Heatherwick Studio: Provocations
September 13, 2014 – January 4, 2015
The extraordinary British architect and designer Thomas Heatherwick has been hailed as a genius, lauded by The New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger for the uniquely inventive nature of his work, and praised by esteemed designer Sir Terence Conran as the “Leonardo da Vinci of our times.” The Nasher’s exhibition, the first in North America to present the work of Heatherwick and his studio, examines the astonishing range of his practice and traces the development of the studio's work from the design of small-scale objects and structures to complex, sophisticated buildings and master plans. The exhibition illuminates the studio's unique iterative "problem-solving" approach to design, and the hands-on making that is such an important element of the studio's identity, highlighting the design concepts behind small, personal products as well as on large public and private architectural projects in the U.K, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and China. Organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center, the exhibition will travel to several venues in North America after its presentation in Dallas.
Sightings: Anna-Bella Papp
October 24, 2014 – January 18, 2015
Sightings: Anna-Bella Papp continues the Nasher’s Sightings series of exhibitions and installations by emerging and established contemporary artists. Anna-Bella Papp makes exquisitely restrained works in unfired clay. Occupying tabletops or mounted to walls, the sculpted reliefs are intimate in scale yet suggest objects and spaces many times their scale. Many of the works recall low-relief architectural models or site plans for minimalist earthworks. They also call to mind modernist reliefs by artists as diverse as Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, and Ben Nicholson. Born in Romania in 1988, Papp currently lives and works in Rome. Her Sightings exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center will be the first museum presentation of her work in the United States.
Organized by Nasher Chief Curator Jed Morse, the exhibition will be accompanied by the first museum publication on the artist’s work.
Melvin Edwards: Five Decades
January 31 – May 10, 2015
In January 2015, the Nasher Sculpture Center will present Melvin Edwards: Five Decades, a retrospective of the renowned American sculptor Melvin Edwards (b. 1937). Working primarily in welded steel, Edwards is perhaps best known for his Lynch Fragments, an ongoing series of abstract yet evocative reliefs that incorporate tools and other familiar objects to summon a range of artistic, social, and cultural references. In addition to a selection of Lynch Fragments spanning the artist’s half-century career, Melvin Edwards: Five Decades will also include groundbreaking environmental works in barbed wire, midsize and large-scale sculptures, maquettes reflecting Edwards’s long career in public sculpture, rarely seen drawings, and a selection of his sketchbooks.
Organized by the Nasher’s Associate Curator Catherine Craft, the exhibition will travel to other US museums and will be accompanied by a richly illustrated scholarly catalogue.
Phyllida Barlow (working title)
May 30 – August 30, 2015
In the summer of 2015, the Nasher Sculpture Center will present a major exhibition of the work of British sculptor Phyllida Barlow. Barlow employs commonplace materials—wood, plaster, concrete, cardboard, and strips of colorful cloth or tape—in extraordinary, monumental, ramshackle, hand-built structures that expound a dizzying array of novel sculptural forms. Towering, bulky accumulations of matter, as the artist puts it, “elbow their way into the room,” filling the space and looming over viewers.” Recent projects at the Tate Britain in London and the New Museum in New York have showcased the prodigious talents of the now 70-year-old Barlow, who, after a distinguished teaching career at the Slade School of Art in London, is finally enjoying the broad international recognition her work has long deserved.
Organized by the Nasher’s Chief Curator Jed Morse, the exhibition will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring new scholarship on the work of the artist.
Giuseppe Penone (working title)
September 19, 2015 – January 10, 2016
Italian artist Giuseppe Penone has played an integral role in the development of art over the past five decades. From his conceptual and performative works of the 1960s and 70s to the large-scale sculptural installations of the past ten years, Penone has explored intimate, sensate, and metaphysical connections with nature. Working in a stunning variety of materials—including wood, stone, metal, plaster, resin, acacia thorns—the artist makes palpable and present the analogous processes of nature and art: carving large trees along their growth patterns to reveal the sapling contained within; elaborating the interior space of his closed hand into a large-scale sculpture that both contains his hand and enlarges the space it contains; rendering the swirling mists of his breath in the cold in tactile clay forms that contain the impression of his body. The exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center will feature a selection of work in a variety of materials highlighting the development of Penone’s ideas over the course of his career.
Organized by Nasher Chief Curator Jed Morse, the exhibition will be accompanied by a new scholarly publication.