Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.
For last week’s picks, please go here.
Reynier Leyva Novo, “Blind Paintings, Mnemosyne’s Whisper,” 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Hanley, Imaging and Conservation Specialist, MFAH Sarah Campbell Blaffer Conservation Lab
1. Reynier Leyva Novo: Former Present Today
Blaffer Art Museum (Houston)
January 12 – March 10, 2024
Opening January 12, 6-8 p.m.
From the Blaffer Art Museum:
“The Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston is proud to present the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of Cuban conceptual artist Reynier Leyva Novo. Former Present Today presents a newly realized installation and painting series to simultaneously reveal and conceal monuments, structures, and figureheads which manifest revolution and tyranny. The works are created through research on icons and memorialization and how the prestige of nation established through revolution utilizes both facts and myths as a means of propaganda.
The exhibition reflects upon monuments and public sculpture in nationalist ideology and the failed journey to social utopia. The first iteration of this project was realized at the 2019 Aichi Triennale in Japan where Novo created two sculptures of 1:1 replicas of monuments in Russia and presented them with paintings of slogans and images cut out from propaganda posters made by avant-garde artists in Soviet-era Russia.”
Installation view of “John Miller: New Horizon” at Meliksetian | Briggs
2. John Miller: New Horizon
Meliksetian | Briggs (Dallas)
November 18,2023 – January 20, 2024
From Meliksetian | Briggs:
“Meliksetian | Briggs is pleased to present New Horizon, a selection of works by New York and Berlin-based artist John Miller. This exhibition, the artist’s first in Texas, features paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and photo-based works spanning the 1980s to the present. Comprised of various series from a forty-plus-year career, Miller’s project critiques systems of representation, commodification, and production, of political and libidinal economies and social relations in the public and private space.
While an integral part of Miller’s practice since his early career in the 1980s, painting is the genre Miller has consistently challenged, particularly its inherent associations and reception. Whether ironically quoting styles like regionalist painting or social realism, or using generic imagery from postcards, comic books, or reality TV as subject matter – ‘pictures of pictures’ – or making abstract works in a ‘surrogate’ style, intending to evoke a layman’s idea of artistry, Miller remains acutely aware of the implicit culturally-loaded, regressive nature of painting. Hence, he deploys strategies to subvert and destabilize the genre. The current exhibition features an early brown impasto abstract painting, a pedestrian painting, various game show paintings, and new paintings that juxtapose photographic elements with brown impasto forms.”
Erin Shirreff, “Composition 4,” 2023, dye sublimation prints on aluminum, latex paint, edition of 5, 49 1/4 x 41 1/4 x 5 3/4 inches (framed)
3. Erin Shirreff: Spatial Moto
Lora Reynolds Gallery (Austin)
November 18, 2023 – January 13, 2024
Artist talk January 13, 2 p.m.
From Lora Reynolds Gallery:
“Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Spatial Moto, an exhibition of new and recent work by Erin Shirreff and the artist’s second presentation with the gallery. Shirreff works in photography, sculpture, and video, but across all mediums her work is fundamentally image-based. Her practice is rooted in the studio and in process: material translations from two- to three-dimensions (or from three- to two-) or from analog to digital (and vice versa) are what form her diverse but interrelated bodies of work. Running throughout, and consistently for almost two decades, is her curiosity about different modes of attention, and what happens within the uncertain moments of an aesthetic encounter.”
Audrya Flores, “She is The Healing Path,” 2019
4. Audrya Flores: Rattling
Sala Diaz (San Antonio)
January 13 – February 23, 2024
Opening January 13, 12-5 p.m.
From Sala Diaz:
“Rattling examines the roles of ritual, creativity, and play in the healing process. Like the segments of a serpent’s rattle, this body of work serves as a record of growth and evidence of transformation. It makes the inner work of healing visible.
Each sculpture in the exhibition is paired with a small arrangement of ritual remnants representing a particular phase in the healing journey: soul retrieval (inner child work) and cord cutting (boundary-setting). Creating rituals around these difficult processes and giving them form as mythical creatures helped the artist to face the grief, rage, and fear that accompany them.”
A work included in “Open To Suggestions: Works by Texas State University Painting Students”
5. Open To Suggestions: Works by Texas State University Painting Students
Lockhart Post-Gallery
January 5 – 26, 2024
From the event organizers:
“Texas State’s Painting III class is proud to present Open to Suggestions, a group show featuring paintings created over the course of the Fall 2023 semester. Drawing on the varied perspectives of students working towards several different majors, including Studio Art, Art Education, and Communication Design, this exhibition showcases ingenuity and experimentation in different approaches to painting. As the artists respond to conceptual prompts such as memory, identity, science, spirituality, and place, their exploratory approaches to each work are informed by their own budding sense of creative identity and individuality. Experimentation is found across substrates, media, and techniques, and becomes the unifying element of the work as the artists respond to and influence each other. Open to Suggestions celebrates this exploratory stage and invites the viewer to find inspiration in the potential within the work.”
