25 YEARS OF COLLECTING

The Warehouse celebrates the 25th anniversary of building The Rachofsky Collection with a show curated by Allan Schwartzman.

BY ALI NEMEROV

Opening on August 26th at The Warehouse, an exhibition space and project initiated by Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, 25 Years of Collecting will celebrate the significant commitment that the couple have made to the art and artists of the postwar period over the past two-and-a-half decades–and chart how their perspective has evolved over time. Taking over the expansive 18,000-square-foot space, the exhibition will be organized by collecting period, telling the story of how the collection has grown and changed from year to year in concert with the couple’s interests and priorities. “What’s really interesting,” Howard Rachofsky says, “is how you see our interests focus on a specific historical moment, and then move to something less systematic, and then back again. This is an opportunity for us to step back and learn from the past and look ahead to where we’d like to go.”

Past exhibitions at The Warehouse have focused on a specific theme culled from the Rachofskys’ collection of roughly 1,000 objects. Often sparsely installed, these shows have placed the dynamics between individual objects at their center, creating new resonances–and dissonances–in their intimate juxtapositions. One such exhibition, Geometries On and Off the Grid: Art from 1950 to the Present, traced geometric abstraction in the postwar period across artwork spanning eighteen countries and seven decades. The exhibition brought together works exemplifying one of the

Above: Louise Bourgeois (American 1911-2010), Cell (You Better Grow Up), 1993, steel, glass, marble, ceramic, and wood, cage: 83 x 82 x 83.50 in.; mirrors open: 88 x 90 x 84 in. Photograph by Kevin Todora; Below: Robert Ryman (American, 1930-2019), Untitled, 1961, oil on stretched linen canvas, 37.87 x 37.87 in. Both The Rachofsky Collection.

Above: Kai Althoff (German, b. 1966), Untitled, 2004, oil and varnished paper on fabric, 29.87 x 28.37 in. The Rachofsky Collection.; Below: Kazuo Shiraga (Japanese 1924-2008), Tenshosei Botsuusen (Featherless Arrow incarnated from Heavenly Swift Star), 1960, oil on canvas, canvas: 71.37 x 107.37 x 1.50 in.; framed: 72.37 x 108.50 x 1.62 in. The Rachofsky Collection. Photographs by Kevin Todora.

Maurizio Cattelan (Italian, b. 1960), Untitled, 2003, resin body, synthetic hair, clothes, electronic device, bronze drum, 31.50 x 33.50 x 22 in. The Rachofsky Collection. Photograph by Kevin Todora. Richard Serra (American, b. 1938), Close Pin Prop, 1969-76, rolled lead, tube: 37.75 x 9.50 in. dia.; pole: 79 x 3.50 in dia. The Rachofsky Collection. Photograph by Kevin Todora.

collection’s core competencies: a global perspective on postwar art with a specific interest in Italian art and that of postwar Japan. The largest space in the exhibition, Gallery 3, brought together works by Giovanni Anselmo, Robert Irwin, Alan Saret, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Tuttle, and Nobuo Sekine, highlighting affinities in the ways in which these artists from America, Italy, and Japan contended with the formal purity of their minimalist predecessors, breaking with the traditions of their systems, organization, and geometries in the process.

In 25 Years of Collecting, Gallery 3 will take on an entirely different–and slightly idiosyncratic–character. The 2,500-square-foot Gallery 3 space will be “something between open storage and a sculpture court,” notes Allan Schwartzman, the exhibition’s curator, who has advised the Rachofskys since the collection’s inception. Brimming with sculpture, the space will bring together 55 works spanning the history of postwar art, from Edward Kienholz’ Untitled (With Piano Keys), 1966; to Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather, 1993; to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Passport), 2005; to Aria Dean’s Work (tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie), 2021. As opposed to a chronological or thematic grouping, relationships here will be made between works that were created with entirely different intentions, like that between Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1970—a wall-bound work made of anodized aluminum depicting the progression of a mathematical sequence—and Analia Saban’s Draped Marble (Emerald, Jade, Fior di Pesco Classico), 2015, in which three marble slabs have been bent in half and draped, midpoints crumbling, over a wooden sawhorse. The juxtaposition of the two works results in a playful and refreshing take on the evolution of artistic engagement with notions of progression and seriality in sculpture over time.

The exhibition’s opening gallery will assemble three works which serve as a mise-en-scène of sorts, each created in a span of seven years (2007–2014) but that together represent the range and breadth of themes that the exhibition touches upon and the collection holds. Sigmar Polke’s The Illusionist, 2007, at nearly ten feet wide, looms large. Part of the artist’s Lens Paintings series, the work is one of the last, and grandest, that the artist created in his lifetime. To create the piece, Polke used a semitransparent plastic surface to depict two Victorian magicians conducting a séance with a blindfolded woman. Painting on the back, sides, and front of the material, the artist uses the painting’s subject and substrate as a metaphor for his own practice: the artist as the magician, the subject—and possibly its viewer—the illusion. On an opposite wall Maurizio Cattelan’s Untitled (Canvas & Broom), 2009, will function as a witty counterpoint. The work is at once a painting and a sculpture, reminiscent both of Piero Manzoni’s iconic folded Achrome canvases and Marcel Duchamp’s infamous Readymade sculptures. Here a broom props up the surface of the canvas as it appears to sag to the floor, which, as Schwartzman notes, “is a

Buster Keaton-esque, deadpan take on the end of modernism. The content is collapsing, the party is over.” Between these works, Pierre Huyghe’s La déraison, 2014, will be installed. The sculpture is a cast concrete fragment of a female figure from a monument created for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale outside of Paris. Sculptor Jean-Baptiste Belloc intended for the figure to represent Africa set amongst figures personifying each of France’s colonies. Shown toppled, headless, and covered in moss, the work functions as an eerie and prescient reminder of the collapse of colonial ideals and histories, and their relationship to the history of modernism–an increasingly central theme of contemporary art, and one with which other works in the exhibition also contend.

The Rachofskys have long collected both significant historical works representing pivotal shifts in the history of art, and contemporary works seeking to trace new stories about the art of our time. Spanning every medium and approach to artmaking, 25 Years of Collecting is a rare opportunity to take stock of the collection’s history and look towards its future. As Howard Rachofsky noted, “For us, collecting is deeply personal but also a commitment to the wider community. Over the years our interests have reflected just that: what are the most pressing artistic statements from history through today, and what can we learn from the conversations between them? This exhibition offers a new perspective on that question, and we’re excited to see what comes of it.” P

Above: Cecily Brown (British, 1969), We didn't mean to go to sea, 2018, oil on linen, 89 x 83 x 1.50 in. The Rachofsky Collection. Photograph by Kevin Todora; Below: Charles White (American, 1918-1979), Untitled, c. 1966-1967, oil on canvas, 28.50 x 50.50 in., framed: 30.25 x 52 x 1.75 in. The Rachofsky Collection. Photograph courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery. For open hours please visit thewarehousedallas.org.