Highlights from the Nasher Collection

Start date: Saturday, April 18, 2009
Event is ongoing: Until Sunday, September 6, 2009

The Nasher Sculpture Center presents a new iteration of its rotating installation of works from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection. Comprising approximately 100 works installed in the Center’s indoor galleries and sculpture garden, this installation continues the investigation of several key developments in modern and contemporary sculpture. Masterworks by artists such as Auguste Rodin, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Alberto Giacometti embody the modernist interpretation of the human figure, incorporating radical formal and psychological investigations. The realm of dreams and the subconscious is examined in some of the best known sculptures of the Surrealist movement by artists such as Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró. The installation continues with sections exploring the crucial development of Constructivism and welded metal sculpture in the twentieth century from Naum Gabo to Antony Gormley, including a concentration of works by masters of the torch Julio González and David Smith. A selection of works by Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg presents the opposing developments of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in the 1950s and 60s. And the lower level gallery features minimalist works from the 1960s and beyond by artists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol Lewitt, and Tony Smith.

In addition to the works from the Nasher Collection, the Nasher Sculpture Center is pleased to present Isaac Witkin’s Volution (1964). Featured in the groundbreaking 1965 London exhibition, The New Generation, Volution and other works introduced an important group of young sculptors working with new materials normally associated with industrial production and creating radically new sculptural forms. A fluid, sensuous, green fiberglass column, Volution encapsulates the experimental spirit of the group and updates the organic abstractions of modernist predecessors like Jean Arp and Henry Moore. Volution comes to the Nasher Sculpture Center for one year courtesy of the artist’s daughter, Nadine Witkin, who has also generously lent Hawthorne Tree, Variation III (1990), on view at DFW International Airport with other works from the Nasher Sculpture Center.