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Exhibition
20 Sep 2024 — 26 Jan 2025
Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms examines drawing as a meditative process that invites the gradual appearance of indeterminate images. Selected from the Menil’s permanent collection, this display of twenty-nine drawings dating from the late 1930s to the present share a visual language of emerging forms. Not fully resolved or strictly defined, the works in this exhibition are open, suggestive...
Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms examines drawing as a meditative process that invites the gradual appearance of indeterminate images. Selected from the Menil’s permanent collection, this display of twenty-nine drawings dating from the late 1930s to the present share a visual language of emerging forms. Not fully resolved or strictly defined, the works in this exhibition are open, suggestive images that seem as though they are still in the process of becoming.
Artists have embraced this type of practice for myriad reasons that range from an unlocking of the subconscious to an exploration of nature’s most complex systems, including vast cosmic realms and immaterial energies. Artists represented include Lee Bontecou, John Cage, Gustavo Díaz, Hiroyuki Doi, Sonia Gechtoff, Alan Saret, and Hedda Sterne, among others.
On view for the first time at the Menil are a group of drawings by the American artist Gregory Masurovsky (1929-2009), whose delicate marks coalesce into transient swarms, vibrations, or cloud formations on the verge of materializing.
Consider the artworks in this exhibition as portals, each its own point of entry to personal reflection. Notice how mindful looking can be an introspective, even revelatory encounter, one that parallels the act of drawing.
Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms is curated by Kirsten Marples, Curatorial Associate, Menil Drawing Institute.
This exhibition is generously supported by Diane and Michael Cannon; Caroline Huber; Susan and Francois de Menil; Sheila Noeth and Ted Dohmen; and by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.
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Portraits of Women from the Collection (Until 9 November 2024)
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly (Starts on 11 October 2024)
Fragments of Memory (Until 26 January 2025)
Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms (Until 26 January 2025)
The Menil Collection in Neartown Houston, Texas is a museum showcasing the private collection of John and Dominique de Menil. Inside you'll find some 17,000 paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, rare books, and drawings.
The collection features an impressive list of surrealist and contemporary masterpieces with works by some of the 20th century's biggest names like Picasso, René Magritte, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. There's also pieces from antiquity and the medieval era, the tribal cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the American Pacific Northwest.
