David Bates
Exhibition Dates: November 1 – 29, 2003
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1 6 – 8 pm
Gallery Hours: Monday – Saturday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
The Arthur Roger Gallery is presenting an exhibition of recent sculpture, paintings, drawings and reliefs by David Bates.
In his wonderfully varied colorful work David Bates seeks to replicate the excitement of what he's seeing. The artist does, however, invest his still lifes with significance beyond the celebration of their visual splendor. His thickly painted, superbly crafted creations are full of verve and idiosyncratic detail.
David Bates says, "The drawings led to the sculptures which led to the paintings; they all worked with each other and strengthened each other but each also had a life of its own."
David Bates conveys an authentic deeply felt sense of place. He paints and draws in his Dallas studio but goes to Walla Walla, Washington to make his sculptures. Much of his work has been influenced by folk art and outsider art, genres that he feels close to, that are natural to him even if he is not a self taught artist and his subjects' lives are not his. He is not though trying to be a folk artist. He dismisses the notion of regionalism as art of a lesser order. "I can't lean any other way. This is where I live."
David Bates was born in Dallas, Texas and continues to live there. He studied at Southern Methodist University where he received a B.F.A. in 1975 and a M.F.A. in 1978. In 1976 David Bates attended the Independent Study program at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. In 1987 his work was included in the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. His work is represented in the collections of The Whitney Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D. C., The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
For further information please contact 504.522.1999. Gallery web address: www.arthurrogergallery.com
