Alex Da Corte: The Whale
March 2–September 7, 2025
Alex Da Corte: The Whale is the first museum exhibition to survey the Venezuelan American interdisciplinary artist’s long relationship with painting. Organized by the Modern and Curator Alison Hearst, the exhibition focuses on the past decade of Da Corte’s career and includes more than forty paintings, several drawings, and a video that considers painting as a performative act. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with a special contribution from Da Corte and essays by Hearst, scholar Kemi Adeyemi, art historian Suzanne Hudson, and poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib.
Da Corte is globally recognized for his hybrid installations combining 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.
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, CD covers and liner notes, 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 Slatboard 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.
Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling
March 15–July 27, 2025
Feeling Color: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, organized by the Modern and Curator María Elena Ortiz, celebrates the work of these two artists and their contributions to the story of abstract painting in the late twentieth century. Williams (1926–90) and Bowling (b. 1934) migrated from British Guiana (now Guyana) in South America to European and American cities in the 1950s, escaping social upheavals in their native country. Expanding on the international legacies of abstraction that are among the Modern’s central concerns, these artists’ works show that, even in moments of despair, art creates a space for refuge, reckoning, and imagination. This exhibition puts both artists in conversation, illustrating Williams’s powerful commitment to investigating abstract forms and Bowling’s painterly and experimental approach. Williams was Bowling’s elder, and together their works provide an opportunity to reflect on the power of art and abstraction in the twentieth century.
Feeling Color presents Bowling’s influential Map series, 1967–71, and his later poured paintings, which evidence sociopolitical concerns and explore the materiality of paint. Williams’s works include examples from two painting series, Shostakovich, 1969–81, and The Olmec-Maya and Now, 1981–85, alongside other paintings and drawings. These works reflect the artists’ histories by combining modernist abstraction with imagery derived from African diasporic dwellings and the Indigenous cultures of South America, each pointing to the complexity of their postcolonial heritage. These are works that embrace color, movement, experimentation, and abstraction to convey human emotion.
Aubrey Williams, born in British Guiana, is an important figure in British postwar painting, representing an approach toward abstraction that incorporates cross-cultural and transatlantic conversations. Originally trained as Agricultural Field Officer in Guyana, Williams moved to London in the 1950s to study engineering but changed course, earning an art degree from the St. Martin’s School of Art. The artist travelled extensively throughout Europe, created works in Jamaica and Florida in the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually settled in London until his death. Awarded the Commonwealth Prize in Painting by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965, Williams was a founding member of the 1960s Caribbean Artists Movement in London. His works have been exhibited internationally and are included in several prestigious collections in the US and Britain.
Frank Bowling OBE RA was elected to Britain’s Royal Academy in 2005 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008. He is a pivotal figure in British abstract painting, contributing to the canon for over six decades. Born in British Guiana, Bowling migrated to London in the 1950s to study art. Eventually, he moved to New York City, keeping art studios in both cities. In New York, he cultivated a community that included critic Clement Greenberg and like-minded artists such as Jack Whitten and Al Loving Jr. His work has been exhibited widely and is part of prestigious collections around the world.
David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time
August 16–November 2, 2025
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents David-Jeremiah: The Fire This Time, organized by guest curator Christopher Blay. The exhibition’s title, derived from that of James Baldwin’s novel The Fire Next Time (1963), refers to a stanza of the spiritual hymn “Mary Don’t You Weep”: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, / No more water, the fire next time!”
The body of work on view in this exhibition is a group of vertical assemblages of black and other monochromatic paintings on shaped wood that form an installation. Collectively titled Hood Niggas Camping, the twenty-eight works stand over ten feet tall. This primary configuration surrounds viewers completely.
Fire is a major motif in David-Jeremiah’s work. Figuratively, fire is the crucible through which the artist has passed, having spent nearly four years in prison for an aggravated robbery he committed as a teenager. During that “staycation,” as he refers to it, David-Jeremiah conceived of binders full of work, operating in a conceptual space that defies any self-imposed rules made from the comfort of most artists’ studios. Birthing new modes of self-reflective determination and urgency born out of detention, David-Jeremiah brings the fire this time, incinerating what has come before to propose something new: confinement-conceptualism. His maximalist approach to art-making feeds the flames of Hood Niggas Camping and its towering paintings. This is a purifying, refining fire—a disruptive, controlled burn that course-corrects the trajectory of conceptualism. It is fire.
In his artistic practice, David-Jeremiah engages with the ritualistic context of fire and flame. Whether it is sending dead cops to hell in a race to redeem their souls, as in his 2019 painting Hamborghini Rally: Soul Hunt City (‘68 Semipro), or the last in the series of his I Drive Thee tondo paintings manifesting its soul over the flames of an incinerator for a succession of urns in L’Anima, 2023 (part of his 2024‒25 exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts), the flames are there. In the presentation at the Modern, his paintings-as-figures bask in the glow of embers that we, the viewers, create. David-Jeremiah’s work resides at the edge of the fire, and we see our faces and selves reflected back in the flickering flames.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
October 12, 2025–January 18, 2026
Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Senior Curator of Contemporary Collections, Sarah Howgate, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is the first major museum exhibition in the US dedicated to the work of one of the world's foremost figure painters. The exhibition will be overseen at the Modern by Chief Curator Andrea Karnes. Saville rose to prominence in the early 1990s, following her acclaimed degree show at the Glasgow School of Art. In the years since, she has played a leading role in the reinvigoration of figurative painting—a genre that she continues to test the limits of to this day. Her unique ability to create visceral portraits from thick layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the process itself, an act that she experiences as both energetic and bodily.
Bringing together fifty works made throughout the artist's career, this exhibition traces the development of her practice from the 1990s to today, spotlighting key artworks from her career while exploring her lasting connection to art history. From charcoal drawings to large-scale oil paintings of the human form, this broadly chronological display includes works that question the conventional and historical notions of female beauty. The exhibition also highlights the monumental nudes that launched Saville to acclaim in 1992 and new 'portraits' made for the twenty-first century. Rendered in fluorescent, saturated tones, this pioneering series interrogates the connections between the physical and virtual in our image-saturated age.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting was created in close collaboration with the artist, and includes works borrowed from important public and private collections around the world. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication, with texts from Emanuele Coccia, Dr Nicholas Cullinan, John Elderfield, Roxane Gay, and Karnes, and a conversation between Saville and Howgate.
