Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting

June 4, 2023 - September 17, 2023
Robert Motherwell, Face of the Night (For Octavio Paz), 1981

Robert Motherwell
Face of the Night (For Octavio Paz), 1981
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 180 inches
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
© 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

June 4, 2023 - September 17, 2023

Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting is the first presentation in more than a quarter century to fully examine the mastery of Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), a major figure who shaped postwar art. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is an especially fitting venue to mount this exhibition given its institutional commitment to the artist’s work, holding over fifty works in a variety of media in its collection and hosting the final retrospective organized during Motherwell’s lifetime in 1991. 

Organized by guest curator Susan Davidson, Pure Painting features a selection of visually compelling works chosen from throughout the artist’s lengthy and influential career. Beginning with the abstracted-figurative works that dominated Motherwell’s first decade of painting as he emerged in the New York art world in the early 1940s, the exhibition highlights the subsequent key series that defined his oeuvre, offering new insights into his evolution as an artist. Although he was equally proficient as a collagist, a printmaker, and a draftsman, it is Motherwell’s expansive sense of painting that this retrospective explores.

Robert Motherwell

Hollow Men’s Cave, 1986–89/ c. 1990
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
72 × 84 inches. Private Collection, Minneapolis
© 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Robert Motherwell
Face of the Night (For Octavio Paz), 1981
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 180 inches
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund
© 2023 Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY