Beginning November 2nd, Hauser & Wirth will present an exhibition of large-scale paintings and assemblages by late American master Thornton Dial (1928 – 2016). The exhibition features major works from each period of Dial’s extraordinary career and draws upon a history of critical literature shaped by insights from such preeminent writers as Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka. As its title implies, The Visible and The Invisible, this presentation highlights Thornton Dial’s accomplishments as a maker of powerfully physical works (‘the visible’), while illuminating the often-obscured patterns of systemic trauma and exclusion (‘the invisible’) that drove his life and his prodigious artistic project.
The exhibition begins with two early important examples from the body of work known as ‘the Tiger Paintings’—a sprawling opus unto itself that culminated in an historical survey exhibition in 1993, titled Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger, a collaboration between the New Museum and the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. The two Tiger paintings on view at Hauser & Wirth assert Dial’s poetic power and his visual and symbolic ambition to dramatize and reflect upon his identity as an African American artist in a fraught American society. They reveal how Dial was a relentlessly reflexive image maker from the start, an artist whose works question their own assumptions and the traditions of art just as intensely as they do the world in which they were made and received.
Following the Image of the Tiger exhibition, Dial turned his critical gaze to specific aspects of American artistic enterprise and events of modern American life. He produced visual meditations on lynching, and odes to the quilters of Gees Bend and women’s labor. At the same time, Dial was pushing the physical properties of his work beyond painting into the realm of assemblage, narrowing a gap between painting and sculpture through an increasingly virtuosic use of found materials and ever more inventive handling of the conventional medium of paint. ‘Strange Fruit: Alabama Grapes’ (2003), for example, displays Dial’s signature use of repurposed paint cans to create a bacchanalia, redolent of Matisse in its delirious chromatic extroversion. Grape-clusters and cut-tin grape-leaves hang—in an evocation of a lynching—above the outlines of a grape arbor below.
During the final years of his career, Dial’s work became increasingly lyrical, ecological and meditative. The magisterial assemblage ‘Mr. Dial’s America’ (2011) was occasioned by the Occupy Wall Street protests. In the work, Dial unleashes his apocalyptic vison of American political history, cosmic in its intensity and its breadth. Dial-the-alchemist is similarly at full power in ‘Nuclear Condition’ (2011), a response to the meltdown and flooding at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan, which evokes a sparse, haunted, perhaps undersea world—and an implicit hope of a more just world to follow.
Will you be checking out Hauser & Wirth’s new Thornton Dial exhibition when it opens?
