Joy Laville, Flor Garduño, Chuck and George
March 21 - May 9, 2015

Opening reception will be held Saturday, March 21, 2015, 5:30 – 7:30 pm

Joy Laville: The First Fifty Years
Award-winning Mexican artist Joy Laville presents a retrospective exhibition of her works over the past five decades by marking her first in Dallas in more than 30 years. During the 1980s, Laville’s four exhibitions in Dallas attracted many collectors who have treasured her work and can now see the evolution of her painting over five decades. A new generation can discover this singular artist, whose painting, they will observe, is like a river: always the same, always different.

Age has neither slowed Laville down nor diminished the strength that imbues her work. The uniformity of the fifty works in the exhibition reveals how at age 91, the artist paints as well as, if not better than, in 1962, the year of the first work in the MAC show. Her characteristic pastel colors, which belie the power of the landscapes or the immediacy of the women she paints, render an environment where events develop, where she observes them happening, without judgment or opinion. A woman lying between two rocks in front of the sea is presented, as simply another element in the universe. A woman has dropped her book after falling asleep in a lazy afternoon. A seascape seems timeless until we notice what is barely perceptible—two figures standing below the path of an approaching dark cloud. For Laville, each of these moments of knowing takes place in a weave of time, space, and light.

Born in England in 1923, Joy Laville arrived in Mexico in 1956, without a plan of how long she would stay. After marrying the writer Jorge Ibargüengoitia, she made Mexico her home and now lives in the town of Jiutepec. Following Ibargüengoitia’s death in an airplane accident in 1983, Laville began making paintings related to the accident. The paintings are as subtle as they are present: As she stands embracing a bouquet of flowers, a falling airplane is shadowed in the background. She paints herself with only one eye open; it is too much to see with both eyes. Despite being sought after by collectors, she is equally respected as a painter’s painter. In Mexico, she has been the recipient of every major award, from the acquisition prize by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1966, to the prestigious Premio Nacional de Ciencias y Artes, presented by the Mexican Senate, and the Bellas Artes Medal, both awarded in 2012. Joy Laville’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Mexico and Canada, and in London and Paris, and hangs in numerous private and public collections.

Noted art historian and patron Salomon Grimberg, Dallas, is curator of the fifty works in the exhibition. He is widely published in the field of Latin American art and is well known for his expertise on Frida Kahlo. The artist and curator are expected to attend the opening reception.

This exhibition is presented in partnership with The Mexico Institute in Dallas.