Alex Da Corte: The Whale

Alex Da Corte: The Whale is the first museum exhibition to survey the interdisciplinary artist’s long relationship with painting. 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. Galleries adjacent to the exhibition will present a selection of works from the Modern’s collection, extending the exhibition’s deep exploration of Da Corte’s catalysts and influences.

Organized by the Modern and Curator Alison Hearst, the exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a special contribution from Da Corte and essays by Hearst, poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, art historian Suzanne Hudson, and scholar Kemi Adeyemi.

Alex Da Corte: The Whale is made possible through major support from the Texas Commission on the Arts, with additional contributions from the Fort Worth Tourism Public Improvement District, Matthew Marks Gallery, Fort Worth Promotion and Development Fund, Henrik Persson, Gio' Marconi Gallery, and Sadie Coles HQ.