Robert Mapplethorpe @ Texas Gallery, Houston - Blossoming - Curated by Klaus Kertess

Robert Mapplethorpe: Blossoming

Curated by Klaus Kertess

Texas Gallery, Houston

March 10 – April 24, 2011

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

Dennis Speight, 1983

 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

 Used by permission

A recent book of the photographs of ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE is titled Perfection in Form. This title might also accurately describe the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, Blossoming. Curated by writer and art historian, Klaus Kertess, the selection emphasizes the perfection that was Robert Mapplethorpe’s goal for all of his work. A classicist of the medium Robert Mapplethorpe exploited the blacks, greys and whites that can only be achieved in the traditional gelatin silver photograph. He also was a classicist in matters of composition, balancing lights and darks, voids and solids, and the architectural with the natural; paying attention to the most minute alignments and symmetry of the subject matter, both in the camera and the darkroom. The exhibition covers twelve years of Robert Mapplethorpe’s mature work from 1976 -1988 and contains some of the most recognizable images from that period. Klaus Kertess’ selection emphasizes the stylistic rigor of many of Robert Mapplethorpe’s images - from centered vertical images to cruciforms to horizontal landscape layers. By his selection, Klaus Kertess makes us look at the works with a more critical and structural eye than just seeing the sensational or the popular. The title Blossoming is also a reflection on the poetic and romantic aspects of the work and is a natural reference for an artist who illustrated a book of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry and whose formative years in New York were spent in the company of the poet and rocker, Patti Smith. In his photographs Robert Mapplethorpe always found the beauty in his subjects whether it was in portraits, sexual imagery, or the sensuousness of flowers.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE’s work has been seen in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. His work has also been the subject of a number of catalogues and monographs, including most recently, Perfection In Form (2009), Mapplethorpe (2007), Mapplethorpe: Polaroids (2007) and Mapplethorpe The Complete Flowers (2006). 

Texas Gallery held numerous exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe while he was alive, beginning with Photos and Photo-Constructions in 1979. This is the Texas Gallery’s first posthumous exhibition since the artist’s death in 1989.  The Texas Gallery is grateful to Klaus Kertess, who first exhibited Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids at his Bykert Gallery in New York in 1974, for selecting such a beautiful and profound exhibition. It is also grateful for the generous cooperation of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, which represented Robert Mapplethorpe in the US. The gallery presents its special thanks go Monica Eulitz and Michael Stout at the Foundation and all at the Sean Kelly Gallery.

TEXAS GALLERY

2012 Peden, Houston, TX 77019

www.texgal.com

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Jeff Elrod at Texas Gallery, Houston - Fingers Never Stop

Jeff Elrod: Fingers Never Stop
Texas Gallery, Houston
December 8, 2006 - January 6, 2007

Texas Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by JEFF ELROD. A former Glassell Core artist, Jeff Elrod was born in Texas and works in both New York and Marfa. This will be his third show one person at the gallery. Titled Fingers Never Stop, the show consists of a series of new works on canvas utilizing silkscreen, latex and airbrushed acrylic paint. Known for use of graffiti like gestures made originally as drawings on a computer which were then embedded in monochromatic fields of color, Jeff Elrod in the new work balances expressive color and gestures, strong positive and negative spaces, with a background grid that still retains references to the computer origins of his drawings. Like Brice Marden or even earlier abstract artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Jeff Elrod balances the elements applied to the painting surface in a tension that resists any direct reference to content or illusion and re introduces the idea of the shallow space of the picture plane. The work brings to mind the work of the color field painters of the 1960s and 1970s in the use of large areas of color but given a different kick through the use of spray paint as the colors glow rather than recede. Casual marks which are a serendipitous result of the working process are sprinkled throughout the paintings. The resulting paintings are exuberant abstractions of color and light following in the best tradition of modern American painting.

In the past few years, Jeff Elrod has exhibited in Berlin, Milan, New York and Marfa, Tx. Most recently he had a solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York.

