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Erwin Wurm, Untitled, 2011
Photo: Ottomura

ERWIN WURM Beauty Business

13 April - August 2012

Opening celebration – Friday 13 April 21.00 – 24.00 (9.00 - midnight).

Erwin Wurm, an artist living and working in Vienna, combines various art forms: sculpture, photography and performance into a unique personal view of the everyday world. Drawing on history, humour and philosophy, Wurm creates light-hearted art works with at times serious messages. His new large sculptural works created specifically for this exhibition, which have a grand theatrical scale, attract us to interact and participate.

Beauty Business is Wurm's first cohesive focus on the home or dwelling. As the architect Le Corbusier once remarked, the purpose of architecture is to move us, then with his work Erwin Wurm consistently realizes architecture's highest aim: he creates works whose extraordinary power lies not only in how deeply they make us feel, but also in how they let us see the complexity of our feelings, in meaningful environments which help us to dwell. This exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach.

Additional support for this exhibition was made possible by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

Organizer: Dallas Contemporary, Texas
Curator: Florence Ostende, Paris, France

Neiman Marcus (March - April 2012)
Dallas Art Fair (12-15 April 2012)
Goss-Michael Foundation (13 April - August 2012)
Dallas Contemporary (13 April - 19 August 2012)
Design District area (April 2012)
Oliver Francis Gallery (April 2012)

The Dallas Biennale is a new forum for contemporary art in one of the most vibrant cities for art in the United States. The 2012 Biennale will be the first exhibition and chapter for this conceptual platform organized by the Dallas Contemporary, regarded as “America’s Kunsthalle”. Taking place in various locations in both the city center and design district, it will be shaped by the concepts of one curator appointed to enter into a dialogue with the city and the people interested in contemporary culture, as well as a large number of international artists. Locations for 2012 Dallas Biennale include: Dallas Contemporary, Neiman Marcus (Main Street), Dallas Art Fair, Goss-Michael Foundation and the Nasher Sculpture Center. The curator for the 2012 Dallas Biennale is Florence Ostende, adjunct curator, Dallas Contemporary.

This will be the first large-scale survey exhibition of international artists to be presented by Dallas Contemporary to audiences in Dallas and Texas.

The Dallas Biennale is intended to be a survey of international scope, based on extensive curatorial travel across the state of Texas and globally; however, it is not an exhibition of reviving the encyclopaedic format of other grand international surveys, but a critique of them. The exhibition is intended to ignite larger intellectual discussions surrounding international biennales and their growing lack of intellectual clarity and international standardization. Focus, on this one and only Dallas Biennale (thus a play with the loaded and charged name), will be on and to highlight each artist with a large space to exhibit their work, from photography to performance. No over arching theme will exist, but a return to early Biennale principals of celebrating artistic ideas.

All of the art works that will be included in this Biennale will be seen for the very first time; all will be made specifically for the exhibition. The artists selected for the Biennale all incorporate tensions between the power of the large-scale exhibition and the individual artist. Reflected in the exhibition’s title, Dallas Biennale, this universal theme group exhibition, viewed from a early late-twentieth-first-century perspective, links the 20+ artists. For some artists in the exhibition, the clichéd concept of the curated, multi-venue, institutional exhibition will dominate their ideas and art; for others, it is the individual aspects of human existence that informs their works.

The Dallas Biennale additionally highlights the unique development of international contemporary art and ties into the large Diaspora communities of Dallas – Asian, European, North and South American. Capturing the cultural, social, and political aspects of a large city, the exhibition considers installation, painting, sculpture, photography and video by artists who have contributed significantly to the international dialogue of art. Partial list of participating artists: Morehshin Allahyari (Iran); Nick Barbee (USA); Anthea Behm (Australia); Kim Beom (Korea); Michael Corris (USA); Zoe Crosher (USA); Sylvie Fleury (Switzerland); Pierre Joseph (France); Claude Leveque (France); Nicole Miller (USA); Gabriel Martinez (USA); Hugues Reip (France); Delphine Reist (Switzerland); Michael Smith (USA); Mario Garcia Torres (Mexico); and Clarissa Tossin (Brazil).

For information: exhibitions@dallascontemporary.org