Acclaimed Houston gallery, Laura Rathe Fine Art, announces the exhibition Beyond Chaos, featuring new paintings, sculptures, and installations by noted female Texas artists, Sydney Yeager and Karen Hawkins, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 10th, 6-9 PM at 2707 Colquitt Street.
Through the pairing of works by Yeager and Hawkins, divergent techniques and media are presented. Together they emphasize a shared interest in abstract forms that suggest rhythmic movement and relationships to both organic and manmade objects and environments.
As part of the exhibitions, Hawkins will also produce a site-specific installation composed of paper from every edition of “PaperCity Magazine”, chronicling the publication’s twelve-year history and honoring its transition to a hardbound format beginning with their forthcoming September issue.
“Beyond Chaos” will be on view through October 22nd, 2016.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
The paintings of Sydney Yeager navigate the space between control and abandon. In her recent work, she paints more directly with little possibility of revision. Her forms reveal the artist’s fluid gesture and the unique qualities of her medium, exploring oil paint’s sensuous weight and viscosity. Yeager also maintains an interest in fragments. Interwoven brushstrokes coalesce into contingent wholes, that simultaneously seem to collapse into their component parts.
Yeager’s colorful forms hover in fields of delicate wash or unprimed canvas. She says, “The fragment implies a whole, but a mysterious whole which can only be imagined. There is an implied presence, but an absence as well. The fragment is always in motion.” Yeager’s suspended elements conjure diverse associations to geological formations, pixels, and Italian mosaics, recalling the artist’s surroundings in Texas but also her travels abroad in both Rome and Pompeii.
Karen Hawkins explores the book as her chosen medium. In works that range from towering totems to free-standing sculptures, wall-hung constructions, and room-sized installations, Hawkins transforms old and discarded volumes into vehicles of a visual language that emphasizes pattern and geometry, rhythm and movement, as opposed to the written word. She deftly folds, cuts, and sews each page, reforming it until it becomes largely unreadable. In this new context, printed text and graphic elements lose their original meaning but are absorbed into strikingly new visual statements.
Hawkins has always loved books saying “In my childhood they were my escape. I traveled the world through books. I still love to touch them and smell them.” Hawkins considers her work a tribute to this beloved object that is gradually disappearing in the digital age. Reaching beyond the confines of its construction, she hopes to restore the book’s relevance in today’s world.
ABOUT LAURA RATHE FINE ART
With over 25 years of experience in the art industry, Gallery owner, Laura Rathe, started her career working as a private art dealer prior to establishing the Laura Rathe Fine Art gallery in 1998 in Houston, Texas. In February 2013, the gallery expanded and opened a second location in Dallas on Dragon Street, the city’s premiere arts district destination.
Since the gallery’s inception, Laura Rathe Fine Art has become reputable for representing and featuring established, mid-career contemporary artists, many of whom have been acquired into world-renowned private, corporate and museum collections. Various clientele and collections include BBVA Compass, HKS Architects Headquarters, CBRE, Wells Fargo, W Hotels, UTSW Hospital and Halliburton.
Pictured above: Sydney Yeager, Window, oil on linen, 60h x 48w in..
