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Neiman Marcus (March - April 2012)
Dallas Art Fair (12-15 April 2012)
Goss-Michael Foundation (13 April - August 2012)
Dallas Contemporary (13 April - 19 August 2012)
Design District area (April 2012)
Oliver Francis Gallery (April 2012)

The Dallas Biennale is a new forum for contemporary art that proposes a conceptual exploration of the biennale as a platform for exhibiting art. It is organized by Dallas Contemporary, a non-collecting art museum. Taking place in various locations in Dallas' city center, design district and beyond, it is shaped by the concepts of curator Florence Ostende, a Paris-based adjunct curator for Dallas Contemporary. Locations for the Dallas Biennale include: Dallas Contemporary, Neiman Marcus (Main Street), Dallas Art Fair, Goss-Michael Foundation, the Oliver Francis Gallery, Nasher Sculpture Center and the Le Meridien Hotel.

This is the first large-scale survey exhibition of international artists to be presented by Dallas Contemporary to audiences in Dallas and Texas.

With its popular motto, Live Large. Think Big, Dallas is usually perceived as a city of excess and homeland of bling fashion. Without a doubt, Big D - as it is nicknamed - would be the ideal and expected venue for any mega exhibition driven by spectacular mise-en-scene and operatic exuberance. The Dallas Biennale is intended to be a survey of international scope; however, instead of reviving the encyclopedic format of other grand international group shows, this event has been conceived as a series of monographic exhibitions offering each participating artist a stage for a solo presentation. Focus will be on highlighting each artist with a large space to exhibit their work - a return to early Biennale principals of celebrating artistic ideas rather than the authority of an over arching theme. Along with the current exhaustion of the large-scale perennial exhibition format, the Dallas Biennale is intended to ignite larger intellectual discussions surrounding international biennales in the age of curatorial excess.

Looking for a pause in the flow of art production, the Dallas Biennale also branded as the first and only of its kind is seeking to challenge the biannual ritual doomed to exhaustion. The degree of intensity that goes into the making of solo exhibitions is intended as a way of slowing down the accumulation crisis. While modernity was placed under the slogan make it new and the appropriation era under make it again, Dallas seems to be quite unexpectedly the perfect stage for the make it slow era. Built as a theater embracing antagonistic aesthetical beliefs and hybrid theories, this event is promoting the experience of the artwork as a pure content provider rather than a mere discursive backdrop. Holding no hierarchical structure, it questions the authority of the exhibition as an organized knowledge and established pattern of visitors' movement.

This biennale is to be experienced as an open montage whose protagonists' concerns range from car cultures ruins, romantic challenge, ghosts from history, pseudo magic opera, daggering dancing style, fountains of youth, conceptual animism, infrabooming, feminist fashion, naughty typography and mechanical ballet. Relying on a one-to-one correspondence, this exhibition has been conceived as a mutant collective subject in dialogue with each individual artist whose grand ecart between the anti-spectacular and the celebration, the exhaustion and the enthusiasm will result in a cocktail of minimal bling mirroring the current mood of economic turmoil.

Most of the works included in the Biennale are unique and have been made specifically for the exhibition. The Dallas Biennale highlights international contemporary art with the inclusion of artists from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Capturing the cultural, social, and political aspects of a large city, works in the exhibition include installation, painting, sculpture, photography, performance and video.

Participating artists: Morehshin Allahyari (Iran); Nick Barbee (USA); Anthea Behm (Australia); Kim Beom (Korea); Michael Corris (USA); Zoe Crosher (USA); Sylvie Fleury (Switzerland); Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet (France); Pierre Joseph (France); Claude Lévêque (France); Gabriel Martinez (USA); Nicole Miller (USA); Charlotte Moth (United Kingdom); Okay Mountain (USA); Hugues Reip (France); Delphine Reist (Switzerland); Michael Smith (USA); Mario Garcia Torres (Mexico); Clarissa Tossin (Brazil).

