Currently on view at Link & Pin in South Austin is Synchronicity, a collection of recent portraits by painter Cheryl Finfrock and photographs by Eva Weiss dating back to 1972. On a crusade for universality, the exhibition ties the artists’ breadths together through their common subjects, which focus on the inelegance of being human. This candid exploration of people before and between performances or seminal moments combines incredibly similar but independently created works — a meaningful coincidence.
A Growing Need
Youth suicide is on the rise, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS). Counselors across the county have established initiatives to aid youths’ mental health in schools and DSHS plans to discuss with schools what can be done.
Black cemetery section gains historical marker: Research ongoing for descendants of early African American families
The Colored People’s Section of Der Stadt Friedhof was approved for a Historic Texas Cemetery Marker and an official plaque will arrive in the coming weeks.
Fungus endangers bats: Texas researchers concerned for populations with ‘White Nose’ syndrome
Bat populations are declining rapidly across North America from White Nose Syndrome (WNS). Although the Mexican free-tailed bats are not suffering from the disease, Cave myotis bats have decreased in population by 75% since the fungus was first detected in Texas Panhandle bat habitats in 2017, according to both Bat Conservation International (BCI) and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD).
Mark di Suvero: Metal Like Paper
Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper is an exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas featuring work from the monumental sculptor’s more than sixty-year career. Remaining tethered to poetic themes of humanity are 30 sculptures and over 40 drawings and paintings. Color erupts in his images, which constantly change with perspective. The largest exhibition of di Suvero’s work since his solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, here his abstract futurist gestures continue to lean towards optimism and joy — a contained, frenetic energy.
Paho Mann: Latent Constructions
Opening June 24, 2023, is Latent Constructions, a solo exhibition of works by Paho Mann, presented by Galleri Urbane. The show will consist of 8 digitally constructed still-life prints made with 3D scanning software and photographs. Using this state-of-the-art technology, Mann creates abstract images of 19th and 20th-century cameras and flowers as a metaphor for the constant transition of photographic and imaging technology. The exhibition collapses the boundaries between perceptions into a single experience.
FHS will drop upper-level German
Beginning this fall, Fredericksburg High School will no longer offer upper-level German courses. The language, once a first language for many Fredericksburg residents, has been declining in use since the first World War. The absence of the course is a part of the question of the preservation of the Texas German dialect.
Color is the dope, Aron Barath
Galleri Urbane welcomes Hungarian painter Aron Barath for his first solo exhibition in the United States. Color is the dope is a chromatic experience featuring canvases of bold, gossamer strokes of paint. Following his inclusion in the gallery's 2021 group summer show, RIPE, and a list of presentations across Europe, Barath introduces a broader array of hues in his ongoing investigation of color for this exhibition.
"Gesture painting is the way through which I can make my thoughts and feelings visible the most freely, spontaneously, without any compromises. It is a very inner energy that bursts out of me at the given moment," Barath says of his generative, abstract style.
Developing from a more limited color palette, in this show, Barath utilizes both muted and vibrant colors that splash and streak across canvases. Black, white, and opaque colors filter to the paintings' foreground to materialize colors of light. He combines contrasting hues upon the canvases: some radiate strongly while others cast colors more quietly. The pigments simultaneously display as transparent and impasto — a sublimity crafted by the Budapest-based painter.
Laying his canvases on the floor, Barath uses colors freely, painting with various materials and tools. Tested and mixed himself are water-based paints which allow his multiple layers to all easily be perceived at once. He uses a variety of brushes, brooms, sponges, and sprayers of different shapes and sizes alongside his handmade tools.
Barath chooses to explore the essence of traces of light, substance, and color in his work, absent from contemporary trends of communication. The selected paintings in the exhibition are studies of light and color through a series of intuitively completed steps. A euphoric kind of action takes place in Barath's studio as he paints interpretively and sometimes dances around his canvases.
Viewers of Color is the dope are transported into Barath's tranquil, psychedelic scene. "A good abstract painting primarily gives an experience," he says.
