Dallas Art Fair Foundation Gifts Two Artworks To Dallas Museum Of Art And Nasher Sculpture Center

The Dallas Art Fair Foundation has announced it has gifted two artworks from the Dallas Art Fair's Four x Five exhibition to two major Dallas museums. The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) has acquired Cynthia Daignault's painting, Elegy (Los Angeles) (2019), for its permanent collection. The Nasher Sculpture Center has acquired a new wall sculpture by Gabriel Rico, Cincuenta from the series "Reducción objetiva orquestada (2020), for its permanent collection.

"Through the generosity of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation, over the past four years we have brought 32 works by 26 artists into the collection," said Dr. Agustin Arteaga, the DMA's Eugene McDermott Director. "The Fair and the funds provided by the Foundation presents a wonderful opportunity for the Museum to build on our collection goals by bringing together a rich selection of local, national, and international art right here in Dallas."

Added Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the DMA's Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, "Cynthia Daignault's Elegy (Los Angeles) is history painting for our time. Although Daignault's source material is a photograph of the 1992 LA uprising, it still hits a raw nerve, both in terms of the plumes of smoke which call to mind the wildfires that have ravaged the west coast this summer and the country's continued reckoning with racial injustice. Her distinctive brush strokes are almost at odds with her grey scale palette, animating the supposedly neutral presentation of the news with a pulse of emotion."

"We are delighted to receive the gift of this work by Gabriel Rico from the Dallas Art Fair Foundation and Perrotin," says Nasher Director Jeremy Strick. "The work's poetic arrangement of disparate parts will rhyme beautifully with so many of the works in the Nasher collection."

"Like Dada collages or Surrealist assemblages," notes Nasher Chief Curator Jed Morse, "Rico's works propose new ways of understanding civilization and its relationship with the natural world through the juxtaposition of disparate objects, each of which comes with its own constellation of meanings and associations. The sculpture adds a new formal branch to the lineage of found object construction in the Nasher collection, including welded compositions by John Chamberlain and David Smith, as well as assemblages by Phyllida Barlow, Tony Cragg, and Joan Miró."

"We deeply value our close, ongoing relationships with the DMA and the Nasher and it's an honor to bolster their already world-class collections. The synergy we have, and moments like these, further the arts in Dallas and make sure the city continues to be a cultural destination," says Kelly Cornell, Dallas Art Fair Director.

Cynthia Daignault is a Baltimore-based painter known for an ambitious and wide-ranging practice, exploring the contemporary American experience through a diversity of subjects. Of her Elegy series, the artist says, "Created in monochrome, [these] subjects [...] exist beyond reality, fading into memory, history, and death. Each canvas is an elegy, a metaphor for the contrast between eternal forces: black and white, life and death, love and loss. These works look back to Picasso's Guernica, and through Picasso to Robert Motherwell's Elegies and Andy Warhol's Death and Disasters. As in those precursors, the subject is abject horror-the sickness of bearing witness to an unthinkable global tragedy and the dilemma of how art might make sense of collective trauma."

Gabriel Rico is a Guadalajara-based artist who was recently included in the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale. His inclusion in Four x Five is a return to Dallas; in 2017, he curated an exhibition at The Power Station. Of his Reducción objetiva orquestada work, Perrotin Director Melissa Timarchi says, "[it] is part of an ongoing series of non-mathematical equations, which the artist began over a half decade go. Rico fuses natural elements with kitsch objects to compose non-mathematical formulas where numbers and symbols are substituted with carefully selected found and man-made objects. Like Surrealist objet d'art, the work's meaning is found through the relationship between the disparate materials and their connection to the human condition."

This gift builds on the Dallas Art Fair Foundation's long history of raising money and gifting art to the city's arts community and cultural institutions. The foundation has donated over $1.5 million to the arts to date, including through its annual Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program. Since the program launched in 2016, it has raised $450,000 for the DMA to purchase artworks from the Dallas Art Fair and add them to the museum's permanent collection. ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978, Baltimore, MD) has presented solo exhibitions and projects at many major museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and White Columns. Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art the Blanton Museum of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Daignault is a regularly published author, and her writings have been published in a range of publications. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2016 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Award, a 2011 Rema Hort Foundation Award, and a 2010 Macdowell Colony Fellowship. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.

Gabriel Rico (b. 1980, Lagos de Moreno, Mexico) lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico, and studied at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, Guadalajara. Recent exhibitions have taken place at: The Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA (2019), The group exhibition May You Live In Interesting Times, Venice Biennial, Italy (2019), the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, the Power Station, Dallas (both 2017); Gyeonggi Creation Center, Ansan-do, South Korea, Fundación Calosa, Irapuato, Mexico (both 2016); MAZ Zapopan Art Museum, Mexico, Korea Ceramic Foundation, Seoul, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice (all 2015); and Ex-Escuela de Cristo, Aguascalientes, Mexico (2014).

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