The Dallas Museum of Art's collection of contemporary art will get a little deeper in November 2015 when it becomes the exclusive American host of a new exhibition of works from Jackson Pollock's Black Pourings phase. "Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots" will be the first time in more than three decades that the artist's under-explored Black Pourings have been surveyed.
The exhibition also will be the first major DMA initiative to be curated by Gavin Delahunty, who joined the DMA as the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art in May 2014. Delahunty's previous position as head of exhibitions and displays with Tate Liverpool in England proved pivotal in this exhibition, as the Tate is co-organizing it.
Tate Liverpool gets the first shot at the exhibition, from June 30-October 18, 2015. The exhibition will be at the DMA from November 15, 2015 through March 20, 2016.
"Blind Spots" will comprise loans from various U.S., Asian and European collections, as well as works drawn from the collections of the DMA and Tate. The DMA currently has three Pollock works in its collection: Hayride, Portrait and a Dream and Cathedral.
The Black Pourings are black enamel and oil paintings that Pollock created between 1951 and 1953, works that were a radical departure from paintings he had done in the previous few years. To give the series some context and show Pollock's range, the exhibit will include a selection of paintings he made between 1947 and 1949.
"While several of Jackson Pollock's contemporaries combined black and white, his Black Pourings were exceptional in their absolute merging of color and surface, which went over and above what Pollock himself had previously achieved; this is a crucial difference for many contemporary artists revisiting Pollock's work today," Delahunty said in a statement.
"This exhibition will invite visitors to rediscover this critical moment in Pollock's artistic development, and inform a greater understanding of the artist's distinctive trajectory."
The exhibit also will feature drawings by Pollock from the same period, as well several rarely seen sculptures. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition will include scholarly texts on Pollock's practice with new essays by Jo Applin, Gavin Delahunty, Michael Fried and Stephanie Straine.
Yellow Islands, 1952, Jackson Pollock. Oil paint on canvas, support: 1435 x 1854 mm.
