Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

ED RUSCHA: ROAD TESTED

January 23 - April 17, 2011

Dr. Marla Price, director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is pleased to announce Ed Ruscha: Road Tested. The exhibition, organized by Michael Auping, the Modern's chief curator, will track key images inspired by the artist's long fascination with driving.

Since Ruscha's first road trip from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956, the artist has continued to engage the images he has encountered along the roads of the western United States. This multimedia presentation will feature some of his most iconic paintings, including two large-scale works from the 1960s, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas (1963) and Standard Station with Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964). The exhibition marks the first time these two paintings will be reunited in over three decades.

Ruscha's exploration of the topography of greater Los Angeles will be represented by paintings that depict aerial grids of the city in smog and at night, as well as various Southern California horizons and sunsets, and paintings inspired by street names and road signs. The exhibition will also include many of the artist's most famous books, including Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Real-Estate Opportunities, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, and the innovative panoramic Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

Ed Ruscha: Road Tested will also explore Ruscha's lifelong interest in the mechanics and design of cars through paintings, photographs, drawings, and the rarely seen film Miracle, which tells the story of a mechanic who is magically transformed as he rebuilds the carburetor on a 1965 Mustang. In describing the exhibition, Auping explains, "Ed's work has always been associated with the theme of travel, but amazingly an exhibition that brings together many of the images that have been specifically inspired by the road has never been put together."

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, with essays by Michael Auping and the artist Richard Prince, and an interview with Ruscha about driving. The book will also include a pull-out road map pinpointing the location of inspiration for many of the artist's most famous images.

For more information, contact:
Kendal Smith Lake
Manager of Communications
(817) 738-9215 x167
kendal@themodern.org
or:
Dustin Van Orne
Media Relations Coordinator
(817) 840-2151
dustin@themodern.org

FOCUS: Erik Parker

December 5, 2010-February 6, 2011

The FOCUS exhibition series is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Curator Andrea Karnes for the Museum's Director's Council, a group that supports acquisitions at the Museum. Each FOCUS exhibition presents work by an emerging contemporary artist. FOCUS exhibitions are open to the public and are included in general Museum admission: $10 for adults; $4 for seniors (60+) and students with identification; free for children 12 and under; free for Modern members.

Erik Parker has described his work as "fragmented samples of our culture." A Texas native, Parker is known for his figurative paintings of disembodied, twisted heads that ooze vivid color and recede into themselves as much as they explode outwardly into the space around them.

Made with spiraling swirls of hot-to-pale pink, vivid oranges, yellows, greens, ranges of blue-from deep to swimming pool-reds, and purples, the figures are often set against dark backgrounds containing their own matrix of dots, paisleys, stripes, and waves. Accompanied by a word or phrase nestled somewhere in the lower half of the canvas, phrases such as Half Made Man, Player Hater, Betty Fords, Drama, Crime, Hoax, Why Me, Think Twice, and American Apparel label and suggest the state of each sitter. The words, when juxtaposed with the portraits, clearly speak to a wide range of cultural conundrums.

Erik Parker is an artist living and working in New York City. Born in 1968 in Stuttgart, Germany, Parker grew up in San Antonio, Texas. He received a BFA in 1996 from the University of Texas at Austin and earned his MFA at SUNY Purchase in 1998. Parker's work has been shown internationally in both solo and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include an upcoming show at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, and exhibitions at the Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; Marianne Boesky, New York; De Appel, Amsterdam; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Leo Koenig Inc., New York; Gallery Charlotte Moser, Geneva, Switzerland; and Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co., Milan, Italy. Parker has shown in group exhibitions at Pinturas de la Colección Diezy7, Puerto de Santander, Spain; Faurschou, Copenhagen, Denmark; Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee; Gallery Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Bronx Museum, New York (toured to Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, L.I.C., New York.

