Top Five: February 16, 2023

Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.

For last week’s picks, please go here.

1. Impressions: 500 Years of Printmaking
O’Kane Gallery, UH-Downtown (Houston)
February 16 – March 30, 2023

From the O’Kane Gallery:

“The O’Kane Gallery is honored to host a special selection of artworks from the collection of The Printing Museum in Houston, Texas. The exhibit features a broad sample of printing techniques including woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and screen prints created over a span of 500 years from 16th and 17th century genre scenes and religious subjects through six prints by the renowned Houston artist and Texas Southern University educator John Biggers. Other examples include prints by Lucas van Leyden, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Victor Vasarely, and Houston’s Charles Criner.

Founded in 1982 by printmakers Raoul Beasley, Vernon P. Hearn, Don Piercy, and J. V. Burnham, The Printing Museum is dedicated to preserving quality prints and the technologies used to create them. The collection holds prints of historical significance as well as some fine-arts facsimiles, including one of the Gutenberg Bible. The museum seeks to serve as a center for community engagement offering hands-on opportunities for self-expression.

The exhibit foreshadows The Printing Museum’s move to its new location in Houston’s Midtown planned for later this spring. The variety of works additionally supports the beginning of printmaking now offered as a studio course on the UHD campus.”

2. Nii Narku Thompson: Why Question
Daisha Board Gallery (Dallas)
January 21 – February 25, 2023

From Daisha Board Gallery:

“Depicting moments of intimacy, the first exhibition of 2023 at Daisha Board Gallery, Ghanaian-born, Dallas-based Mixed-media artist Nii Narku Thompson Why Question, has been constructed on unstretched canvases and burlap. Combining various modes of expression, painted, assembled, and sewn together forming geometrical figures. The result is a dynamic conversation on identity, relationships, and sexuality.

Nii Narku, works in lengthy processes that involve varying degrees of laborious layering of paint on canvasses that, themselves, have been cut and stitched together onto a sustainable material. By adopting these modes of mark making he somehow mimics the complex interactions and social processes. Bathed in saturated hues the figures navigate themselves through a range of intimate roles, they long to be seen. This combined with vibrant backdrops and alluring color combinations makes it difficult to look away. Thompson’s work is a representation of his Ghanaian descent, Queerness, Intergenerational kinship, and Acceptance.”

3. Emily Joyce: Under the Garden
Inman Gallery (Houston)
January 14 – February 25, 2023

From Inman Gallery:

“Former Core Artist in Residence Emily Joyce (b. 1976) returns to Houston for her seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. In Joyce’s recent symmetrical paintings, she explores hidden systems of nature, the built world, and the cosmos. The paintings are composed of modular and interlocking hexagons, triangles, and concentric circles with special surprise guest appearances by the occasional lily or a bit of gilded text. While in her twenties and fresh out of art school, Joyce worked as a decorative painter, embellishing the walls of mansions and vacation homes. Now, a few decades later, that early training has seeped into her new paintings.

In this recent body of work, you’ll find combinations of faux-bois, gold leafing, spatter painting, stenciling, rag-rolling, marbelizing etc.–sometimes all in one composition. By assigning each technique to its own specific shape on the canvas, Joyce creates an unfolding pattern and off-beat rhythm. The decorative finishes function as sophisticated painting solutions, rather than tromp-l’oeil trickery. Joyce’s presentation includes a site-specific painting onto which other works are hung, a self-referential work that cleverly–and playfully–exemplifies these conceptual underpinnings.”

4. Existencia: Daniel Rodríguez Collazo & Edgardo Kerlegand
Camiba Gallery (Austin)
January 14 – February 25, 2023

From Camiba Gallery:

“EXISTENCIA references both artists’ forms of expression as they relate to the human existence — one on the internal and physical forms of the human figure and the other on the forms that humans create and exist in.

Cuban artist Daniel Rodríguez Collazo’s main interest as a creator is rooted in the observation and analysis of architecture’s powerful connection with the individuals who inhabit it, from its functional to its subjective aspects. In his Resonancias Series, in which the works are created by painting and then carving into drywall, he takes apart and reinterprets lines and planes in a way that allows the viewer to focus on the positive and negative arrangements created by stark contrasts.

Mexican artist Edgardo Kerlegand has always been interested in painting the human figure, and the spiritual and the introspective aspect of his subjects has come to characterize much of his work. His drawings and paintings are as much about self-expression, contemplation and reflection as they are about the image of his subjects. He is influenced in the interplay of color and texture by the mark making of Asian Art, Orthodox Iconography, German Expressionism and Mexican Muralism.”

5. Members Only 2023
K Space Contemporary
January 6 – February 24, 2023

From K Space Contemporary:

“Each year, K Space Contemporary sets aside time to highlight the artwork of our members. We are pleased to kick off the new year with the 2023 Members Only exhibition.

South Texas is home to a diverse population of talented artists working in a wide variety of media and styles. Members Only offers a cross-section of artwork created by the artists of our region. Some works celebrate life and art for art’s sake while others deal with personal reflection, social issues and current events. The full exhibition will be available online at www.kspacecontemporary.org.”