’s warped into a parabolic shape, playing with the idea of a forced order gone wonky in silent revolt. A stunning and crisply colorful series by Brazilian Ravine Neuenschwander employs eleven framed comic strips in which the artist has painted over the images and text of the comic with bright colors with the text bubbles painted white. It’s a chipper, uplifting kind of censorship, full of jubilant silence. Ms. Neuenschwander’s large gridded photo series, Conversations, catalogues a tabletop full of things that people make while talking long after a meal has ended: bread dough and paper sculptures, straws stuck on fork tines, knotted cherry stems. The post-meal detritus testifies to deep relationship and enrapturing exchanges among friends. But like Ms. Neuenschwander’s other piece, there’s only the faceless suggestion of the speakers.

The adjacent gallery approaches the subject of the body with an undercurrent of violence: a medical table covered in colorful crystal grenades by Mona Hatoum and paintings by Marcel Dzama and Magnus von Plessen point to brutal violence wrapped up in beautiful objects and images. Janine Antoni’s Grope is made from hundreds of men’s pants pockets sewn together to form larger pockets, in turn forming a tremendous pocket of space between the corner of the wall where it is hung and the piece itself. It creates a kind of tent, and it, like Ms. Hatoum’s grenades, references the body without ever showing it, making its illicit suggestion that much more powerful. The dizzying video piece by Pipilotti Rist turns nude couples hidden in bushes into hunching sorts of beasts, lurking and hungry in the light of a spotlight, the image of them floating on a woman’s mind as she goes about daily life. It’s unsettling and disorienting, and creates no small measure of sexualized fear in the dark gallery.

The three large scale paintings in the entrance to the barrel vault describe the City. While each does so with a different material approach, the essence of the city as teeming, unmappable, and frenetic is shared in all of them. The rich, blackish collage by Mark Bradford anchors the set, while Matthew Ritchie’s The Idea of Cities creates a joyful mental map. The main space of the barrel vault houses pieces that stand in here as exemplars of modern and contemporary painting: Philip Guston’s peachy self-deprecations, a frantic Franz Ackerman, the quiet and verbose Christopher Wool.

A room of portraits is muted and hushed, the tone set by several blurry and distorted Marlene Dumas paintings that convey the corruptive, murky perversion that plagues her subjects, like Double Bind in which two parents squash their baby’s face in a sandwich of kisses. Michaël Borreman’s small, lush paintings depart from the subject matter his style references, old world realism, and shows figures locked in self-conscious and vulnerable poses that have the great capacity of rendering his sitters entirely modern.

and still this (Detail) by Jim Hodges

Geometrical-bent work takes up the next gallery across from the portraits. But whatever is on the walls in this space is overshadowed by the singularly resplendent sculptural “painting” by Jim Hodges – a free-standing, semi-circular room made from a series of canvases that have all been hinged together. The interior of the room is absolutely aglow from gold leaf patterns and scenes that Mr. Hodges has laid on the canvas: a forest, a tumultuous sky, a burst of light, a pool of water. The fragility and temperamentality of gold leaf is harnessed by the artist here, telling the story of nature through its most delicate and valuable metal in a form that’s part Chinese screen, part gilded temple, part glowing chalice. It’s called and still this, and I still can’t get its dazzling afterimage to unsear itself from my mind.

One of the last two galleries shows Fred Sandback’s yarn installation Broadway Boogie Woogie, which finds itself installed for the first time ever in this exhibit; strings of yard stretch from ceiling to floor, creating a maze that viewers are free to wander. The last gallery showcases the work of conceptual and experimental artist of from the 60’s and 70’s – Lucio Fontana, Yayoi Kusama, Marcel Broodthaers and Mimmo Rotella among them. It’s a tribute to a genesis that takes place whenever a group of artists begins to stretch the boundaries of material and artistic thinking. It’s a tribute to the passing of a torch.