Gabriel Dawe’s “Ode to Futility” at Talley Dunn Gallery, Dallas
A myth and biblical narrative, The Tower of Babel follows the endeavor of society to build a structure so glorious it could bring them in touch with the heavens. However, when understood as a threat toward God, the single language of humankind was divided, shattering efforts to finish the construction. The myth tells us that unearned glory was the Babylonian’s demise. Artist Gabriel Dawe says their pursuit was an “epic exercise in futility.”
In his solo exhibition Ode to Futility, Dawe washes this ancient story with a modern interpretation, veering away from the long-established understanding of the people as arrogant in their pursuit to raise themselves to a heavenly existence on Earth. He displays gossamer-thin sheets of gold leaf upon numerous jigsaw puzzles, both hanging and built into megalithic towers, and meandering throughout the space is one of the artist’s signature Plexus installations of colored string. The plane of glinting towers at Talley Dunn Gallery is situated within the prismatic illusions of light created by the fibers.
Choreographed to the space so that its perceived structure changes with every step, Dawe beguiles the viewer with the woven site-specific installation. Thin, colored strands of embroidery threaded uniformly stretch between wooden supports on the floor, ceiling, and walls across one-hundred feet in the gallery. Materializing light, he connects individuals to that which is unseen, transitioning everything in the gallery into one ethereal experience. The towers, fraught with their narrative of uncertainty, are swaddled in moments of blissful clarity.
Further stepping away from the dialogue of observable reality in Ode to Futility, Dawe invites exhibit-goers into a golden cosmos contained in two black arches. The portal-like displays pull us into a version of the myth where perhaps the builders were not condemned. Missing No. 30 and several similar circular jigsaw puzzles covered in gold leaf are hung, glimmering on a black surface.
Scintillating throughout the gallery are sculptural towers of precisely stacked cardboard puzzle pieces. The forms are made from layers of jigsaw puzzle pieces produced in the same die cut, and sit upon stylized wooden pedestals with arched doorways and windows. Study no. 7 (with gold leafing), a tower built of golden puzzle pieces, seemingly rises and falls simultaneously. Dawe exhibits several variations of The Tower of Babel in the gallery: walls are tall and short, paths ascend and descend, and stairs cascade steeply and gradually. In a moment, the viewer sees the demise of the society which built the tower, but Dawe ruminates on their pursuit of building, distancing them from being victims of illusions of grandeur. To touch something higher is to see the beauty in fragments, which he reminds us still remain pristine.
Hanging on opposite walls are puzzles of more than four by six feet of The Tower of Babel by painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Golden Path No. 10, hung at the front of the gallery, is complete, fully locked together by the tabs of the puzzle pieces. Upon the works, Dawe lays a gold labyrinth meant to be followed by the eyes, while the puzzle on the far wall remains untouched — only a handful of puzzle pieces missing from the image.
Arranged on a gallery wall, Dawe further reinterprets the ill-fated utopia through various expressions of coveted artworks, such as Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, René Magritte’s The Son of Man, and Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Incomplete puzzles of these as well as master paintings by other artists are hung on a wall, calling into question the meaning of the lost pieces. Without every puzzle piece present, the viewer still knows these images. Dawe continues to pay homage to incomplete work, juxtaposing revered paintings with puzzles he designed, manufactured, and gilded in gold. Ironically written on a small scrap of paper and pinned to the wall, nestled between the gallery of artworks, are the words “all here,” perhaps referencing complete understanding even in futile moments.
Dawe intertwines opulence with corruption and mystery with myth in this exhibition. His modern understanding of the story of The Tower of Babel leads him to a profoundly personal place, saying, “In my life’s journey, I’ve tirelessly searched inside and outside of myself for answers. I’m not sure I’ve found any, but I’ve come to realize that the most insightful journeys are inwards.” The anthropological towers glinting in the darkness of their demise, incomplete puzzles, and illusions of light illustrate the significance of immateriality. This exhibition is a meditation on the creation of art and exalts the artist, who is considering the value of creation in both existence and absence.
buff, Sam Mack
Galleri Urbane welcomes back sculptor and ceramicist Sam Mack for their second solo show with the gallery, buff. This follows their inclusion in the gallery’s 2020 summer collective and their 2019 solo exhibition, Pass.
