Magnetic Fields

M AG N E T I C F I E L D S Curated by Connie Lowe

March 10 thrugh May 15, 2011 Russell Hill Rogers Galleries

featuring works of

Barbara Kreďż˝, Minneapolis, MN Richard Martinez, San Antonio, TX Kim Cadmus Owens, Dallas, TX Dan Sutherland, Austin, TX

300 Augusta | San Antonio, Texas 78205.1216 ph 210.224.1848 | www.swschool.org

M AG N E T I C F I E L D S

Foreword

Artist Biographies Barbara Kreft is represented by Circa Gallery, Minneapolis, and is an adjunct instructor at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The exhibition Magnetic Fields features the paintings of Barbara Kreft (Minneapolis), Richard Martinez (San Antonio), Dan Sutherland (Austin), and Kim Cadmus Owens (Dallas). The exhibition’s title refers both to the physical field of a painting (its actual flat surface and as the illusion of deeper space) as well as to the physical and conceptual forces of attraction and disruption in the work of these artists.

The paintings in the exhibition can be viewed as two complementary groups. One is dominated by ordered abstract pattern with an emphasis on surface or shallow space (Kreft and Martinez) and the other characterized by an excess of information with space that is deep, layered, and folded, entangling abstract shape and pattern among recognizable images (Owens and Sutherland).

While each artist has a distinctive painterly agenda, there are also common points of intersection. Shared concerns throughout the exhibition include the embracing of opposites and contradictions, intentional interruptions of the visual field, and deliberate manipulation of light, space and color, as well as the use of pattern. The artists also share an interest in labor-intensive processes with close attention to the actions of the hand and to their materials.

All four artists are deeply invested in the experience of making paintings – the pleasures, negotiations, and contradictions within a historical practice that, in our time, is constantly invigorated through infinite variation. The wide range of ideas and sources behind and within these works reflect the continued vitality of painting as a timely conceptual and material inquiry into the very nature of the world we inhabit.

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Curator

Richard Martinez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is represented by REM Gallery, San Antonio, Darke Gallery, Houston, Jay Jay Gallery, Sacramento, California, and Fresh Paint, Culver City, California.

Kim Cadmus Owens is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Dallas, and represented by Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas.

Dan Sutherland is an Associate Professor on the Department of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. His work is represented by Moody Gallery, Houston and David Shelton Gallery, San Antonio.

Connie Lowe is an artist and Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The Southwest School of Art is a recognized leader in visual arts education, offering on-campus classes and workshops for more than 4,000 adults, children and teens each year, taught in state-of-the-art studios located in downtown San Antonio.

During its 46-year history, the art school has also offered free Saturday art classes to San Antonio families, and mobilized artists to teach the visual arts in San Antonio schools and social service centers.

In addition to its teaching mission, SSA consistently brings provocative and engaging exhibitions to San Antonio, many featuring American masters as well as regional artists, and always free to the public. Believing in the value of the past to enrich contemporary lives, SSA has also raised more than $25 million to keep its award-wining historic site a vibrant “downtown oasis” that’s a favorite of both local residents and tourists.

In the fall of 2013, the Southwest School of Art will become Texas’ only independent college of art by adding a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree program.

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In Dan Sutherland’s lush paintings we encounter an immediate sensory experience as well as numerous references to the expansive history of painting. The painting space seems to be laid out in a tableau format, similar to that of a still life or landscape, observed from various positions. However, an array of painterly effects disrupts and complicates the traditional unity of these forms, presenting a variety of contradictions to be worked through. The exact subject matter is momentarily recognizable but elusive -- vision constantly shifts, does not settle, edges come into focus and blur away.

In making his work, Sutherland flips the painter’s common practice of starting with an overall compositional framework.

Instead he builds with parts – images based on odd still life arrangements, historical paintings and abstract organic and geometric shapes – gradually discovering a Mortal Elemental, 2010, oil on aluminum, 84 x 116 inches structure of light, space and form as he proceeds. Within this provisional structure elements seem to merge, then shift, fall apart and reconfigure. Equally important to this process are the particular choices Sutherland makes in his surfaces (canvas, wood or metal), pigments and mediums. Fom his persistent material and conceptual negotiation with each painting – an accumulative and subtractive give-and-take – the result is always much greater than the sum of its parts.

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Through a contemplative application of paint to pattern, Barbara Kreft seeks to order the intense sensory experiences of both contemporary culture and the natural world.

Reflecting her interest in fractures, time zones, and geological strata, her paintings are built with layers and divisions that hold opposing organic and ordered qualities in a carefully orchestrated tension with no single focal point.

The merging of opposites is also evident in Kreft’s sources, gathered through close attention to both sensory and intellectual experiences, often recorded and remembered through photography. These sources include travel to distant locales (such as Easter Island, India, and Bolivia), rug patterns gleaned from books, and observations of shadows on the sidewalk and peeling paint on the bathroom floor.

Kreft’s choices of pigments, mediums and the use of stretched canvas as support are consistent and specific.

Floralis, 2007, oil on canvas, 64 x 59 inches She aims for the surface to feel “smooth and subtle, like snake skin” and for the paintings to exude an interior light.

She will sometimes acquire a color (caesar purple, persian rose, medieval yellow, mineral violet) because the name links to memory or the imagination of places.

For Kreft, the act of painting is one of getting lost in another world – analogous to a solitary walk in a snow-covered forest – in which immediate experience, deep memory, and vague recollections are synthesized.

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Kim Cadmus Owens uses a formal painterly language to connect physically experienced and techno-mediated realities. Her subject matter is what she calls “architectural landscapes on the edge” – the marginal industrial landscapes in which an area’s historical development and original purpose blend with a contemporary perception of its use and value. From this source, her paintings present a world in which time and color seem frozen, expressed simultaneously as both past and present.

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Richard Martinez builds elaborately shaped canvases that function paradoxically as both discrete objects and monochromatic painting fields embellished with a pattern of lines and/or fragments of silhouetted images. These works fuse diverse painterly-linguistic and art historical references, re-contextualizing familiar elements to propose new ways of looking. Martinez thinks of his paintings as visual hybrids that incorporate many diverse sources such as the European Baroque, decorative elements, architecture and Modernist painting. He wants to discover what happens in a particular painting when these unlikely elements bump up against each other and are absorbed into his process.

In pushing these disparate elements together, he continually aims to bring a painting to an edge where it succeeds, but simultaneously almost doesn’t succeed. Rather than trying to make a “pure” painting statement, he intentionally sets up situations in which components argue against each other both spatially and conceptually.

Habits, tools, and materials are particularly important to Martinez. He gives close attention to his stance in front of the painting, to the sensuous feel of the paint and its weight as it is brushed across a canvas in a repetitive gesture. By choice, he works within a space between knowing and not knowing. For the artist, and consequently the viewer, eluding a definitive answer is of ultimate importance.

Indanthrone II, 2010-11, acrylic and oil on shaped, stretched canvas, 42 x 80 x 2 inches

Cheap, 2009, acrylic and oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Owens is also interested in the impact that digital devices have on our perceptions of space and atmosphere. She uses “back and forth” negotiations with the computer to make digital studies from a source photograph, revealing its inherent abstractions and suggesting possibilities for color and composition. The manipulated digital photograph is then re-interpreted through the more visceral, empirical and traditional act of applying paint to canvas. The process aims to reconcile the contradictions generated by the hyper-visuality and invisible electronic buzz of contemporary experience.

The resulting paintings present a spatial dilemma between the recognizable imagery and the intervening surface insistence of flat abstraction. They intentionally contrast the computer-mediated image with a quality of light that expresses an immediate consciousness of both place and weather.