The Dallas Museum of Art is saying farewell to two exhibitions about significant female artists in February. Both exhibitions showcase a different dimension of the artists’ life and practice.
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations will close February 9. Curated by Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the museum, the exhibition is a mid-career retrospective of the British American artist. The exhibition examines Brown’s practice by bringing together nearly 30 works from three decades of her career, including large-scale paintings and drawings.
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Brown’s work challenges art history’s traditional values while presenting women as complex and fully realized authors and subjects. Her art references European masters, Broadway plays and pop culture.
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SIGN UP “When I look at art, I don’t think the experience is quite complete until I respond to it, and I think a lot of my work comes from the desire to just absorb art that I love. It feels like an incomplete experience until I make paintings. It’s almost a way to process other art,” Brown said the exhibition’s opening.
In absorbing art, she subverts the concept of male domination over women and the natural world and challenges gender stereotypes. She also revisits her works, making her canvases dynamic. The exhibition is organized around scenes and motifs prevalent throughout visual culture, including the boudoir, the garden, the shipwreck, and the hunt.
“In examining the recurring tropes in Cecily Brown’s paintings, viewers are able to appreciate the artist’s adept ability to reclaim and redefine female subjects,” Brodbeck said. “In her work, Brown continues to challenge artistic conventions and engage audiences with her revisionist approach to the history of art.”
The Scene
Frida Kahlo: Beyond the Myth will close February 23. The exhibition exploring Kahlo’s life and humanity through 60 works of art was co-curated by Dr. Agustin Arteaga, the museum’s former Eugene McDermott Director, and Sue Canterbury, the museum’s Pauline Gill Sullivan Curator of American Art.
“Sue and I worked together, trying to create a narrative that will walk through from her very, very early days as a young girl, four years old, and having pictures from the most important photographers of the 20th century that depict her at very private, intimate moment and also her works and create that way to learn about her life as she was thinking and reflecting on the things that happened to her,” Arteaga said at the opening of the exhibition.
The exhibition combines Kahlo’s carefully constructed self-portraits and still lifes with those of her friends, family, and fellow artists to create a more intimate portrait of one of the most famous artists in the world. Besides nearly 30 of Kahlo’s paintings, drawings and prints, the exhibition features works by Diego Rivera, Nickolas Muray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and Julien Levy.
“Frida Kahlo was incredibly self-aware, carefully constructing the persona that she uses to represent herself in her artworks. Through this persistent self-fashioning, Kahlo was, in essence, the architect of her own myth—a myth that she was ultimately devoured by,” Canterbury said. “It is only through the eyes of those around her that we are able to get closer to who she really was, seeing her as she was seen and not only as she saw herself.”
Originally scheduled to close in November and extended due to popularity, the exhibition is organized chronologically, beginning with her early childhood in Mexico, to her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera, her blossoming career between Mexico and the United States, and her difficult final years, including the devastating injuries, illnesses and chronic pain she suffered most of her life.
“Though Kahlo is beloved for her vibrant and emotional paintings, there is still much to learn about who she was as a person. Through this exhibition, we hope to peel back some of the layers to reveal more about the individual who continues to captivate audiences here and around the world,” Arteaga said.
Learn more: Dallas Museum of Art
