Eating Paint
January 24, 2015-February 28, 2015
Houston, January 14, 2015 –Rudolph Blume Fine Art/ArtScan Gallery announces the opening of a new exhibit called “Eating Paint,” featuring five artists, including three with Houston-area roots. The title refers to a 1961 manifesto by Claes Oldenburg called “Ode to Possibilities” that argues for a visceral and exuberant way of art making, stating that “I am for an art…that spits and drips…that you can squeeze and kiss…which is eaten like a piece of pie…”
The artists in this exhibition share this sentiment and engage in a “muscular” style of painting charged with pictorial energy and visual opulence. In contemporary art, there has been a return to tactile and physical sensibilities as a reaction to the flat screen and the sterility of technology. As conceptual and digital works in a “post-Internet culture” have become all the rage, these artists have rediscovered the immediacy and serendipity of the act of painting.
The featured artists include nationally acclaimed artist Jackie Tileston, who got her first exhibition in Houston at the William A. Graham Gallery in the early 1990s and whose work is widely exhibited across the country. Her work brings together a multiplicity of sources and has been described “as a cosmic flux of quiet and chaotic forces ”. She currently works and lives in Philadelphia.
Howard Sherman is a widely exhibited and collected artist. The surfaces of his new work explode into a sculptural dimension, adding a new sense of exploration that also combines gestural expressiveness and cartoonish social elements. Howard Sherman is featured on the cover of the recently published “Texas Abstract : Modern + Contemporary” by Michael Paglia and Jim Edwards. This book presents an unprecedented attempt to reconcile the historic mid-20th Century abstraction in Texas with the vibrant contemporary art scene flourishing now in the early 21st century.
Julon Pinkston builds layer upon layer of acrylic paint in order to create tactile objects that expand the vocabulary of two-dimensional paintings. Infused by a sense of humor and irony these paintings/objects come closest to Oldenburg’s gustatorial exhortations. Julon lives and teaches in Houston.
Michael Blair’s work draws inspiration from children’s drawings and the art of self -taught artists. His paintings inhabit a zone between sophistication and the celebration of non sense, where emotional memories are formed that transcend rational analysis. As one of his teacher’s at the University of North Texas in Denton, Ed Blackburn, once said ”every painting has to be a revelation”.
Casey Arguelles Gregory, whose recent showpieces incorporate text fragments with loaded meanings in heavily impasto-ed canvasses, creating an ironic union of legendary artists Ruscha and Oldenburg. She also edits a witty blog called the “Art Stroller” where she explores art shows across the city and state with her 2 years old daughter Clementine whose likes and dislikes are often very suprising.
The “Eating Paint” Exhibit will run from January 24, 2015- February 28, 2015 at the Rudolph Blume Fine Art/ ArtScan Gallery located on 1836 Richmond Ave, Houston, TX 77098. Hours are from 11 am-5 pm, Wednesday through Saturday. Most of the aforementioned artists will be at the grand opening on January 24th for a Q&A with the public.