The Menil Collection is a unique museum environment located in the Montrose-area Museum District housing the collection of John and Dominique de Menil.
The museum building is the centerpiece of a neighborhood featuring satellite gallery spaces and related cultural instituitons set in a parklike setting.
Menil Collection Exhibitions
Body in Fragments (Aug. 21, 2009 to Feb. 28, 2010)
Exhibit brings together diverse works from the collection to explore the ways in which different cultures conceptualize the spiritual, physical, and intellectual aspects of personhood. The disintegration of the human body witnessed in Cubist and Surrealist works speaks to modern art’s challenge to Cartesian dualism and perceptions of the human mind and consciousness in the wake of world war, reflecting the development of psychology and its embrace of what was once known as “primitive” art.
Joaquín Torres-García: Constructing Abstraction with Wood (Sep. 25, 2009 to Jan. 3, 2010)
The exhibition will center chiefly on works from the 1920s to the 1940s, spanning the time from when Torres-García lived in Spain, New York, Italy, and France, developing toys and the vocabulary for his wood constructions, to his eventual settlement in Uruguay as the founder of a Constructivist art movement. These sculptural works will be accompanied by a selection of Torres-García’s oil paintings and drawings, which demonstrate the connections between his experiments in two and three-dimensional forms.
Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil (Oct. 30, 2009 to Feb. 14, 2010)
At close to thirty-three feet long, and one of the artist's largest canvases, due to its size it is rarely exhibited. In celebration of this rare hanging, the Menil will also exhibit more than a dozen related drawings and studies from the artist's private collection. While three of these works on paper were shown with the painting in the 2008 exhibition,"Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons" at the Tate Modern, London, this will be the first time the entire group of drawings will be exhibited, and the first time they will be shown with the painting.
Maurizio Cattelan (Feb. 12 to Aug. 15, 2010)
The exhibition at The Menil Collection, organized by Franklin Sirmans, curator of modern and contemporary art, will be the artist’s first solo show in Texas. The exhibition will focus on recent large-scale works that premiered in Europe in 2007 and will feature sculptures that range in tone from the melancholic and politically contentious to the decidedly irreverent.
Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance (Mar. 19 to Aug. 8, 2010)
Organized by Michelle White, Assistant Curator, the show highlights the temporality of a lesser-known avant-garde movement. Actively engaged with other conceptual and performance-based ways of making art as they were emerging in the United States at that time, such as like Fluxus, Assemblage and Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme was a brief but influential moment in the history of modern art.
Steve Wolfe on Paper (Apr. 2 to Jul. 25, 2010)
Steve Wolfe was born in Pisa, Italy in 1955 and lives and works in San Francisco, California. For the last twenty years, Wolfe has created objects and drawings of astounding craft and visual presence that investigate intersections among material culture, intellectual history, and personal and collective memory.
Menil Collection