For more information, contact:
Kendal Smith Lake
Manager of Communications
(817) 738-9215 x167
kendal@themodern.org
or:
Dustin Van Orne
Media Relations Coordinator
(817) 840-2151
dustin@themodern.org

FOCUS: Robert Lazzarini

February 20 - April 5, 2011

The FOCUS exhibition series is organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Curator Andrea Karnes for the Museum's Director's Council, a group that supports acquisitions at the Museum. Each FOCUS exhibition presents work by an emerging contemporary artist. FOCUS exhibitions are open to the public and are included in general Museum admission: $10 for adults; $4 for seniors (60+) and students with identification; free for children 12 and under; free for Modern members.

Robert Lazzarini is best known for his sculptures of common objects in which detailed craftsmanship is combined with precise illusionistic distortion. Scaled to the size of the original object and using the same materials, Lazzarini creates versions of guns, knives, brass knuckles, chairs, telephones, telephone booths, and skulls, among other things. Factuality is a theme that runs throughout his imagery, as is visual perception and how that perception is constructed in both the mind of the viewer and in the physical world. "I am concerned with the direct relationship between the viewer, the original object (the role of memory), and the sculpture (the object reconfigured)," Lazzarini explains.

In some cases the artist's choice of subject has psychological implications. The viewer who moves in for a better look at gun iv, 2009, made of steel and walnut, for example, can suddenly be staring down the barrel of a gun. Here, Lazzarini's deadpan yet skewed imagery disrupts any possibility of what one might consider normal viewing and coaxes the viewer into the prospect of something dangerous. The objects in this work initially appear to be a mirror image of a single .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. Closer examination, however, reveals that these are two distinct, conjoined objects and that the barrel of one gun pierces through the grip of the other. The artist's use of even, soft lighting and his subtle distortion of the gallery walls add to the optical illusion and to the viewer's disorientation. Encountering a work like gun iv raises such basic questions as, Do I know what I think I know? Do I see what I think I see? The title, the simple lower case gun with the iv to mark its number in the series, reinforces the idea that the work is the actual object while vision and memory suggest that these are not guns we have ever seen before.

There is a rich art historical lineage for Lazzarini's work. His repetition of objects and the types of (often dark) pop culture subjects he depicts recall artists such as Andy Warhol, who created his own series of guns in the early 1980s. Lazzarini has also been compared to artists who employed visual tricks in their work-the nineteenth century trompe l'oeil painter William Harnett, for example. But it is the Surrealist René Magritte whose study of recognizable objects most relates to Lazzarini's work. When Magritte created his famous painting The Treachery of Images in 1929, which depicts a pipe and the declaration, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe), he was calling into question the notion of representing a three-dimensional object on a flat, two-dimensional surface and its relationship to the original. Like Magritte and others before him, Lazzarini pushes the boundaries of how the realm of the visual plays into our understanding of the world. His modern-day explorations are specific to true form and materiality, while at the same time they address the notion of dislocation and the infinite possibilities of re-presentation.

Robert Lazzarini was born in New Jersey in 1965 and currently lives in New York City. He received his BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1990. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions.

For more information, contact:
Kendal Smith Lake
Manager of Communications
(817) 738-9215 x167
kendal@themodern.org
or:
Dustin Van Orne
Media Relations Coordinator
(817) 840-2151
dustin@themodern.org

Modern Art Museum Information

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
3200 Darnell Street, Fort Worth, TX 76107
Telephone 817.738.9215 Toll-free 1.866.824.5566 Fax 817.735.1161
Website: www.themodern.org
Email: info@themodern.org

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*$10: General (13 to Adult)
Free: Children under 13
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*Changes effective June 24, 2007

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• Free first Sunday of every month
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Hours may vary throughout the inaugural year to accommodate demand. Please call ahead to check for up-to-date scheduling.

The Modern focuses on post–World War II international art in all media. Additionally, the Museum offers a variety of educational programs, including lectures, guided tours, adult and children's classes and workshops, summer art camp and occasional family activity days. The Modern also features a state-of-the-art auditorium that showcases films, musical performances, and lectures, and a restaurant, Café Modern, housed in an elliptical dining room.