Rebecca Warren: Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) & The Main Feeling

This spring, the Dallas Museum of Art will unveil Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument), 2016, a commissioned sculpture for its newly renovated north entrance by acclaimed British artist Rebecca Warren (b. 1965). Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) will debut to the public in April as part of the grand opening of the Museum’s Eagle Family Plaza, a new space for contemporary art and outdoor programming. The title Pas de Deux refers to the dynamic, fluctuating relationship between art history’s most persistent binaries: male/female, high/low, old/new, Dionysus/Apollo, classic/grotesque. To coincide with the installation of the first US museum-commissioned sculpture by Warren, the DMA will present an exhibition of her work. Opening on March 13, 2016, Rebecca Warren: The Main Feeling will focus on Warren’s sculptures from 2003 to the present day, a pivotal transitional phase in the artist’s practice characterized by the emergence of an increasingly abstract style. The exhibition will survey some 30 works from this period in a wide range of media, from early neon-lit wall vitrines, to delicately balanced compositions of welded steel, to slim clay totems cast in bronze.

At the beginning of her career, Warren produced unfired chaotic and inchoate clay figures that were powerfully sexualized but also decidedly awkward. They were more in the manner of a stylistic collision between proto-Cubist Pablo Picasso and satirist and cartoonist Robert Crumb. In more recent work, Warren’s art aspires to a smoother overlay of parts that tend much more to the abstract, opening the way to an abundance of ambivalent associations and interpretations.

“Rebecca Warren is one of Britain’s most vital contemporary artists, whose work invites us to engage with the aesthetic conventions of an earlier generation of male sculptors through a freshly feminist sensibility,” said Gavin Delahunty, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, DMA. “As one of the first commissioned works by a living female artist to be installed at the entrance of an American museum, Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) will serve as a beacon for the DMA’s intent to broaden its collecting and exhibition habits.”

The DMA’s commission of Pas de Deux (Plaza Monument) was made possible by the DMA/amfAR Benefit Auction Fund and by The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation.

Rebecca Warren: The Main Feeling is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition is presented with generous support from Gene and Jerry Jones. Additional support is provided by TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art, an annual fundraising event that jointly benefits amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research and the Dallas Museum of Art, and by the Contemporary Art Initiative.

The Dallas Museum of Art is supported, in part, by the generosity of DMA Members and donors, the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Texas Commission on the Arts. 

About the Dallas Museum of Art’s Eagle Family Plaza
In 2015, Dallas Museum of Art benefactors Jennifer and John Eagle donated 3 million USD to the DMA for the renovation of the Museum’s north entrance to improve the overall visitor experience. The Hamon Charitable Foundation gave an additional gift of 1.3 million USD for the project. The north entrance, to be renamed Eagle Family Plaza, is designed by Dallas-based landscape architectural firms Studio Outside and Hocker Design Group, with a new freestanding food service building and interior renovations to the DMA’s cafe designed by Lionel Morrison of the local architectural firm Morrison Dilworth + Walls. In addition, the DMA’s renovation plans include the creation of an outdoor exhibition space at the north entrance. The first commissioned work for it will be a sculpture by British artist Rebecca Warren, and it will serve as the first in a series of rotating works by various artists highlighted in the new north lawn of the Museum.