Entitled buff, the show references the word’s numerous definitions, including the name of clay forms with a tan, sandy color (stoneware), a person’s muscular build, and the physical practice of maintaining a car’s body.
“buff describes an investment based on reductive definitions that name an arbitrary point in the process which is intended to yield one final expected outcome rather than the full spectrum of what is possible from that material and the myriad of practices,” Mack writes in a statement for the show, referencing the levels a ceramic piece must go through to pass as buff.
Traditionally non-functional beyond their original use, the artist grants permanence to familiar vessels such as Big Gulps and coffee cups by making them into stoneware. The sculpted containers are adorned with objects of everyday life, including queer and, specifically, transgender iconography. While not figurative nor literally representative of any one individual, these still-life objects of transness allow the viewer's body to become the body in relation to these objects.
The viewer's proximity and relationship to the work is important as they bring experiences of all forms, abilities, and identities, “which are valid and valued beyond state-constructed expectations,” Mack stated. The artist solidifies existence in this collection of stoneware artifacts of transgender life and references a grammar and history of trans gay men and masculinities broadly under-considered to this day.
Limbo Group Exhibition at Oak Cliff Assembly
Limbo, a group show curated by Simon Okoro and Tobias Jacob, will be held on Nov 12. The exhibition features Dallas-based artists working in photography, painting, and interactive sculpture. Limbo bridges mediums and alters traditional displays, bringing the show into a disorienting realm.
I Pick Up My Life, Tammie Rubin
Galleri Urbane welcomes back Austin-based artist Tammie Rubin for her debut solo show with the gallery, I Pick up My Life. She presents an exhibition surrounding Black Americans' metaphysical, physical, and spiritual relocation. Following her inclusion in the gallery's 2020 winter group exhibition, Rubin brings together family images, coded symbols, and historical maps to visually contextualize The Great Migration, referencing the first line of One-Way Ticket by Langston Hughs in the show’s title.
Her conical porcelain sculptures from the Always & Forever (forever, ever) series, shown at Untitled Miami 2021, are simple at first glance: caution cones, snow cone cups, and funnels. However, the blue and white stippled objects reference hoods worn by groups such as the Catholic Brotherhood of the Nazarenes, Ku Klux Klan, cultural images of wizards and witches, dunce caps, various African headdresses and Mardi Gras festival costumes. "It's this idea of codifying power," she says of conical hoods and the capirote—both "foreboding and absurd." Pulling pageantry used to denote power and intelligence to ignominy, she transforms the function of ceramics in the contemporary art space by placing migratory maps and visual data upon their surfaces.
Seemingly arbitrary geometric shapes within a mural are symbols said to be used in Underground Railroad quilts to communicate messages to enslaved individuals. This recreation of Monkey Wrench, North Star, Shoofly, her recent 2022 public project in Austin, TX, include painted motifs which were used to call to gather people and prepare, show the allyship found in a location, and with the North Star remind the people of the path to freedom.
Recalling her 2022 installation at Project Row Houses in Houston, TX, Harmony, Comfort, Convenience, Round 53: The Curious Case of Critical Race…Theory?, Rubin fills a confined space with stake flags and lines a broad wall with collaged prayer fans—typically found in churches of the south to commemorate lives. In this exhibition, she repeatedly urges the viewer to acknowledge past and present systems, their implications, and mass movements in pursuit of freedom.
A collection of various media, Rubin's components weave together a range of associations, intertwining history and storytelling, redefining the use of an object and underscoring the magnitude of its being multifunctional. The inherited symbolism in these diverse forms and implied meanings encourage a range of emotions. I Pick Up My Life is an ethnographic experience of Black Americans and a migration story that spans centuries.
