Mary Sims: A Retrospective

Painter and printmaker Mary Sims (1940–2004) was a Memphis original. The works of art in this exhibition, the first museum survey of Sims’s extraordinary career, will be something of a revelation even to those who knew the artist and her work quite well. The show moves from her early and elegant intaglio prints of the late 1950s, to spare, optically flat portraits isolated on monochrome backgrounds from the 1960s and 1970s, to monumental later-career canvases that use the Old Testament and ancient mythology as fantastical jumping-off points for rebellious history paintings, and ends with her riotous, maximalist still-life subjects from the 1980s and 1990s that are filled with flowers, animals, toys, and textiles. Sims was both meticulous in her craft and a prodigious worker. Her consistency and productivity are nothing short of amazing.

Mary Sims was an exceptional draftsperson and colorist who developed carefully organized compositions that were also whimsical and at times even strange. Collectively and individually, her paintings reveal much about the artist, including her idiosyncratic points of view, her sly sense of humor, and her irreverence. In Mary Sims: A Retrospective, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens celebrates the artist as the distinctive late twentieth-century Southern force of nature that many in this city and beyond remember her to be. The paintings she produced throughout her career and even her earliest etchings reveal both a knowing contemporary sophistication and an unmistakable sense of cool.

Mary Sims: A Retrospective will include more than sixty paintings, drawings, and prints borrowed from private collections and museums in Memphis and across the country.

An accompanying catalogue with an essay by independent art historian Marina Pacini will be published by Dixon Gallery and Gardens in association with D Giles Limited.

Presented by: Joe Orgill Family Fund for Exhibitions
Organized by: Dixon Gallery and Gardens