Dunn and Brown Gallery

DUNN AND BROWN GALLERY // MAY 20 // 6-8PM

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Dunn and Brown Contemporary
5020 Tracy Street
Dallas, Texas 75205
214-521-4322
dunnandbrown.com

VERNON FISHER + XIAOZE XIE
May 20 - June 30, 2011

Xiaoze Xie: Transient Memories

Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Xiaoze Xie: Transient
Memories. This is the inaugural exhibition for artist Xiaoze Xie with Dunn and Brown
Contemporary. The exhibition consists of 10 works on paper and one painting on canvas
depicting political figures of the East and West and political events in China’s recent history.

A Chinese-born, U.S.-based artist, Xiaoze Xie is known for his realistic paintings of stacked
newspapers and images of political figures from China’s recent history, such as Mao Zedong,
Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin. The works in Transient Memories are rendered in graduating
shades of gray, turning news photos of events and individuals into abstract, fleeting images.
The works on paper are made from ink on delicate rice paper, referencing traditional Chinese
ink painting. Not only to these ink paintings depict historic political leaders, such as Mao
Zedong and Joseph Stalin in Mao Zedong and Stalin, December 1950, but they also portray
more recent political figures from the West, as in March 6, 2003. L.T. (Rumsfeld). Other images,
also taken from newspapers, as in The People’s Great Hall, portray Chinese leaders addressing
a large conference. Xie provides the date and initials of the newspaper in many of the titles in
order to emphasize the historical context of the event depicted.

While his works have political undertones, the figures in each image are reduced to abstract
forms. Standing back, the viewer sees the image as a worn photograph snipped from a
newspaper, but up close the viewer focuses more on the markings and brush strokes made by
the artist’s hand. Xie quotes a Chines poet to describe his work:

History only records a few people’s grand deeds;
The voices of others merge into silence.

Xiaoze Xie received a Master of Arts from the Central Academy of Arts and Design, Bejing, in
1991 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas, Denton, in 1996. Since then he
has been given multiple solo exhibitions in locations such as Dallas, Houston, New York,
Scottsdale, Belguim, Bejing, Seoul, and Toronto. His work is currently in the private collections of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Xie
received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2003 and artist awards from the Dallas
Museum of Art and the Phoenix Art Museum. Xie is currently the Paul L. Phyllis Wattis Professor of
Art at Stanford University.

Vernon Fisher - A Over B
Oil and acrylic on canvas - 84 x 96 inches

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Vernon Fisher: 1989-1999

Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce the opening of Vernon Fisher: 1989-
1999. On view are six monumental paintings from 1989 to 1999, ten years within Fisher’s thirty
year career.

The paintings in Vernon Fisher: 1989-1999 were made prior to his first retrospective. Many of
the works exhibited have a conceptual basis as seen throughout his oeuvre. Several of the
paintings are overtly narrative and feature his experiments in fragmentary text during this time
period. The text includes a visualization of revisions, typos, and strike-overs, giving the work a
didactic element of a work in the editing progress. Of this experiment Fisher says, “The texts in
these pieces have a halting quality as if the product of an anguished mind. This is also a
moment when the relationship of text to image became more tenuous.”

Vernon Fisher currently lives and works in Fort Worth Texas. His work has been shown in major
museum exhibitions of contemporary American art, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others.
Fisher was also honored with a mid-career, traveling exhibition organized by the La Jolla Museum
of Contemporary Art. He was the first Texas artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. Fisher has received multiple fellowships from the National Endowment of
the Arts, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, and a John Simon
Guggenheim Fellowship. Fisher was also included in the prestigious 2000 Biennial
Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Most recently, in 2010 Fisher was
honored with a retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, titled
K-Mart Conceptualism.

Xiaoze Xie - The People's Great Hall, 2008
Ink on rice paper - 41 x 62 inches