Proto Grove, Michelle Wasson
Galleri Urbane welcomes back Chicago-based artist Michelle Wasson for her debut solo show Proto Grove. Since her inclusion in the gallery’s 2021 summer group exhibition, RIPE, Wasson has migrated into a lighter and breathier environment with this new body of work.
By blending the genres of still life and landscape painting, Wasson transports us on a journey from the modest tabletop into an atmospheric Beyond. She celebrates the practice of painting often presenting an artist’s palette in the foreground, referencing the potential of art to transform us. Layering rich harmonious color while working simultaneously on variations, Wasson explores process as she builds history into her canvases.
Bosque, 2022, reminiscent of her past work, contains a figurative tree like silhouette that Wasson echoes throughout the exhibition. Golden, sienna, and amber hues lay against a seductively dark background. Another painting, Spirito Rosso, 2021, captures the transition from Wasson’s darker paintings into the more colorful domain of Proto Grove. With deep crimsons and violet accents, she creates an environment of dream-like depth providing various entry points for the viewer.
Anointing the show is a brilliant painting For Hermes from 2022. Pale mauves, purples, and accents of flaxen petals build to form a winged vase of flowers, reminiscent of the namesake Greek god’s winged sandals. This piece is one of several variations of a sculptural silhouette that playfully nods to art history.
Wasson takes the viewer on an emotional journey with these generative creations and their gossamer of colors upon deep backdrops, at times, unveiling human nature and its inherent tensions. In a glowing expanse, Proto Grove’s narrative is one of nature’s fertility--providing a hopeful gesture of light that celebrates the need for relentless recreation from destruction.
“Natalie Wadlington: Places that Grow” at the Dallas Contemporary
Far from her roots nestled in the central California valley, Natalie Wadlington makes her institutional debut at Dallas Contemporary with the solo exhibition Places that Grow. The show displays precise narrative paintings of childhood excursions on enormous, vibrant canvases. Set in highly domesticated spaces, the scenes lean heavily on the atmosphere of youthful wonder and innate care for the Earth, all set upon backdrops of dramatic Texas skies.
The show features a new series of paintings that utilize various elements of the outdoors that are often overlooked and under examined in adulthood. From dusk to dawn, characters crouch to inspect and save insects, such as bees clung to the water’s surface in Pool in Fall (2022), asserting the environmental undertones of the show. Wadlington underscores the importance of curiosity, which innately fosters protection for Mother Earth.
With a consoling human presence and themes of rejuvenation, Wadlington’s paintings soften the harsh realities of environmental destruction and encourage nourishment. Repeated depictions of water are found throughout the exhibit, most notably in End of Summer (2022)and Front Yard in Sunset (2022). The artist paints saturated, striated hues reflecting setting suns into water puddles and pools, contrasting drab, often man-made foregrounds of pavement, mowed grass, and in one case, a sprawling white plastic chair.
In Front Yard in Sunset (2022), Wadlington fills two 84 x 84-inch panels, balancing the end of day and the edge of night. She captures resistance to the tiredness and exhaustion at a day’s end in vibrant hues. Fiery evening sunshine soon turns to cool moonlight as pinks and purples glow upon skin and through sprawling tree limbs. A particularly active painting of girls capturing a spider for inspection and playing with a dog, the artist lures viewer into the scene, which plays out underneath a mystical evening sky.
Swimming at Night (2022) feels as though the viewer is let in on a secret: it’s an exciting excursion into the night, beneath a veil of stars cloaking the land. Aglow in a full moon’s silvery-blue light, the life of animals and swaying trees and cold grass come alive. Patterns created by nature fill the painting, including the texture of stones, a turtle’s back, and a sprig of pine needles creating ripples in water. Wadlington repeatedly exhibits the simple beauty of the outdoors in the vastness of her skies, and in the mundane details her characters carefully examine.
