Fort Worth Key Magazine

Alex Da Corte: The Whale
2025-03-02 - 2025-09-07 | Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth, TX, 76107, United States
Alex Da Corte
The Anvil, 2023
Neoprene, EPS foam, upholstery foam, staples, thread, polyester fiber, epoxy clay, MDF, plywood
© Alex Da Corte, Courtesy of the Artist
Photo: Natalie Piserchio

March 2, 2025 – September 7, 2025

Alex Da Corte: The Whale, the first museum exhibition to survey the interdisciplinary artist’s long relationship with painting, 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.
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.
The exhibition’s title, The Whale, emblematizes the artist’s vast mining of contemporary culture, a process that Da Corte describes as “analogous to the Jungian night sea journey, looking backward and collecting the past as an act of commingling with spirits, either cultural or personal.” Da Corte sees the medium of painting as “a cavity for these ghosts”—much like museums themselves. 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, compact disc graphic design, 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. Da Corte creates the image in reverse-order, applying the front-most layer of paint to the back side of the glass and building up subsequent layers, with the background added last. In addition, the exhibition encompasses the artist’s source materials and ephemera, providing a fresh perspective on his process. Galleries adjacent to the exhibition will present a selection of works from the Modern’s collection, extending the exhibition’s deep exploration of Da Corte’s catalysts and influences.
Organized by the Modern and Curator Alison Hearst, the exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue with a special contribution from Da Corte and essays by Hearst, poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, art historian Suzanne Hudson, and Kemi Adeyemi, associate professor of gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington.

Alex Da Corte: The Whale is made possible in part with support from Matthew Marks Gallery.

The Last Five Years
2025-08-14 - 2025-09-06 | Circle Theatre, Circle Theatre, West 4th Street, Fort Worth, TX, USA
AUGUST 14‭ ‬‮–‬‭ ‬SEPTEMBER 6‭, ‬2025
Book‭, ‬Music‭, ‬and Lyrics by Jason Robert Brown‭ | ‬Regional Premiere
We round out the Summer with a contemporary classic‭, ‬one of the most beloved musicals about a tumultuous heartbreak to ever have‭ ‬been written‭. ‬Fresh off its first-ever Broadway Run‭, ‬starring Adrienne Warren and Nick Jonas‭, ‬Circle Theatre will be the first‭ ‬to bring‭ ‬The Last Five Years ‬by Jason Robert Brown back to the area‭! ‬
The Last Five Years‭ ‬captivates its audiences with its innovative storytelling and beloved score‭. ‬A powerful piece that speaks to the universal experience of love and loss‭, ‬this critically acclaimed musical delves into the five-year romance between Cathy and Jamie‭, ‬two aspiring artists‭, ‬through a unique narrative structure‭: ‬Cathy’s story unfolds from the end of their relationship moving backward‭, ‬while Jamie’s perspective moves forward from the start‭.‬
Memorable melodies soar throughout the piece‭, ‬which leave audiences considering all that can go wrong when two people collide‭ – ‬and all that could have gone right‭, ‬had they ever truly seen one another‭. ‬
‭*‬contains adult language and situations‭*‬
