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Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art Opens Fall Season with Solo Exhibitions Celebrating the Art of Texas Featuring Andrea Rosenberg of Dallas, Al Souza of Houston, Julie Speed of Austin, and Introducing Bale Creek Allen of Wimberly, also Continuing in the Sculpture Garden, Chris Powell of Fort Worth.
Friday, September 13, 2002, 6:00–8:00 p.m.
Valet parking available
September 13–November 9, 2002
Andrea Rosenberg uses charcoal, graphite, and gouache, among other media, to create delicate yet forceful images. The works' linear and diffuse qualities suggest the artist's spontaneity and graphic ability, her comfort with the media evident as she rigorously lays down from memory each botanical element. Though many of the works in the exhibition are small, approximately nineteen by thirteen inches, Rosenberg maintains her ability to present elegant, sensual forms in larger-scale pieces, which as David Galloway notes in his essay in the exhibition "are never simple 'enlargements.' First of all, their very scale prompts the use of a body language which lends these works an expressive corporeality absent from the miniatures."
Rosenberg's subject matter relates to many eras and traditions along the path of art history, though the overall result is undoubtedly modern. Galloway associates the individual elements of her work with many notable figures: the still-lifes of Cezanne and Matisse; the sensuousness of Georgia O'Keefe and Robert Mapplethorpe; and the economy of line of David Hockney. Yet the works in this exhibition are undeniably Rosenberg's, marked by her swift, confident line, unfinished quality (this is intentional; "stop before it is done," according to the artist), and dialectic appeal.
Andrea Rosenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1948 and studied at the Art Students League from 1962-66. In 1970, she received her bachelor degree from Case Western Reserve University of the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, and in 1971 earned her Master of Arts degree, also from Case Western. She currently resides in Dallas, Texas.
Al Souza: New Paintings
September 13–October 12, 2002
Al Souza has devised a way of making art that uses recycled imagery to build complex structures of pictorial meaning based on the addition, subtraction, and layering of visual information. Using the universal medium of jigsaw puzzles, Souza creates images of nostalgia with all of the attendant formal concerns one finds in two-dimensional compositions with traditional media—oil or watercolor, for instance. The results are dazzling and inviting, with layers of irresistible imagery that entice the viewer to explore and reminisce about the indulgences of contemporary commercial society.
Trained as an engineer, Souza very deliberately constructs these "paintings" by building up layers of puzzle segments and individual pieces, using glue as the medium. Anne Tucker, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, notes in her essay in the exhibition catalogue, "Souza begins with ordinary materials and banal subjects portrayed in a clichéd manner—cute dogs, home-sweet-homes, whipped cream-laden cakes—and he puts them together in his own sly, sophisticated way. The result is a cacophony of color…formed into a surprisingly pleasing whole. Part of the pleasure in each assemblage is seeing the whole, and reading it as a vibrant and coherently patterned composition, then zeroing in to identify the bits, and then finding that on backing up again, one perceives the whole slightly differently."
Al Souza received his B.S. in Civil Engineering in 1967 and immediately began studies at the Art Students League in New York. He was awarded an M.F.A. in Painting in 1972 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Souza has exhibited widely throughout Texas and the United States, has received various grants, fellowships, and honors, and in 2000 was a featured artist at the Whitney Biennial Exhibition in New York. Souza has also worked since 1973 as an art instructor at a number of institutions. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and splits his time between residencies in Houston and Massachusetts. This is his second exhibition with Pillsbury & Peters Fine Art.
Julie Speed: Alters of My Ancestors and Other Recent Work
September 13–October 26, 2002
Julie Speed's paintings derive solely from the artist's imagination, exploiting her uncanny gift for realistic depiction. Masterfully executed, the surfaces of these works are slick (in the Neo-Classical sense), suggesting a photorealistic quality that contrasts starkly with the untraditional subject matter—religious figures against a backdrop of swarming spermatozoa; Romanesque heads with third eyes; women surrounded by hyenas, skeletal remains, and burning relics of domesticity. Comparisons to Salvador Dalí are not unwarranted, though Speed undoubtedly utilizes a more sensitive, earnest methodology. Fourteen paintings, most created within the last two years, will be featured in the exhibit, accompanied by a suite of major collages entitled Alters of My Ancestors, previously shown at The Nave Museum in Victoria, Texas and traveling to the Lawndale Art Center in Houston and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, and The Texas Fine Arts Association/Jones Center for Contemporary Art in Austin.
These surrealist collages incorporate images from the past, producing visual puzzles or metaphoric expressions for Speed's cynicism, wit, and iconoclasm about life and people. Reminiscent of the Belgian painter Réné Magritte, the images are of ordinary people and scenes, with abnormal elements added that force a double take. Sometimes subtle, as in the addition of a third eye, and in many cases completely bizarre, the collages, like Speed's paintings, comprise a compendium of "altered" characters from the past, expressing in varying degrees the artist's love of irreverence and incongruity.
Julie Speed was born in 1951 in Chicago, Illinois, and lives in Austin with her husband, Fran Christina.
Bale Creek Allen: Faith and Superstition
September 13–October 12, 2002
Bale Allen—artist, musician, and actor—creates his work using familiar objects in unexpected ways, incorporating the everyday with a splash of the spectacular. The combination of lunch boxes with neon and steel, for instance, juxtaposes youthful innocence with adult, Las Vegas-style glamour, and suggests a sophistication usually seen in, more established artists. This is his first exhibition with Pillsbury & Peters Fine Art.
Allen was born in Los Angeles in 1968 and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; he was awarded his degree after only two years due to the quality of his work. Allen has exhibited widely, in both solo and group exhibitions, has performed on the stage and in film, and in 1999 produced a self-titled solo album. The artist currently resides in Wimberly.
Chris Powell: Recent Sculpture
June 28–October 5, 2002
Powell ranks as one of the most prominent members of a generation of mid-career artists who have emerged in Texas in the past twenty years. The recipient of numerous public and private commission for outdoor sculpture, he employs stone, clay, and other traditional materials to explore the abstract shapes of plants, animals, and natural phenomena. His best work achieves a subtle balance between figurative and non-figurative, evoking memories of early modernists like Moore, Noguchi, and even Brancusi. His proficiency as a stone carver and master ceramicist imparts an air of timeless perfection to his deceptively straight-forward exercises in pure form.
The exhibition includes eight new works, created with the rear sculpture garden of Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art in mind, composed of either limestone or white Carrera marble.