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

Kathleen Gilje, Texas Gallery, Houston - Likeness & Beyond: Portraits

Kathleen Gilje, Likeness & Beyond: Portraits
Texas Gallery, Houston
January 24 – February 25, 2006

Texas Gallery presents the work of Kathleen Gilje, the New York based painter, in an exhibition titled Likeness & Beyond: Portraits. The art historian Linda Nochlin has written this about Kathleen Gilje’s work: “her wickedness is bound up in the very reality of the Great Masterpieces themselves and the Great Minds who interpret them. These are fierce and often funny paintings…” (Art in America, March 2002). This statement was prompted by the nature of the work which is painting as re-interpretation, re-creation, and “re-storation” of classical icons by the likes of Rembrandt, Ingres, Velasquez, Holbein, Van Eyck and van Dyck. Trained as a conservator of old master paintings, Kathleen Gilje has utilized her skill and historical knowledge to create a body of work that amazes, challenges and amuses the viewer. It is startling to see a copy of a well-known painting such as Rembrandt’s “Portrait of Agatha Bas”, full scale and perfect in its rendering. However, it is even more startling that in Kathleen Gilje’s version the subject is rendered as a nude. An intervention by the artist creates a strong sensation of the familiar made completely unfamiliar. In addition new issues, both aesthetic and political, are raised immediately. Suddenly the conventions that have been taken for granted and the received historical wisdoms are questioned and a masterful copy becomes a strong and original statement, beautiful and intelligent.

In the most recent painting included in the show, the famous diptych of “Adam and Eve” by Jan van Eyck is recreated to scale with a subtle difference. The artist illustrates carnal knowledge by the falling away of the fig leaves that the figures grasp to their respective groins in the original piece - a brilliant change that is lyrical but profound. The leaves float down lightly but they represent “heavy” meaning which the artist is able to indicate through a simple “restoration”.

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

Danny Clayton, Texas Gallery, Houston - Ten Years of Paintings

Danny Clayton: Ten Years of Paintings
Texas Gallery, Houston
November 1 – 15, 2005

Danny Clayton is having the first show of his paintings in Houston in a decade at the Texas Gallery. The installation of the paintings on paper is configured as an altar piece in the back room of the gallery. There are many references to sources as diverse as antique textiles, the I Ching, icongraphic symbols from the writings of Joseph Campbell and Paleolithic artifacts from Arkansas. Danny Clayton creates an intense, obsessive personal iconography which is re-iterated by the painstaking rendering by hand of each work, which often take a year for the artist to complete. Reminiscent of the work of an iconoclast such as Bruce Conner, the pieces are a personal version of mandalas for meditation or hallucination. The artist refers to the works as “yantras” which is a word that could reside somewhere between a mantra and tantra. Of particular significance is a repeated octagonal form that is the center of most of the works and which is an elaboration on a hexagram of three lines… one vertical and two diagonals. This form is the glowing shape in the very center of each work and from which all other elements radiate outwardly.

Danny Clayton was born in Houston, Texas, and currently resides and works in Mexico City. In recognition of his adopted cultural base, Danny Clayton opened the show on November 1, to coincide with the celebration of the Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead.

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

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

Francesca Fuchs, Texas Gallery, Houston - Mom

Francesca Fuchs: MOM
Texas Gallery, Houston
September 6 - October 1, 2005

Texas Gallery presents a new exhibition of paintings by Houston-based artist, Francesca Fuchs. The show entitled is the third solo exhibition at the gallery for the artist. Francesca Fuchs, a former Core Program member, is known for her formal approach in painting to figurative and decorative subjects. The tension between the recognizable elements in her work and the formal considerations of line and color is characteristic of all the previous work. However, this ambitious show of 6 paintings, all 8 x 10 feet, completely confounds image and abstraction. The selection of a highly personal image… a mother nursing her baby… becomes a point of departure from a charged subject into closely valued, delicately balanced compositions. There is recognition by the viewer, confronted by a surround of large canvases, of both achievements simultaneously.

Francesca Fuchs has written the following about the MOM paintings:

Just recently a neighbor asked me what I painted. When I replied: ‘Babies and Flowers’, I had to laugh…..because babies and flowers are on the level of cat paintings – clichés of a particularly feminine sentimental aesthetic. I use this sentimental subject matter seriously, for their emotional potency is cooled down with a super-sized scale and hard-edged mechanical execution. This friction between the paintings’ emotional content and their formal execution invites both nostalgia and critical reappraisal. 

