William Wegman, Texas Gallery, Houston - New Paintings

William Wegman: New Paintings
Texas Gallery, Houston
October 11 – November 12, 2005

Texas Gallery presents a show of new paintings by William Wegman. It is the artist’s eighth show at the gallery since 1973. William Wegman was recognized as an innovator in the early 70s when an artist was able to be recognized for work in more than one medium. Much like Rauschenberg with his experimentation in painting concurrent with his involvement in photography, dance and performance, William Wegman moved between performance, installation, drawing, video and photography. The underlying connection has always been the artists touchstones of oblique humor and slanted references that were conveyed in his influential videos (made in the artists studio with his dog Man Ray) or in his dead pan drawings on typing paper that were illustrated non-sequiturs. In the early 90s the painted photographs of the dogs and watercolor collages made from vintage greeting cards evolved into a series of collaged and illustrated paintings, many very large in scale. As usual there were off beat and strange references and enigmatic scenes though certain themes recurred throughout the last 15 years as the artist has devoted more time to the more traditional mediums of painting and collage. Exploration, travel, the dream world of disjunctive landscapes, and architectural forms that collapsed space and time with abandon were found in the paintings on canvas and these same themes have evolved into the new collaged paintings on board where suddenly the postcard image of the Guggenheim museum leads directly to the Seven Pools in Hana, Maui, Hawaii, or where Mt. Fuji leads one directly to a castle on the Rhine. The works combine both the fantasy of children’s games and a surreal overview of the world as we know, remember and imagine it.

William Wegman lives and works in New York City and eschews most travel. A comprehensive survey show of the work of the last 35 years will open at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in March of 2006.

TEXAS GALLERY
2012 Peden, Houston, TX 77019
www.texgal.com