“Elegy (Los Angeles)”

The Dallas Art Fair Foundation this week announced it has gifted two artworks from the Dallas Art Fair’s Four x Five exhibition to two major Dallas museums: The Dallas Museum of Art has acquired Cynthia Daignault’s painting, Elegy (Los Angeles) (2019), for its permanent collection, and The Nasher Sculpture Center has acquired a new wall sculpture by Gabriel Rico, Cincuenta from the series “Reducción objetiva orquestada (2020),” for its permanent collection.

“Through the generosity of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation, over the past four years we have brought 32 works by 26 artists into the collection,” Dr. Agustin Arteaga, the DMA’s Eugene McDermott director, said. “The fair and the funds provided by the foundation present a wonderful opportunity for the museum to build on our collection goals by bringing together a rich selection of local, national and international art right here in Dallas.”

Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the DMA’s Hoffman Family senior curator of contemporary art, commented, “Cynthia Daignault’s Elegy (Los Angeles) is history painting for our time. Although Daignault’s source material is a photograph of the 1992 LA uprising, it still hits a raw nerve, both in terms of the plumes of smoke which call to mind the wildfires that have ravaged the west coast this summer and the country’s continued reckoning with racial injustice.

“Her distinctive brush strokes are almost at odds with her grey scale palette, animating the supposedly neutral presentation of the news with a pulse of emotion,” Brodbeck added.

Nasher Director Jeremy Strick said the Scuplture Center is “delighted to receive the gift of this work by Gabriel Rico from the Dallas Art Fair Foundation and Perrotin. The work’s poetic arrangement of disparate parts will rhyme beautifully with so many of the works in the Nasher collection.”

Nasher Chief Curator Jed Morse continued, “Like Dada collages or Surrealist assemblages Rico’s works propose new ways of understanding civilization and its relationship with the natural world through the juxtaposition of disparate objects, each of which comes with its own constellation of meanings and associations.

“The sculpture adds a new formal branch to the lineage of found object construction in the Nasher collection, including welded compositions by John Chamberlain and David Smith, as well as assemblages by Phyllida Barlow, Tony Cragg, and Joan Miró,” Morse said.

Dallas Art Fair Director Kelly Cornell said, “We deeply value our close, ongoing relationships with the DMA and the Nasher, and it’s an honor to bolster their already world-class collections. The synergy we have, and moments like these, further the arts in Dallas and make sure the city continues to be a cultural destination.”

— Tammye Nash