Elusive twilight and evening skies guide the exhibit, urging viewers to feel childlike wonder through the paintings. In her dramatically stylized depictions, Wadlington draws much from her new home in College Station, Texas to reflect the vivacity of her stories during distinctly different times of day. Digging in the Rain (2021) employs darker tones than other works in the show — it encapsulates the fight between rain clouds and fading sunlight in an intense storm, while drops pelt the scene’s desperate characters. The painting shows the frantic mission of a helpless, blue figure clawing at the muddied ground, alongside a dog squirming under a chain link fence. Unlike her other paintings, this dreary work holds delicate despair that mirrors the grim ecological narrative Wadlington attempts to combat.
Places that Grow is composed of scenes capturing seemingly solitary moments. Paling moonlight envelopes Early Morning (2022), a sleepy snapshot of a child stooping to feed a stray cat. Completely immersed in their mission to save the bees or excavate fossil-filled flowerbeds or find wildlife in the night, Wadlington’s characters exude a comforting sense of home found in nature throughout the show.
This is an exhibit of stolen time, which captures the spirit and movements of youth in their exploration of natural curiosities. Using her adolescence to guide the show, Wadlington creates semi-autobiographical vignettes of memories in the great outdoors that resist simple, whimsical narratives.
Places That Grow is on view through August 21 at the Dallas Contemporary.
Intersections
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce our 7th annual group show, Intersections, an exhibition featuring the work of Gail Peter Borden, Peter Frederiksen, Chase Barney and Benjamin Terry, and welcoming Amelia Briggs, Karen Navarro for the first time. This show is composed of recent works from the artists which examine intersections of culture and identity along with themes of convergent artistic elements and mediums.
Artist Benjamin Terry returns with his effervescent geometric paintings, which fit together like jigsaw puzzles. To exude his 80’s attitude in style, Terry utilizes punches of colors, splatters of paint, and bold gradients. In a stylistic hangover from his previous work, he layers wood pieces over paper, divulging from entirely wood works. The pieces are simple at first glance but reveal themselves as carefully planned abstracted scenes. Contrasting with a sleek style are artist and architect Gail Peter Borden’s signature color blocked resin cast acrylic panels. With vibrant monochromatic and complementary colors, the works can be tessellated together in a multitude of variations and explore illusions of depth through color.
Gallery artist Peter Frederiksen contributes his bold cartoon-like embroidery work on linen, featuring What is it (2022). Appropriating his traditionally feminine medium into soft sculptures, Frederiksen encourages interpretations of his abstract, humorous works by inserting messages into his pieces.
Highlights from new artists to the gallery include Chase Barney, exhibiting ceramic work that “blends queer joy and religious melancholy.” His pieces are scenes of embraced animals and euphemistic images, such as in Mountain Meadow (2021). Filled with symbolic contradictions, Barney raises questions of identity in his ambitious work. Stylized relief scenes use exaggerated and understated scales, relying on atmosphere created through iconography. Artist Karen Navarro continues the exploration of identity in deconstructed portraits of immigrants and individuals victimized by colonialism. The Argentinian-born artist, in her pursuit to understand selfhood in modern society, breaks the boundaries of traditional portraiture.
Reminiscent of childlike wonder and imagination, Nashville-based multidisciplinary artist Amelia Briggs creates animated, three-dimensional pieces. Pollyanna (2022), composed of panel, reclaimed fibers, latex, and oil, manipulates materials to create a puffy figure with meandering snake-like lines of gradient colors swirling out from the center. Her wonderland-like figures appear to float in space, further challenging the understood reality they exist in.
Ensemble pieces fusing into a larger narrative, Intersections is fortunate to create a larger story of power in and through harmonious dichotomies. This show reveals layers of individuality and questions of elements and materials, challenging tradition. This colorful collection of artists brings forth various techniques and concepts to present Galleri Urbane’s identity.
