The artist and photographer’s work ranged from the erotic to the unsettling. He was a mentor of Mapplethorpe and a long-time contributor to Drummer magazine. Long-time icon of the creative world of New Orleans, George Dureau died Monday (April 7) morning at the Walden Healthcare Center in Kenner according to NOLA.com. He was 84.
George Dureau, the painter and photographer who captured French Quarter denizens for decades using camera and brush, died today around noon, according to Arthur Roger, the art gallery owner who was Dureau’s longtime friend. Dureau was 82 and had been in poor health. “It’s been a long journey. It’s been a remarkably peaceful one. He was very restful,” Roger told Gambit this afternoon.
Over at Arthur Roger Gallery, the red pastel figure drawings and glass sculptures of New Mexico-based James Drake’s “Can We Know the Sound of Forgiveness” and the multidimensional poured paintings of Holton Rower ‘s “Viscous Resin Extruding From the Trunk” evoke styles of the past.
“Dreams from the bristles of the artist’s brush… I probe be yond the confines of the finite to create an infinity…Living dreams.” Arshile Gorky’s words, in 1942, at the start of his late, most eloquent, phase. The quote occurred to me during my initial visit to Edward Whiteman’s new exhibition of abstract pictographs (recently at Arthur Roger); it returned during my second.
Jammin’ on Julia, the annual spring street party in the New Orleans Arts District takes place from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday (April 5). Look for a dozen exhibitions of regional and national artworks augmented by live music in many galleries along Julia Street and nearby. As always, the wide selection of art will hold something to satisfy most taste.
Bunny Matthews new show “The People of New Orleans from A to Z” hangs at the Arthur Roger Gallery throughout March until April 19th, celebrating a closing reception on Saturday the 5th. The series reads like a children’s A to Z book of illustrations on uniformly 17×14 paper, ink, and colored pencil renderings. It is exciting to see cartoon caricatures on the walls at Arthur Roger. The surge of acceptance for comic-style drawing is a late 20th, early 21st century advent, owing nearly everything to New Orleanian George Herriman. Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” strip would be an inspiration to Robert Crumb and eventually Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston. Beginning with the lampooning caricature of Honore Daumier, Daumier’s caricatures have only entered into fine arts education post-feminism.
David Bates is without question Dallas’ most venerated artist and, at 61, definitely worthy of a serious museum reappraisal. Artists often have mixed feelings about such things, since so many significant retrospectives have the aura of museum funerals rather than progress reports. So, it was with a bit of trepidation that David Bates, whose work has found its way into important collections from New York to Hawaii, said OK to a two-museum retrospective of his career at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
For the past decade, Richard Baker has developed two distinct but related bodies of work, one in oil and the other in gouache: the oil paintings depict tabletops covered with all sorts of printed ephemera and bric-a-brac; the gouaches are of book covers and, more recently, record covers. In 2012, however, Baker began breaking down the neat division between the oil paintings and works on paper by making something silly — a Whoopee cushion — out of paper and painting it pink.
30 Americans showcases works by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. This provocative exhibition focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture while exploring the powerful influence of artistic legacy and community across generations.
February 9 – May 11, 2014: In a career spanning more than forty years, Bates has combined exquisite technique with a deep understanding of American modernist traditions, resulting in a body of work that is at once sophisticated, soulful, and accessible. From his lush early paintings of the Arkansas nature conservancy Grassy Lake and the Texas Gulf Coast; to his reliefs, sculptures, and assemblages created in a variety of materials; to his most recent paintings depicting survivors of Hurricane Katrina, self-portraits, and a return to still life, this exhibition provides an in-depth look at the work of a unique and significant American artist. This exhibition includes approximately 45 paintings on view in Fort Worth, and 45 sculptures and 20 related paintings and drawings on view in Dallas.