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Indepth Arts News:
"Visions, Vows and That Old Time Religion: Paintings by John Alexander"
2002-03-23 until 2002-04-21
McKinney Avenue Contemporary
Dallas, TX,
USA United States of America
The McKinney Avenue Contemporary (The MAC) will present Visions, Vows
and That Old Time Religion, an exhibition of paintings by New York-based
Texas artist John Alexander from the decade 1978 to 1988.
John Alexander is among the most internationally recognized artists from
Texas. Like other post-war giants -- Robert Rauschenberg and Julian
Schnabel come to mind -- he has made his reputation outside of Texas, all
the while maintaining longstanding relationships with dealers,
collectors, and art professionals in his home state. Yet, unlike
Rauschenberg and Schnabel, Alexander is still considered to be a Texas
artist, although he has lived and worked full time in New York for more
than twenty years.
Perhaps because of this, North Texans have been treated to regular
exhibitions of his art as it has evolved since his graduation from
Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts in 1970. It
is now time to look back at the fertile decade of his work from 1978,
the year before his first New York exhibition, to 1988, when he was
given his first museum retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Center in
Cincinnati, Ohio and his first European exhibition in Paris, France.
Richard Brettell, a founding board member of the McKinney Avenue
Contemporary and Professor of Aesthetic Studies at the University of
Texas at Dallas, has selected a small group of paintings made in that
decade from public and private collections throughout
the nation. The larger gallery at The MAC will be devoted to the
frenetic action paintings of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the
smaller gallery to later works in which the human figure predominates.
The MAC will publish a catalogue of the exhibition, which will include a
critical essay by Brettell, reproductions and catalogue entries on each
painting, and a sampler selection of criticism of Alexander's work
during that period by critics like Barbara Rose, Donald Kuspit, Jane
Livingston, Michael Brenson, and Robert Hughes. The paintings will be
interpreted within the boom/bust timeframe of their production and as a
reflection of the painter's own anxieties and ambitions. Particular
attention will be paid to the painter‚s inventive titles and their tense
interplay with representation.
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