In November 2015, the Dallas Museum of Art will become the exclusive American venue for a new exhibition of works by Jackson Pollock, the first in over three decades to survey a phase of work known as his Black Pourings. Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots will illuminate this underexplored but pivotal part of the artist’s practice. The exhibition marks the first major DMA initiative to be curated by Gavin Delahunty, who joined the DMA as the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art in May.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is co-organized with Tate Liverpool, where Delahunty previously served as Head of Exhibitions and Displays. The exhibition will be comprised of significant loans from U.S., Asian, and European collections, as well as important works drawn from the collections of the DMA and Tate.

The exhibition will introduce audiences to the artist’s practice via a selection of paintings made between 1947 and 1949; these works will serve to contextualize the radical departure represented by the Black Pourings, a series of black enamel and oil paintings that Pollock created between 1951 and 1953. Exhibiting works from the height of the artist’s celebrity set against his lesser known paintings will offer the opportunity to appreciate Pollock’s broader ambitions as an artist, and to better understand the importance of the ‘blind spots’ in his practice. The Black Pourings will be presented alongside drawings from the same period, which are regarded as his most important and productive output as a draughtsman. Also on display will be several rarely seen sculptures, illuminating Pollock’s experimentations with space, density, and figuration.

“Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots expands the Museum’s growing scholarship on modern and contemporary art by illuminating a crucial period in the creative practice of one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the DMA’s Eugene McDermott Director. “We are delighted to bring to new audiences this important and under-examined aspect of Pollock’s work, and look forward to sharing Gavin’s exciting and forward-looking vision for our curatorial program with the public.”

“While several of Jackson Pollock’s contemporaries combined black and white, his Black Pourings were exceptional in their absolute merging of color and surface, which went over and above what Pollock himself had previously achieved; this is a crucial difference for many contemporary artists revisiting Pollock’s work today,” said Delahunty. “This exhibition will invite visitors to rediscover this critical moment in Pollock’s artistic development, and inform a greater understanding of the artist’s distinctive trajectory.”

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition and include scholarly texts on Pollock’s practice with new essays by Jo Applin, Gavin Delahunty, Michael Fried, and Stephanie Straine.