September 11 - October 30, 2021
From Kirk Hopper Fine Art:
“Alexandre Hogue was a passionate observer of life, and the act of painting directly from nature and experience informed his work throughout his long career, which spanned from the early 1920s until his death in 1994. Nature, to Hogue, was the entire sensorial realm of experience, whether he worked from landscape or from the figure, from memory or imagination. Accordingly, he aimed to comprehend and express the tension and harmony he perceived between the self and the spiritual world, between the intellect and nature as he understood them. The Southwest – Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma – provided settings that allowed Hogue to immerse himself in the wonder of the earth and the mystical essence of nature. That impulse to record and draw inspiration from the natural world reverberates in every part of his entire corpus of work.
His well-known “Dust Bowl” and “Erosion” paintings labeled him as a regionalist, but Hogue never accepted that identity. For the duration of his life, Hogue remained outside the so-called mainstream of American art. He didn’t subscribe to movements or schools, but charted and maintained an independent course with relatively little regard for contemporary developments. Most attempts at categorization – be it labeling Hogue’s work Taos, Salvador Dali-inspired Surrealism, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), American Scene, Precisionism, Geometric Abstraction, Hyperrealism, Pop or Hard Edge – were parried by Hogue himself with a professional annoyance and fencer’s agility. His restless intellect never allowed him to settle into anything resembling a signature style.
Kiss-Kuzzen-Zen, 1972, oil on canvas, 42 x 30″
Nonetheless, an entire generation of artists, curators, collectors and viewers is unfamiliar with the work produced in mid-career. Kirk Hopper Fine Art is honored to present the Non-objective works – the crisply rendered “Alphabetical” and “Calligraphic One Liner” paintings – the “USA” series, in addition to a group of experimental lithographs that allude to life at its most primal, as well as the forces of atomic energy. Spanning the late 1940s to the early 1970s, “Alexandre Hogue: The Modern Work” is the first time this significant body of work has been brought together for a gallery exhibition. The power of the paintings and prints will come as a revelation to those who are encountering his art again or those seeing it for the first time. By and large, these works are as symmetrical as Rorschach blots and as unearthly and as mysterious as mirages.”
On View: September 11, 2021 | 12–8 pm
Kirk Hopper Fine Art (Riverfront Blvd.)
1426 North Riverfront Boulevard
Dallas, 75207 Texas
214-760-9230
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