News

Stuart Arends is fond of saying that he lives in the middle of nowhere. Ever hear of Willard, New Mexico? The landscape around the artist’s house is austere, almost barren, with a view of some mountains off in the distance. He is “off the grid and under the radar” as Christian Mayeur, the founder of Mayeur Projects, wrote in Arends’s catalogue for the exhibition Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House. It’s as if Arends, in his choice of a site for living and working, deliberately wished to evoke the idea of stepping into a void in order to make the work—but a void that is in actuality a transactional space where objects take on subtleties of meaning, even if meaning is bracketed only by the specificity of materials…

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to present James Lumsden’s exhibition Reflexion, representing a body of work developed over the last three years. An opening reception will be held Saturday, May 19th from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, following the group show Manmade in 2016. Reflexion will continue through August 11.

Lumsden’s paintings continue to investigate how raw materials innate to the medium can be turned into something poetic – an object filled with light, feeling, atmosphere, and emotion. Led by his chosen medium and a deep understanding of the subtleties and contradictions of the painted surface, Lumsden expands the possibilities of the medium through adept experimentation...

Margo Sawyer, the Elgin-based artist whose art intersects sculpture and architecture, has won a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recently announced 173 fellowships (including two joint fellowships) in arts and sciences for 2018. This honor comes with up to $45,000 to support one of the winners’ future projects.

“The Guggenheim Fellowship would allow me time and resources to cultivate designs of spaces transcendent,” Sawyer says. “Public places that foster contemplation.”...

Margo Sawyer’s artistic practice investigates the relationship between space and transcendence; the places where architecture and ritual converge to create transcendent qualities that encourage a state of contemplation within the viewer. The central actor in her work is color. Sawyer’s practice bridges site-specific installations and public art to transform mundane architectural structures into euphoric icons, join exquisite objects and materials into domestic spaces, and turn large public spaces into intimate refuges. Sawyer’s art unites the complex and unexpected, where the physical, material, perceptual, and psychological effects of color interact...

“They’re either very big or very small,” Gael Stack says as we stand before her latest set of canvases. “In my life or in my painting, I don’t do middle ground very well.” Her latest exhibition, at Dallas’s Holly Johnson Gallery, on view through May 5, is aptly titled Tinies (her works were also on view in a show of the same name at Houston’s Moody Gallery in Spring 2017). The roughly postcard-sized paintings are precious in their smallness, but they are suffused with the same easygoing elegance as their vaster cousins...

Opening Tuesday at the Spencer Museum of Art, the exhibition “Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World” examines the integral relationships between humans and plants through works by more than 50 historical and contemporary artists from the museum’s collection, loans and site-specific installations by four artists-in-residence.

Kicking off the exhibition is the Big Botany research symposium, beginning with the keynote lecture, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz of Tel Aviv University, at 5:30 p.m. March 27 in the museum’s auditorium. Art historian Giovanni Aloi of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and philosopher Timothy Morton of Rice University will give lectures April 11 and May 2, respectively. All lectures will be live-streamed through the museum’s YouTube channel...

For Immediate Release - Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of, Geoff Hippenstiel: PURITY. The artist brings a fresh approach to expressionism with new, large-scale oils paired with a selection of small works on paper. An opening reception will be held for the artist on Saturday, April 7 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. This exhibition marks the artist's second solo show with the gallery and will continue through June 16.

Geoff Hippenstiel pushes abstraction in a manner that reinvigorates the materiality of paint. Using diverse materials such as enamel, wax, metallic and fluorescent artist’s pigments, as well as industrial paints, he allows for an allusion of depth while affirming the importance of surface...

If you’re looking for calm before the storm of “DFW Art Month,” then I would recommend two shows to visit. First, take yourself away on a trip to the quiet abstraction of boats and the sea wave. At least many of David Aylsworth’s paintings seemed to visually reference the nautical theme. For a further strip down show of pure colors and white rectangles, head over to see Jeffrey Cortland Jones’ paintings. Both will cleanse your palate for the inevitable glut of art about to come our way with the Dallas Art Fair and all the art opening to come...

Dion Johnson’s abstract paintings inhabit hairline margins between technologic and handmade. The ten examples in “Feel the Sky,” Johnson’s decadal retrospective at Azusa Pacific University, chart his pictorial evolution while affirming his enduring interests...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas pleased to announce Tinies, an exhibition of new work by Gael Stack, featuring new oil paintings on paper. A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, February 24, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. The exhibition continues through May 5, 2018.

Gael Stack is one of the most accomplished American painters working today. Her ‘tiny’ paintings on paper are full of mystery, like intimate interior universes awash in cryptic messages and enigmatic figures. Her mark-making, both dreamy and unsettling, looks as if it could dissolve before it is fully formed - evidence of a mind in constant "shuffle" mode, randomly stumbling onto bits of the past. Every image, regardless of the medium, has a source. And while each body of work Stack creates has its own theme, the influences are fairly constant - and oddly apparent once you know them...