Shozo Shimamoto, Untitled - Whirlpool.

DALLAS, TX.- The Dallas Museum of Art presents Variations on Theme: Contemporary Art 1950s–Present, an exhibition drawn primarily from the Museum’s strong holdings of contemporary art. On view through January 30, 2013, in the DMA’s iconic Barrel Vault and surrounding galleries, the exhibition brings together works in various media from disparate periods to explore themes and ideas that drive artists’ creative processes. Sections are devoted to thematic associations including abstraction, minimalism, and the figure. Historical and literal associations such as the use of text, the construction of typologies, and the tradition of Vanitas structure other groupings.

Several works from the collection will be on view for the first time, including five works on paper by Texas artist Brooke Stroud and Arturo Herrera’s mixed-media piece Agon. They are installed among a number of recent acquisitions, such as Shozo Shimamato’s Untitled–Whirlpool and Simon Starling’s Venus Mirror (8/6/08, Copenhagen), both of which entered the collection this year, to focus a new lens on ways of discovering the collection. New additions to the collection will also be presented alongside familiar icons such as Morris Louis’s Delta Kappa, Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral and Portrait of a Dream, and Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red and Red.

“For the first time, you are able to see some of our masterworks by Pollock, Rothko, Hofmann, Kline, Richter, Warhol, and other Western titans alongside their Japanese contemporaries Takamatsu, Shimamato, Matsutani, and Montanaga,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, The Eugene McDermott Director of the DMA. “It is no exaggeration to state that our relatively recent focus on postwar Japan puts us at the top of our peer museums nationally and internationally, and allows for a groundbreaking conversation about emerging forms of artistic expression after World War II—a period for too long described only as one of American triumphalism and European and Latin American innovation.”

Variations on Theme: Contemporary Art 1950s–Present is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Jeffrey Grove, The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art.

Simon Starling, Venus Mirror