August 26 - October 14, 2023
From the Galveston Artist Residency:
“I remember being in the downstairs gallery at the CAMH in the winter of 1993 and seeing an exhibition of paintings by Robin Utterback. It seemed to me that the paintings had crept out from the sidewalks and streets of the neighborhoods surrounding the museum at the time. That show came to mind 30 years later when I was visiting the studio of the painter William Warden, who had just moved to Texas from Philadelphia and had never heard of him or seen his work.
Soon after, I ran into Alison de Lima Greene and she gave me a catalog of a show of Robin’s work at Foltz Fine Art. Thumbing through the catalog, I was struck by how quirky and weird, but also elegant the paintings seemed to me now. There was something that felt very honest about the range of the work; there was a poetic searching in the way one work shifted into another. It was a way of making that is very rare these days.
I wanted the show to travel to the GAR Gallery, but in the end we ended up putting a very different show together. Recruiting William Warden as a Co-curator, we climbed into the storage unit where Robin’s remaining unclaimed works are kept and we selected the works currently on view here. As we were sifting through the paintings, we immersed ourselves in the writings of poets that Robin felt connected with and inspired by, particularly John Ashbery. In 1979, Utterback made a lovely poster for a poetry reading by Ashbery, on the campus of Rice University. In 1987, Ashbery wrote a very positive review for Art in America of Robin’s show in New York at Tibor de Nagy.
It was in Ashbery’s tenth book of poetry, A Wave, that I came upon the poem Introduction. We felt that it captured the spirit of how an Utterback painting is built, and this became the title for the show.
Eric Schnell
8/13/23”
Reception: August 26, 2023 | 6–9 pm
2521 Mechanic St
Galveston, 77550 TX
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