New Exhibitions Now on View at The Menil and the Menil Drawing Institute
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly in Main Building
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is the first major museum survey in the United States of work by British European visual artist Tacita Dean (b. 1965). The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with Dean, spotlights her career-defining approach to creating art through unmediated and chance-based drawing processes across a variety of mediums, from film to printmaking.
Blind Folly, the show’s title, reflects Dean’s desire to let the behavior of her mediums dictate the results of her work. For the artist, the playful and old-fashioned phrase connoting foolishness, “blind folly,” represents the role chance and fate play in the creative act.
The exhibition includes new works inspired by the artist’s time in Houston, some following her residency at the Menil’s Cy Twombly Gallery, alongside Dean’s monumental blackboard drawings and groups of rarely shown drawings from her studio on paper, found postcards, and albumen photographs. A separate gallery presents a rotating group of her 16mm films. Photos: V. Sweeten
Wall Drawing Series: Ronny Quevedo at the Menil Drawing Institute
Wall Drawing Series: Ronny Quevedo features a site-specific work by New York-based artist Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981). The 36-foot triptych, C A R A A C A R A, 2024, explores the relationship between origin, transfer, and translation, with each panel of the composition indicating a different step in the artist’s process.
Quevedo uses drawing, particularly schematic renderings, in his practice to explore the visual languages of abstraction, cartography, cosmology, and sport from across the Americas. The artist builds upon these interests with interconnected diagrams and markings spread across his works to express the complex relationships between body, home, field, globe, and celestial spaces. Photo: Sarah Hobson
Out of Thin Air: Emerging Forms at the Menil Drawing Institute
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 artworks 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. Photo: Paul Hester
Fragments of Memory at the Menil Drawing Institute
Fragments of Memory , a selection of works from the Menil’s permanent collection, explores the ways in which the past imbues present experiences.
Works on display from Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) and Jasper Johns (b. 1930) explore how memory fragments as time passes, while pieces by artists like Sari Dienes and Gael Stack layer objects and imagery from their family and friends, presenting a picture of consciousness.
Other artists featured in this exhibition include Wardell Milan, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Danh Vo, and more. Photo: Adam Neese
For more information:
Please visit https://www.menil.org/visit.