Alex Da Corte : the whale / edited by Alison Hearst and Alex Da Corte ; with contributions by Alison Hearst, Kemi Adeyemi, Suzanne Hudson, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Alex Da Corte.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Da Corte, Alex, 1980- artist, editor.

Adeyemi, Kemi, author.

Hudson, Suzanne, author.

Abdurraqib, Hanif, author.

Contributor:

Hearst, Alison, curator, author.

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, host institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Da Corte, Alex, 1980---Exhibitions.

Da Corte, Alex.

Installations (Art)--Exhibitions.

Installations (Art).

Genre:

exhibition catalogs.

Exhibition catalogs.

Physical Description:

176 pages : color illustrations, plates ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Fort Worth, TX : Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth ; New York, NY : DelMonico Books, 2025.

Biography/History:

Venezuelan American artist Alex Da Corte lives and works in Philadelphia. His career surveys include Mr.Remember at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, Denmark (2022-23) and Fresh Hell at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan (2023). His solo exhihbitions have been staged at Secession Museum, Vienna, Austria (2015), Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2016), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2018), and other institutions. His work was selected for the 2018 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, the 2019 Venice Biennale, and the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Da Corte's recent writings include essays for the exhibition catalogues Marisol: A Retrospective (Buffalo AKG/DelMonico, 2023) and Ellsworth Kelly at 100 (Glenstone Museum, 2024). In 2026, Da Corte will co-curate a retrospective of the artist Roy Lichtenstein, the first in New York in more than thirty years, at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. - page 174

Alison Hearst is Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. She organized the museum's FOCUS exhibition series from 2015 to 2022, including solo exhibitions by Thomas Demand, Joyce Pensato, Analia Saban, Lorna Simpson, Stanley Whitney, and others. Hearst was the curator of Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings (2016), Robyn O'Neil: WE, THE MASSES (2019), and I'll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen (2023). In addition to the catalogues published alongside these exhibitions, she was also a contributing author to Mexico Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990 (The Modern, 2013), Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s (Skira Rizzoli/The Modern, 2014); Katherine Bernhardt: Swatches (Karma, 2018), and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: Collection Highlights (The Modern, 2020). - page 174

Kemi Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the co-editor of Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and the author of Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022). Her forthcoming book, Writing About Black Art, was a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2023. Adeyemi is the founder and director of The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts-writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary Black art. - page 174

Suzanne Hudson is Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. An art historian and critic, she writes with an emphasis on the history, theory, and conventions of painting: within art schools and alternative pedagogical institutions, including museums, but also in spaces of care work and medical and psychological services. A contributor to Artforum and Brooklyn Rail, among others, she has written numerous essays for journals, exhibition catalogues, and artist monographs. Her books include Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT Press, 2017) and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021). - page 174

Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His books include The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2017), his first full-length collection of poems; They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), a collection of essays; Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize; and A Little Devil in America (Random House, 2021), a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. His latest book is There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024), and also a New York Times bestseller. Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2021 and a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient in 2024. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School. - page 174

Summary:

Focusing on the past decade of Da Corte's career, this exhibition features more than forty paintings, several drawings, and a video that considers painting as a performative act. Da Corte is globally recognized for his hybrid installations marrying painting, performance, video, and sculpture. Immersed in the history of art, design, and pop culture, Da Corte's combinations evoke mixed feelings, such as fantasy and malice, while crossing hierarchies of high and low culture. His works combine modernist color theory and the spatial experiments of post-minimalist sculpture to consider topics including consumerism, persona, sex, invisible labor, taste, power, and desire. The exhibition's title, The Whale, illustrates the artist's vast mining of contemporary culture, a process that Da Corte describes as "analogous to the Jungian night sea journey, looking backward and collecting the past as an act of commingling with spirits, either cultural or personal." This concept, drawn from the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, relates to myths in which the hero is devoured by a sea monster--a whale--and descends into a land of ghosts, e.g. Hades, or Hell, in the quest for individuality. Da Corte sees the medium of painting as "a cavity for these ghosts"--much like museums themselves. Painting, forever brimming with the weight of its own history and historically itself an uncanny threshold of consumption, represents "the mouth of the whale" to Da Corte. The artist situates himself here, within a crowded, beautiful trash-scape of contemporary culture, digesting advertisements, animation cels, compact disc graphic design, art history, and more. The ephemeral pop culture source materials referenced in Da Corte's paintings make evident how the things we identify with--or use to define us--evolve over time. To realize this reconstructed vision of painting, Da Corte stretches the medium's traditional boundaries. The exhibition incorporates Puffy Paintings in stuffed, upholstered neoprene, Shampoo Paintings comprised of drugstore hair products, and sculptural Slatwall Paintings, where found objects protrude from the slatted grooves found in everyday commercial displays. The remaining paintings in the exhibition are reverse-glass paintings, in which the artist employs a process often used in animated celluloids and sign-making. Da Corte creates the image in reverse order, applying the front-most layer of paint to the back side of the glass and building up subsequent layers, with the background added last. In addition, the exhibition encompasses the artist's source materials and ephemera, providing a fresh perspective on his process. - from exhibition website (04/14/2025)

Contents:

Foreword / Andrea Karnes

The Great Pretender / Alison Hearst

Gay Painting / Kemi Adeyemi

The Conversation Pit / Suzanne Hudson

Ekphrasis and Memory / Hanif Abdurraqib

Plates

Voice Memos / Alex Da Corte

Plate List

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Image Credits

Lenders to the Exhibition.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and plate list.

Local Notes:

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Alex Da Corte: The Whale, curated by Alison Hearst, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, March 2 - September 7, 2025. - page 176

ISBN:

1636811604

9781636811604

OCLC:

1481602539