Francesca DiMattio

Claudia Schmuckli

Blaffer Art Museum

Working in the gap between representation and abstraction, Amy Sillman's canvases openly and proudly invoke myriad forms of painting, ranging from historic to contemporary, western to eastern, and high to low art, only to freely and confidently blend them into a painterly language that is decidedly contemporary and personal. With a deep regard for, and intellectual engagement with, the very act applying paint to canvas, Sillman's work combines a seductive use of color with an almost palpable physicality.

Amy Sillman: Suitors & Strangers

Blaffer Gallery at the Univers

Canadian artist Jon Pylypchuk (born 1972) has a unique talent for marrying the abject and the sublime. In his work, desperation and exhilaration, ugliness and beauty, tragedy and comedy are joined in images and words that declare that that life is a messy affair and we are the ones making it so. Like many before him who playfully expose the darker side of existence, Pylypchuk delves into the world of children's books and characters, where inanimate objects come to life or animals live the lives of people. Endowed with human attributes, the creatures populating his paintings, drawings and sculpture speak powerfully of the pathetic banality and stubborn optimism that define our path through life as a tragicomedy of epic proportion. Copublished with the Austellungskunsthalle zeitgenössiche Kunst Münster on the occasion of a ten-year survey of Pylypchuk's work, this book provides a comprehensive look at an artist who movingly summons the frailty of human existence.

Jon Pylypchuk

Arts & Photography

Gail Kirkpatrick

Individual Artists

Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston

Features fifteen internationally recognized contemporary artists, including Sophie Calle and Edward Burtynsky, whose work, in painting, sculpture, installations, and photography-based media, embodies an essentially idealistic outlook formed of traditional "romanticism", tempered by a strong sense of reality and stubborn optimism in the face of daily adversity and heartbreaking disappointment.

Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion

David Pagel

NICK FLYNN

Terrie Sultan

Colin Gardner

History & Criticism

GILES

Throughout his career, Leonardo Drew has been continuously engaged with the cyclical nature of existence. Made to resemble the detritus of everyday life, his formally abstract but emotionally charged compositions have a metaphorical weight that is as unique as it is symbolic. Often interpreted as a comment on the position of African-Americans in contemporary American society, his work transcends any specific historic and ethnic reference, and is deeply embedded in the theory and practice of mid-20th-century abstraction. Ranging from the intense drama of his sculptures and installations of the 1980s, to the epic sweep of his massive wall-bound tableaux in the 1990s, to the ethereal language of his paper casts of the early 2000s, his works transcend time and place. Add the poetic intimacy of his recent works on paper, and Drew’s practice can be described as a journey toward enlightenment, full of reprises and returns as well as new beginnings.

Existed: Leonardo Drew

Allen S. Weiss

Sound Speed Marker focuses on Hubbard / Birchler's recent trilogy of video installations--Grand Paris Texas (2009), Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011) and Giant (2014)--which explore the physical conditions and social character of the cinematic experience, with particular respect to film's relationship to place and the kinds of traces movies leave behind. Published on the occasion of the touring exhibition Sound Speed Marker presented at Ballroom Marfa, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Blaffer Museum of Art at the University of Houston, this richly illustrated volume includes all three components of Hubbard / Birchler's newest trilogy, as well as related photography and sculpture. Four essays and an interview with the artists contribute new scholarship in examining the genesis of the works.

Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler: Sound Speed Marker

Anne Ellegood

Jeffrey Kastner

Fairfax Dorn

Inka Graeve Ingelmann

Sean Kissane

Ballroom Marfa

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Books by Claudia Schmuckli