News

Crowded public art openings at galleries are not ideal for spending quality time with art, but sometimes you take what you can get.

And sometimes a work will sneak up on you and lock you in for a surprising moment, despite the distractions.

When a new season kicks in, like it has in this post-holiday week, you may find yourself at openings while also vowing (to yourself, to an artist, to the gallerist) that you’ll be back on a quieter day to take another look. How many times have we thought and said this and not followed up? We mean to. But then the next round of openings happens the following weekend, and then the next, and obligations pile up while time is squeezed...

“Handbook of Unknowing” is Jackie Tileston’s sixth exhibition at Zg Gallery since joining their roster in 2004. The works in this show continue on the path that she’s been forging since the start of her artistic career and offer a consistent follow-up to her 2014 exhibition, “Field Guide to Elsewhere” ....

It is a new year and with this time of renewal, I would like to lament about a few shows coming or came down in January before I preview some exciting new shows for you to get out and see...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Wherefore & Hence, an exhibition of ten recent paintings by David Aylsworth. This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will be held Saturday, January 6, from 5 to 8 pm. The exhibition continues through March 24, 2018.

David’s Aylsworth has spent years cultivating his painting practice – with exuberance, quirkiness, and imperfections embedded in his method. Refinement has never been an Aylsworth goal, yet in Wherefore & Hence he reveals a certain restraint evinced by more simplistic compositions.

When describing his work,art historian Sandra Zalman states, “Where there are brushstrokes, drips, clotting and scraping… it is evident in the almost discursive way that shapes coalesce to articulate a larger story of meditation- the fine line between form and figure, or plane and ground, which speaks to the very human quality of finding opportunity in uncertainty, near connections, qualifications, and do-overs. The paintings may play, and tease, and flirt, but their force derives from the quiet, unassuming way they confront these larger concerns.”...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Reflect, by Austin-based sculptor Margo Sawyer. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, November 18, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through February 3, 2018.

Throughout her career, Margo Sawyer has created installations which translate sacred spaces into a contemporary vocabulary. The central actor of Sawyer’s art is color.  Reflect 2017, is a large-scale floor installation that converses with the architecture in an ever-changing way, with the play of light and reflection moving throughout the space and uniting an array of complex and unexpected unions of color. Reflect, holds fragments of a career long fascination with glass, its optical color play, how transparency, reflectivity, luminosity, physicality, materiality, perceptual, material and shape affect the psychological effects of color, as a window into our emotions. Elements of the work were produced by the artist in residence at Pilchuck Glass School and recently at Franz Mayer of Munich, Germany in 2106...

John Adelman’s artistic skills are fully in evidence in eleven new drawings completed this year, each executed on canvas in gel ink and acrylic.  They illustrate a wide range of formal approaches through which Adelman follows a strict set of rules to achieve his pictorial goals. This might be regarded as conceptualist process, but the result of his meticulous technique feels more important than the actions used to complete the pieces. He repeatedly uses text and certain shapes like nails traced on the surface while taking a tally. Many of the pieces, like the ethereal “38724," have the number of nails rendered over the surface as their title...

A black circle fills the frame; a dark void within which small white flecks float. These white specks are plant seeds captured with an X-ray, their ghostly white shells and tails caught in a black petri dish. The piece, by the artist Dornith Doherty, is titled Finite and is part of an ongoing series from her project Archiving Eden; the eponymous show is on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art until Jan. 14, 2018....

Tommy Fitzpatrick’s current exhibition Crystal Cities, on view through Nov. 4, includes ten compelling, colorful, acrylic-on-canvas paintings of interlacing planar forms that command the main space of Holly Johnson Gallery.   A separate area features a wall-mounted shelf of small-scale Plexiglass maquettes with interchangeable parts, which Fitzpatrick used as models for his paintings...