Press & Media

“george dureau’s tender and powerful portraits of new orleans’ disenfranchised communities,” i-D

Dureau was born in New Orleans’ Irish Channel neighborhood in 1930, about four miles from the city’s French Quarter, where he spent the majority of his life making paintings, sculptures, and photographs — both in the studio and on the street. Forty years of Dureau’s portraits have recently been published in a new Aperture book, The Photographs, a volume that arrives over 30 years after Dureau’s only other book was published in 1985.

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“A New Orleans Photographer’s Eye for Male Beauty and Imperfection,” The New Yorker

[George] Dureau began taking pictures in the nineteen-sixties, with a Hasselblad. He did not think of photography as a “total” artistic medium, the way drawing and painting were, but his photographs are his best work, maybe because it’s the work he cared less about. His drawings and paintings are romantic in a different way; they are too suffused with his sensibility, or self-regard. The camera gave him a certain distance, and the pictures a moral ambiguity or weight that’s missing in his other work…

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“PHOTOS: The Unexpected Beauty of George Dureau,” The Advocate

In 2012, Higher Pictures in New York exhibited a selection of George Dureau’s photographs of New Orleans locals shot between 1973 and 1986. Dureau traveled in the high art world but also allowed his work to be displayed in the legendary leather-S/M magazine Drummer. That exhibit, thankfully, sparked renewed interest in Dureau’s work, which led to a new monograph, George Dureau: The Photographs, published by Aperture in June of this year.

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“Spotlight: Jim Richard,” New American Paintings

Since the late 1970s, New Orleans artist Jim Richard has been making paintings, drawings, and collages in which art-stuffed modernist interiors melt into multihued graphic fields. Devoid of inhabitants, his signature claustrophobic spaces are visual essays on taste and influence, composed as if with maximum disorientation in mind.

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“Local color, global appeal,” The Magazine Antiques

simon gunning

Focused on craft and dedicated to traditional methods, Gunning has sidestepped current art world fashions. But, in New Orleans, that’s just another sign that he belongs here, for the city’s distinct culture has rarely shifted to suit national tastes.

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“James Drake,” THE magazine

James Drake is interested in systems, the micro- and the macrocosmic. Having recently opened the show Drawing, Reading, and Counting at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans (May 7 – June 18), the Texas-born, Santa Fe-based artist is still at work within a system he created for himself over four years ago; creating numbered drawings on nineteen by twenty-four inch paper every day.

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“Movement & Stillness,” New Orleans Art Review

The expressive mode of painting taken by Wayne Gonzales in Forest, the large-scale achromatic acrylic on canvas painting now at Arthur Roger Gallery, parallels the movement of matter and the painter/viewer in his characteristic economic and gestural strokes. As in his paintings of crowds, his marks beg not only the kinesthetic response of the viewer, but also a response in actual spatial depth. As the marks lay flat on the surface, they invite close inspection of their abstractness and simplicity, and distanced observation to marvel at the phenomenon of their gestalt, melding into legible representation.

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“Jim Richard: Domestic Bliss,” New Orleans Art Review

IMPLICIT IN RICHARD’S painting is a revived perception of the decorative function of art. His pictures declare the power of decoration to concentrate sensuous experience and, thus, to grip the viewer. With a system of rhythms and carefully sited disjunctions — and, of course, his piquant sense of color, Richard makes delight unavoidable.

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“CHERYL DONEGAN,” New Orleans Art Review

Schorr reads Donegan’s act as “simulation of total abandon” in order to question “who owns women’s pleasure—whether it’s made by men, or by a woman’s own body.” In a 1997 interview, Donegan discussed her own intentions: “firstly, to make a video that used sex in a style antithetical to the MTV jump cut” by using duration and fulfillment to reclaim “female agency.”

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