Nothing Goes to Waste
On view at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, until May 7 was, Nothing Goes to Waste, an exhibit complete with works of reused materials. Existing vinyl was collaged for the title at the opening of the gallery, setting precedent for the pieces in the exhibit. Commenting less on the need for sustainability, reused materials are the mere impetus for the show’s focus on the curiosity of past lives of various mediums used in artworks.
Some pieces are playful, like Susie Ganch’s 2019 Have a Nice Day from the Please Recycle this Bag series. Created with countless plastic shopping bags, Ganch tufted rug-like pieces adorn the gallery walls at both entrances to the showroom.
Olaniyi R. Akindiya’s Til Death Do Us Part #2, 2020, overcomes the space but was made with what could be condensed to a small stack of media slides. The sculptural patchwork of time depicts a couple on their wedding day: mannequins stand beneath an umbrella that is a complete collage of image slides from presumedly the history of the individuals and between the couple. The chainmail photo slide costumes show the movement of memories and the physical movement of the outfits on the models. The corset, crown, dress, and flowing tuxedo-tailedjacket of combined images faintly project upon the walls into distorted memories.
Displacement and Proximity, Matt Manalo’s 2021 work, is composed of zip ties, rubber bands, wool, raw cotton, laser jet prints on transparencies, and found woven trays. Immediately upon seeing the piece, the viewer can sense an oceanic feeling. It resembles water relentlessly lapping the shore with seaweed, debris, and memories of time. Strings of rubber bands, wool, and cotton sway gently in the gallery space, emulating a sea breeze, bringing life to the piece. On transparent circles are layers of memories, beaten and textured by the harshness of the ocean and time. The images of smiling people in hula skirts absorb the viewers into memories they never experienced. The piece is a time capsule, weathered and displaced.
Near Manalo’s work is Bing, A Connecticut Yankee Has Red Rash by Bennie Flores Ansell, which looks much like washed-up kelp hanging from the ceiling. The piece overcomes the gallery and is a grand, tangled mess of memories made from crocheted strips of film negatives. The reddish-brown film casts light onto the wall, crossing the sculpture into a changeable dimension.
With transparency film, concave mirrors, and light to cement ephemeral moments, Bennie Flores Ansell created Find the Sky 2022. With cut images of skyscapes pinned to the wall, you can see images more clearly through circular mirrors laying on the flat surface. Ansell captured fleeting moments of sky light in a playful and complaintive way.
Plastic Panel Stag, Calder Kamin, with plastic bags, steel, foam, wood, and a pair of glass eyes, produced a stag head to hang on the wall. Twisted brown bags fashion into twine for the shag rug-like texture of fur. The artist does not hesitate to force the viewer to think of waste, dressing the stag’s antlers with ornamental plastic shopping bags. The animal is majestic and exists quietly within its habitat, disrupted by non-ecofriendly items.
Jeff Forster’s works, including Objects of Lithification and Glaze Scape Conglomerate, resemble fossils and artfully crafted petrified wood. The artist’s experimentation goes right using recycled and reclaimed clay and glazes. Forster’s chaotic ceramics mimic geologic processes and bespeak its beauty.
Postal Quilt, Leigh Suggs, 2020, is a quilt of thousands of security envelopes from people all over the country. The precisely woven and stitched blanket combines various patterns and tessellations, connecting the individual lives across the country. During a solitary period, mail through the post kept people involved in society.
For the artists, doing work with post-consumed materials is more a birthplace of their creativity. The tangibility of memory is questioned by many of the works in the gallery, exploring the use of light, shadows, and reflections as mediums. The artists are able to capture ephemeral moments for the viewers in the physical world. Many of the pieces in the exhibit are studies of previously used materials, working to discern their viability to exist as something new.
The Shape of Color, Rachel Hellmann
Galleri Urbane welcomes back Indiana artist Rachel Hellmann for a solo show, The Shape of Color, featuring fluorescent-painted relief sculptures, paintings, and an analogous mural. This body of work echoes her recent paintings and installation at the Rockwell Museum (Rockwell, NY), Leaning Toward the Sun, which will be up through March 2023. These pieces provoke ephemeral conversations of light and assumed dimensionality between various mediums.
