Download as PDF
View on Galerie Magazine

The entrance to the Dallas Art Fair 2019 featuring Stephen Eichhorn’s sculptural work for Chicago’s Carrie Secrist Gallery based on his Cats & Plants series. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE DALLAS ART FAIR

The Dallas Art Fair kicked off last night with a VIP preview. Now in its 11th edition and with nearly 100 exhibitors, the fair opened with a colorful bang and welcomed international galleries including Blain|Southern, Lisson Gallery, and Sadie Coles, all of which were among the first-time exhibitors.

At the Thursday morning preview, the fair revealed the artists who had been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) through its annual acquisition fund. Now in its fourth year, the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program, which is led by the DMA’s director, Agustin Arteaga, and curator Katherine Brodbeck, had a budget of $150,000. The group makes its selections directly at the fair and chose works by Sheila Hicks, Don Dudley, Arcmanoro Niles, Samuel Levi Jones, Emmanuel Van de Auwera, Maja Ruznic, Nobutaka Aozaki, and Dike Blair.

“This is really very important,” Arteaga said at the press preview, “because it provides us with an opportunity to support an artist. We have to bring new fresh works as well as renowned artists.”

Recommended: 9 Great Things to See and Do During the Dallas Art Fair

The fair’s director, Kelly Cornell, said that the program “has created a strong relationship between the fair and the museum, and ensures the highest-quality work is brought to Dallas.”

New York and Berlin dealer Sean Horton, who recently moved to Dallas (after a 15-year stint in New York, where he was a pioneer of the Lower East Side galleries) to open a space, Sean Horton (Presents), noted that the quality of work at the fair had indeed gotten better since its early days. “There used to be a stigma that if you bought in Dallas you weren’t getting the best work,” he told Galerie. “But that’s not the case anymore.”

And more than one dealer noted that if you want to be part of the conversation in Dallas, you have to bring your artists here. Gallerist Rachel Uffner recalled that she first came to Dallas for the annual benefit gala for Two × Two for AIDS and Art, a 20-year-old organization that supports both amfAR and the Dallas Museum of Art. Since then, the Rachofskys, who are among Dallas’s most esteemed and well-known collecting families, have purchased a work by Bianca Beck. This year, a work of Uffner’s artist Arcmanoro Niles was acquired by the DMA through its acquisition program.

While there were works by Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor to be found, they took a back seat to the fresher talent at this fair. If Stephen Eichhorn’s surprising and endearing Cats & Plants installation at the entrance to the fair was any sign, there’s a sense of fun here that’s unmistakable. Here are some suggestions for what to see at the fair.

Maja Ruznic
Conduit Gallery, Dallas

Two large brightly colored canvases by artist Maja Ruznic were the centerpiece of Dallas’s Conduit Gallery. One of the pieces, the 2018 work Azmira’s Daughters, is a lush pink canvas that has been stained with paint and features two ghostly figures who fade into the canvas. It had been announced that morning that it had been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art as part of the acquisition program. “I think it’s a very different fair now,” said Nancy Whitenack, the owner and director of the gallery. “It’s much edgier. Dealers bring their very best work. They understand that there are great collectors here.”