Double Vision: The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection

The inaugural exhibition of the newly formed Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation offers a glimpse at two collections—The Rachofsky Collection, created over the past 40 years, and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection, developed over the last decade—foregrounding the potent and inventive interplay that will serve as a guiding principle for future programming at The Warehouse. This first look, as it were, is our opening chapter as we explore the art of our times.

Although both collections remain distinct in their points of view, the exhibition illuminates the serendipitous ways they overlap. As the exhibition unfolds, each gallery explores a theme or artist central to both collections, including commitments to several artists collected in-depth, such as Carroll Dunham, Wade Guyton, Marguerite Humeau, Calvin Marcus, and Dana Schutz. The exhibition is punctuated with galleries that offer broad presentations of these artists’ practices. In some instances, works by the same artists from different bodies of work will be placed in conversation, while in others, entirely different practices will be brought into dialogue.

A historically significant work by Howardena Pindell, jointly acquired by The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection in 2024, serves as a guiding star for the exhibition and the broader collaboration. Measuring 29 feet in length, Untitled (Reflections), 2022, constitutes a monumental reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s Le bassin aux nymphéas (The water-lily pond), ca. 1917–1920, in the collection of the Fondation Beyeler. Made in Pindell’s signature pointillist style, this work creates a new, forward-looking abstraction filled with a deep appreciation for the gravity of history, while laying the groundwork for future explorations.

For this exhibition Rashid Johnson has selected postwar Japanese, Italian, and Korean masterworks from The Rachofsky Collection to stand alongside his own works, including High Time, 2020, a living structure of steel, ceramic, fiberglass, and plants. The Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection is an avid supporter of Johnson’s work, and this unique presentation demonstrates an opportunity not only for audiences to explore how works within the two collections engage with each other, but also for the artist to explore the power of context to shift and expand meaning.

Both collections share interest in vast, room-filling installations, and this exhibition features two significant examples by Elaine Cameron-Weir and Marguerite Humeau. Both of these works were highlights of the 2022 Venice Biennale and were subsequently acquired by the Hartland & Mackie / Labora and Rachofsky collections respectively. Cameron-Weir’s works meditate on life, death, and the body in an age where the values of the military, religion, and science intersect in countless ways. Her work incorporates a multiplicity of brutal, industrial forms and lightly balanced—almost vulnerable—structures. In another gallery, Humeau’s Kuroshio, 2022, delves into intertwined aspects of science, organic forms, and the female figure. Through what she calls “mythological ecosystems,” the artist creates connections between the environment, the body, and the psyche. Humeau’s and Cameron-Weir’s installations present newly imagined ways of connecting to our surrounding environments and create a discourse between spiritual, natural, and man-made ecosystems.