In German a canvas is a “leinwand” – a screen. The baby paintings need to operate on this cinematic scale. Nursing is such a private, hidden-away, slightly taboo activity, but one experienced ubiquitously by breastfeeding mothers both in private and public spaces. With nothing else to do they look at their baby’s heads for hours studying the curve of the ear, the line of the hair. These paintings are sentimental, they are emotional. The hues are ever-so-subtle variations in flesh color; so smooth and soft that they are barely there, yet so large in scale that the image shifts and you find yourself looking at empty expanses of color. 

I always think of my paintings in terms of their installation – wanting to be read in relation to the other paintings and the environment they are in. Paintings are often custom-made in an attempt to control the viewer’s experience of them – their sense of intimacy or monumentality, their position in relation to the corners and floors. Ultimately I want a dialogue between all the elements in the space resulting in a kind of total art experience, but one where the emotional content is filtered through the brain.

TEXAS GALLERY

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

Lee Friedlander at Texas Gallery, Houston - Xmas in Texas

Lee Friedlander: Xmas in Texas 
Texas Gallery, Houston
December 14, 2004 – January 15, 2005

“He was not unlike a traveler walking into a landscape which may prove mirage.”(Patrick White, “Riders in the Chariot”)

Texas Gallery presents an exhibition of photographs by Lee Friedlander – 40 black and white photographs taken in west Texas between 1997 and 2004. Lee Friedlander has been working periodically in Texas since the early 1970’s, focusing on urban settings, the big thicket and desert landscapes. This new group of photographs has two themes: buildings and streets in towns of far west Texas, such as Alpine and Marfa, which focus on Christmas decorations, and from which derives the title of the show; and classic images of landscape: the highland deserts and mountains of Big Bend and the Davis Mountains. Lee Friedlander’s photos are distinguished by a compositional technique of formal organization and complex pattern. Using a square format camera with a flash, the artist achieves clarity with a great depth of field. Lee Friedlander’s photos bring to mind the beautiful intelligence of the works of Walker Evans and Eugene Atget.

Lee Friedlander lives in upstate New York, is a McArthur Fellow and he will have a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, NY in June 2005. His most recent publications include “Sticks and Stones, Architectural America” (2004), “Family” (2004), and “Stems” (2003).

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

Joe Goode at Texas Gallery, Houston - Surface Paintings

Joe Goode: Surface Paintings
Texas Gallery, Houston
April 24 - May 29, 2004

Texas Gallery presents the work of JOE GOODE whose first show with the gallery was in 1973. This exhibition of new work is titled Surface Paintings - a group of paintings that are purely abstract in nature with layers of patterns of built up brushstrokes and the resulting radiating color. The artist states that he took all of the information that he had accumulated from his work over the last few years and put it into each painting in this series. The overall feel is of shifting atmosphere..like a fog..that obscures and then reveals. Inspiration for the artist has come both from observed nature and from the observed physicality of paint itself…so the works are both associative and self reflective... mysterious and practical at once.

Like many Californian artists, such as James Turrell, Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler, who choose to use other means to affect a pure visual experience for the viewer, Joe Goode wants to create a similar visible reality but by sticking to the medium of paint. He also recognizes that the perception of light is tied up with nature. From an essay about Joe Goode’s work by Michael Duncan, titled Must See to Appreciate: “Turning the picture making experience in a pervasively more cerebral key, Joe Goode espouses the environmental, visual effects of nature painting without any traces of precise narratives... (recreating) natural ambiences. These artificially induced states of mind result from the masterful manipulation of an inherently illusionistic process of painting. Joe Goode’s work analytically employs the color and textural properties of paint to emulate the most elemental levels of visual reality. In their insistence and repetitions, various series can be seen to equate basic color tones with natural elements.” More recently Joe Goode has been informed by Asian influences such as the modern Gutai group of painters who similarly desired to depict in their work the ineffable qualities of nature.

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