The Dallas Museum of Art has announced the acquisition of three major works of contemporary art, each significant additions to the Museum’s collection. The works are:
Marlene Dumas’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (2008), an expressive portrait based upon a 1943 photograph of Ingrid Bergman.
Jim Hodges’s and still this (2005-08), a dazzling gold-leaf painting referencing landscape and reflection that extends across an open circle of ten gessoed canvases.
Yayoi Kusama’s Accumulation (1962-64), a historically important sculpture dating from a critical high point in the artist’s career and featuring a chair covered with hundreds of her signature bulging forms.
Acquired jointly by the Museum and The Rachofsky Collection with the DMA/amfAR Benefit auction Fund, these new acquisitions reflect the DMA’s ongoing dedication to enhancing its contemporary art collection with works of singular importance.
“These new works by Dumas, Hodges and Kusama each play an important role within the constellation of contemporary works at the DMA,” said Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Whether they represent the first work of their kind to enter our collection, such as the Kusama sculpture, or they deepen existing holdings in Dallas, such as the Dumas painting and Hodges installation, each piece further defines the DMA’s collection and reinforces our city’s standing as a major center for the collection, exhibition and study of contemporary art.”
Considered to be among the most important museum holdings of its kind in the United States, the DMA’s contemporary art collection has benefited tremendously over the past decade from the DMA/amfAR Benefit auction Fund, which is supported by the annual fundraising event Two by Two for Aids and Art. Since its founding, the fund has allowed the Museum to acquire some 70 works of contemporary art, examples of which were recently on view at the DMA in TWO x TWO x TEN: Celebrating Ten Years of Two by Two for AIDS and Art.
All three works will be featured in future installations of the collection. Additionally, new media works by Willie Doherty and Yinka Shonibare, both recently acquired through the DMA/amfAR Benefit auction Fund, will go on view this spring and fall respectively, as part of the Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance and Performance/Art exhibitions.
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