David Bates is without question Dallas’ most venerated artist and, at 61, definitely worthy of a serious museum reappraisal. Artists often have mixed feelings about such things, since so many significant retrospectives have the aura of museum funerals rather than progress reports. So, it was with a bit of trepidation that David Bates, whose work has found its way into important collections from New York to Hawaii, said OK to a two-museum retrospective of his career at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

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February 9 – May 11, 2014: In a career spanning more than forty years, Bates has combined exquisite technique with a deep understanding of American modernist traditions, resulting in a body of work that is at once sophisticated, soulful, and accessible. From his lush early paintings of the Arkansas nature conservancy Grassy Lake and the Texas Gulf Coast; to his reliefs, sculptures, and assemblages created in a variety of materials; to his most recent paintings depicting survivors of Hurricane Katrina, self-portraits, and a return to still life, this exhibition provides an in-depth look at the work of a unique and significant American artist. This exhibition includes approximately 45 paintings on view in Fort Worth, and 45 sculptures and 20 related paintings and drawings on view in Dallas.

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February 9 – May 11, 2014: In a career spanning more than 40 years, Bates has combined exquisite technique with a deep understanding of American modernist traditions, resulting in a body of work that is at once sophisticated, soulful, and accessible. From his lush early paintings of the Arkansas nature conservancy Grassy Lake and the Texas Gulf Coast, to his reliefs, sculptures, and assemblages created in a variety of materials, to his most recent paintings depicting survivors of Hurricane Katrina, selfportraits and a return to still life, this exhibition provides an in-depth look at the work of a unique and significant American artist. This exhibition includes approximately 45 paintings on view in Fort Worth, and 45 sculptures and 20 related paintings and drawings on view in Dallas.

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David Bates bounces around a storage room crammed with his art at Talley Dunn Gallery. He’s a bit frazzled, for good reason. It’s November, and he has less than three months to prepare for one of the biggest exhibitions of his life, a retrospective that will be mounted simultaneously at the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

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Review of January 2012 exhibit “Aspects of a New Kind of Realism,” a group exhibition curated by Michael Klein.

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Review of April 2012 exhibits “David Bates: Down Highway 23” and “Joseph Havel”.

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Dallas artist David Bates may be the finest painter his hometown has ever produced, but when it comes to his favorite sport, he heads to Louisiana and the remote extremities of Plaquemines Parish. While the paintings in this Down Highway 23 series reflect the everyday lives of fishermen, they were inspired by a trip he made in 2010, when instead of the usual scenes of shrimpers, oystermen and boats laden with the day’s catch, he encountered a coastal dystopia defined by reporters, politicians, tar balls, oil slicks and clean up crews in hazmat suits. Evidence of the BP oil disaster was everywhere in a coastal landscape transformed into something nightmarish, but amid the chaos he began to spot the familiar faces of those who derived their living from those waters. What he saw in them was not defeat but the same resilience that had faced many hurricanes and come back for more.

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