For information: exhibitions@dallascontemporary.org

Erwin Wurm, Untitled, 2011
Photo: Ottomura

ERWIN WURM Beauty Business

13 April - August 2012

Opening celebration – Friday 13 April 21.00 – 24.00 (9.00 - midnight).

Erwin Wurm, an artist living and working in Vienna, combines various art forms: sculpture, photography and performance into a unique personal view of the everyday world. Drawing on history, humour and philosophy, Wurm creates light-hearted art works with at times serious messages. His new large sculptural works created specifically for this exhibition, which have a grand theatrical scale, attract us to interact and participate.

Beauty Business is Wurm's first cohesive focus on the home or dwelling. As the architect Le Corbusier once remarked, the purpose of architecture is to move us, then with his work Erwin Wurm consistently realizes architecture's highest aim: he creates works whose extraordinary power lies not only in how deeply they make us feel, but also in how they let us see the complexity of our feelings, in meaningful environments which help us to dwell. This exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach.

Additional support for this exhibition was made possible by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

Zoe Crosher, Mae Wested no.3 (Crumpled) from the series 21 Ways to Mae Wested, 2012
Courtesy Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles.

ZOE CROSHER Mae Wested

13 April - August 2012

Opening celebration – Friday 13 April 21.00 – 24.00 (9.00 - midnight).

The new Mae Wested series, presented at the Dallas Contemporary for the first time, fits into Crosher's larger body of work, The Michelle duBois Project (2005--present). Inspired by the impossibility of knowing oneself through photographs, even after an endless accumulation of images, the artist reimagines and intervenes in the extensive personal photographic archive of Michelle duBois, a call girl who traveled extensively in the Pacific Rim during the 1970s and '80s. With a material awareness and strong interest in the arc of the photographic context in relation to the end of the analog, Crosher has re-photographed, scanned and re-ordered duBois' slippery self-portraits into a careful amalgam of documentary and the imagined.

duBois often liked to dress in elaborate costume for the camera, and one of her favorite personas was famed 1930s actress Mae West. For Dallas, Crosher's Mae Wested series will introduce three elements investigating this obsession. Large-scale black and white images of duBois attending an event dressed as West will accompany a series of glamorous staged images which activate the gallery as duBois' various characterizations of West gaze at one another across the room. Imaginative screenplay haikus written by Jason Underhill, which collapse the Japanese and Western fantasies of Mae West, the Marlboro Man and Michelle duBois, will also punctuate the gallery. Throughout the duBois project, Crosher has manipulated the original images as a way to emphasize the archive's physicality. Here, each image has been crumpled, re-photographed, and printed on metallic paper, resulting in shimmering, faceted surfaces which evoke the silver screen.

Zoe Crosher was born in 1975 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, and was recently awarded the prestigious Art Here and Now Award by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Shepard Fairey.
Courtesy the artist.

SHEPARD FAIREY Citywide Street Project

4 February 2012

Dallas Contemporary has invited Los Angeles based street artist SHEPARD FAIREY to create more than 12 murals throughout the city with a focus on West Dallas. Known for his iconic designed President Obama HOPE poster, Fairey has worked as an artist creating works on the streets and globally in public spaces using posters, stickers, wheat paste and painted murals.

In celebration of the mural project, Dallas Contemporary will host the first annual PHENOMENON, an over-the-top, neon-inspired dance party. Fairey, a world-toured DJ, will provide the music for guests in the Dallas Contemporary galleries, just days after completing his murals.

FAILURE
Courtesy the artist.

FAILURE

17 December 2011 - August 2012

Opening celebration – Saturday 17 December 21.00 – 24.00 (9.00 - midnight).

Austin-based artist FAILURE will present his first major institutional exhibition at Dallas Contemporary. FAILURE has been painting grafitti outdoors since 1993 and began with the FAILURE poster imagery in the early 2000’s in Houston. He will present an exhibition of wheat paste posters with spray paint and collage. FAILURE is the founder and Editor of PUREFILTH Magazine, a quarterly fine art photography journal and the Art Director for MadGods clothing.