Hellmann employs rare bioluminescent colors found in the natural world with the exactitude of architectural forms in her sculptures. The contradictory influences contest conventional understandings of form and color and therefore “choreograph relationships between and among the pieces,” Hellmann said of this new body of work.
Paintings on paper directly correlate to the sculptures, stretching Hellmann’s examination of color into the tangible. Thoughtfully planned and redrawn, she will show paintings up to 52 x 52 in, her largest works on paper yet. These studies on paper deceive dimensions in the absence of physical depth.
Using poplar wood and MDF, the artist bends individual segments into architectural forms, which she then joins with adhesives. Following her highly intuitive process, Hellmann paints “shapes of color.” Floating with a luminescent halo, the sculptures fold away from the wall. Contrasting hues exhibit subtle illusions of indiscernible depth.
Parallel Gleam (2022) is a shaped painting of white and highly-pigmented chartreuse acrylic on wood with a perceived luminescence from behind, made from reflective paint—without any use of light. The colors quietly perform beyond physical shape, utilizing shadows and filtering light into a moment.
In her pursuit to blur the line between painting and sculpture, Hellmann works intuitively, finding a flow between her agents. This process creates movement in and between the mind-bending pieces.
Hellmann has been an artist at Galleri Urbane since 2016 and recently showed Dimensions in Space at Saenger Galeria in Mexico City. She was an Artist-in-Residence at Corning Museum of Glass, March 15-17.
Naked Light, Anna Kunz
Galleri Urbane is delighted to welcome back Chicago artist Anna Kunz for her highly anticipated solo show, Naked Light. Completed in 2022, this series of paintings asks viewers to experience the warmth of light, represented by color, as a purveyor of society. These paintings galvanize conversation between both viewers and color upon canvas while confronting the emptiness and lack of connection from physical distancing.
Kunz’s works are in conversation with one another, flowing variously embodied subjectivities through color. “…the edges of each form and color bleed into each other, so there are no real contained boundaries,” she says of her work, mirroring her pursuit of creating ephemeral spaces that disrupt contemporary social and material boundaries.
Kunz utilizes acrylic on canvas and oil on linen for Naked Light as mediums to express kinship and community, addressing solitary existence. Dry and water-soaked strokes create an amalgamation of feelings in each painting. Using planks to traverse the canvases splayed on the floor, she slowly layers one color of paint at a time to the entire body of work. She creates a dialogue between heavily coated, bold hues of paint with lighter layers that are less opaque. No section of a canvas appears to be touched only once — layering thought and feeling.
Upward Slope (2022) is a work of tessellated panels focused on Kunz’s pursuit of physical cohesion to adjoin unlike perspectives. The colors are performative for the viewer, displaying opportunity for various impressions from the help of light’s mutability.
Kunz’s work sits alongside that of artists using color to speak for tangible existence. It’s a contemporary collection that interweaves various communications between the physicality of rhythm found in the paint upon the canvas and choreography of growing solidarity in our muted society.
For the UT Southwestern Medical Center Clements Collection, Kunz further investigated performance of color in a commissioned series of seven panels. Living beyond the canvas, Kunz worked with Nina Sarin Arias on a ready-to-wear collection shown at New York Fashion Week A/W 2022.
Kunz has been an artist at Galleri Urbane since 2016 and is newly represented by Alex Berrgruen, NY.
Sustainable Reuse: Robert Jackson Harrington at St. Edward’s University Fine Arts Gallery, Austin
The exhibit’s artworks cataclysmically combine color, shape, texture, and form to create visually disconcerting pieces that compel viewers to stoop and investigate.
Held in Suspension
The beauty, though imposed, is “held in suspension,” showing the delicate tension between fashioning one’s self into what society wants a woman to look like versus self-expression free of these expectations.