Francesca Fuchs

The Space Between Looking and Loving: Francesca Fuchs and the de Menil House

The Menil Collection
May 23 – Nov 2, 2025

Houston-based artist Francesca Fuchs’s exhibition features new paintings inspired by an unexpected connection with a 2nd-century Roman sculpture of a male torso in the museum’s collection. Presented with keepsakes remade from her childhood, rarely seen photographs of the de Menil house, and artworks and archival material from the museum, Fuchs’s sketches and paintings explore the histories of objects John and Dominique de Menil collected and displayed in their Houston home.

In 1970, John de Menil wrote to German classical archeologist Dr. Werner Fuchs (1927–2016) seeking to identify the subject of a Roman male torso in his collection. Was it a statue of Apollo or Dionysus? Forty-nine years later, Fuchs’s discovery of black-and-white photographs depicting the marble torso in her father’s personal effects in Oxford, England, prompted the artist to find the original letter in the Menil archives. The Space Between Looking and Loving is theartist’s response to John’s unanswered letter, which will be on display in this presentation. The exhibition gallery guide includes a written response from Fuchs.

Fuchs’s methodical approach to repainting provides an opportunity to consider both the representation of an object’s foundational truth and the artist’s personal devotion to the power of the painted image—a generative space between looking and loving. Reflecting on the biographies of objects, the plasticity of memory, and the fidelity of reproductions, Fuchs evokes the meaningful relationships between people and the objects with which they live. A unique and poetic perspective on works from the museum’s permanent collection, Fuchs’s first exhibition at the Menil generates new insights on the history of the de Menil house and its significant role in the design and curation of the main museum building, designed by Renzo Piano.

Paintings excavating the histories of objects is a signature theme of Fuchs’s iterative artistic practice. She invokes the originality of the object and questions where authenticity is located. By juxtaposing her paintings with artworks and archival materials from the museum, the artist addresses the tensions between the objective truth of representation and a subjective faith in memory.

Born in London and raised in Münster, Germany, Francesca Fuchs moved to Houston in 1996 as a fellow for the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. During her thirty-year career in Houston and internationally, Fuchs’s work has been a process of honing extended reflections on the nature of everyday objects and illuminating their fundamental truths. Her portraits of objects are re-paintings of paintings, prints, photographs that resist and reconsider their accepted signals of cultural importance, particularly as they relate to the intimacies of life. Fuchs’s work has been included in exhibitions organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois. In 2018, Art League Houston recognized Fuchs as Texas Artist of the Year.