VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery presents two exhibitions this month -   Richard Serra: Weight and Level, and Buvoli Havel Hillerova Schnell:  Small Sculpture.  Opening reception for both exhibitions is Saturday, September 11, 11am-1pm.  Exhibitions will be on view through October 5.

Richard Serra is a noted Minimalist artist who sculpts using industrial materials including lead and steel. His works on paper, including prints and drawings, are noted for their intense fields of monochromatic black etching or oil stick, oil paint which is applied in a solid form. The current exhibition Weight and Level is titled after two groups of large scale etchings made by Serra between 2008 and 2010 with the publisher Gemini G.E.L.

Founded in 1966 in Los Angeles, Gemini G.E.L. has continuously worked with the most important artists of the 1960′s to the present, including Vija Celmins, Robert Gober, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Richard Tuttle, among many others. Richard Serra began making prints with Gemini G.E.L. in 1972. The archive of Gemini G.E.L. is housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. which includes one example of each print they have published, rare proofs and working materials and related documentation. Click here for more information about the Gemini G.E.L. Archive at the NGA.

Richard Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. After studying at the University of California at Berkeley and at Santa Barbara, he graduated in 1961 with a BA in English literature. During this time, he began working in steel mills in order to support himself. In 1964, he graduated from Yale University with both a BFA and an MFA. Receiving a Yale Traveling Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris, followed by a year in Florence funded by a Fullbright grant. Serra’s early work in the 1960s focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards: steel and lead.

A famous work from this time involved throwing lead against the walls of his studio. Though his casts were created from the impact of the lead hitting the walls, the emphasis of the piece was really on the process of creating it: raw aggression and physicality, combined with a self-conscious awareness of material and a real engagement with the space in which it was worked. Since those Minimalist beginnings, Serra’s work has become famous for that same physicality, but one that is now compounded by the breathtaking size and weight that the pieces have acquired.

BUVOLI HAVEL HILLEROVA SCHNELL - Each of these artists ordinarily creates large sculpture and room-sized installations. This current show explores relationships between works sharing intimate scale that nonetheless confer a sense of the monumental.

Luca Buvoli lives and works in New York. Recognized for his animated film and video as well as sculpture, his work has been shown worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art (2004 – video premier), the Venice Biennale (2007 – curated by Robert Storr – link to review here), the ICA Philadephia (2007 ), The Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina (2003) and The List Visual Arts Center at MIT. (2000). His work has been shown previously in Houston at Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (2003 and 2006) , as well as the MFAH Glassell School (2003). Buvoli’s work is also on view in a new permanent public art installation at William P. Hobby Airport (2010).

Joseph Havel lives and works in Houston and has shown widely in the US and abroad. The subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts (2006), his work is permanently installed on the facade of Raphael Moneo’s Beck Building and in the Isamu Nouguchi designed Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, as well as in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Currently on view is Joseph Havel’s exhibition Cockroach Poems at the Art League of Houston.

Hana Hillerova lives and works in Houston and has had solo exhibitions in Austin (2004, 2006) and San Antonio (2007) and Houston, including Lawndale Art Center (2008) and Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (2008, 2009). Originally from the Czech Republic, Hillerova has attended Charles University (MA 2000) and the University of Texas (MFA 2006), as well as a Skowhegan Residency (2005). Recently she completed a major permanent public art commission at the city’s Intercontinental Airport which is scheduled to open to the public during Fall 2010.

Eric Schnell lives and works in Lake Jackson where he re-located following the destruction of his Galveston studio during Hurricane Ike. He attended the University of Houston (BFA 1995) and Columbia University (MFA 1998). Solo exhibitions have included Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (1995, 2004, 2010) and the Hammer Projects, University of California (2002). Recipient of numerous grants (Pollack-Krasner, Rema Hurt Mann and Joan Mitchell Foundation), he was awarded a six-month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York (2006.)

Pictured above:  a work by Hana Hillerova.