Douglas Bourgeois grew up Catholic in a rural hamlet in southeast Louisiana. Born in 1951, he attended a parochial elementary school where he served as an altar boy, and in his teens enrolled in a training facility for future priests. Today, Bourgeois is not a churchgoer and eschews organized religion.
George Dureau: paintings; Clyde Connell; paintings and sculptures; and Wellington Reiter: environmental installation; all at the Arthur Roger Gallery, 432 Magazine St., through April 22.
Two large sculptures and one small one were shown in the New Orleans artist’s first solo show in New York. Timber, Plow and Ridge Road Climb unveiled an artist of skill, intervention, and unexpected beauty.
At the Susan Cummins Gallery, L.A. based artist Jim Barsness deals with the collapse of empires ancient and modern and the vanity of human wishes.
Art Pick of the Week BY PETER FRANK “New Orleans based-artist Dawn DeDeaux suggest that the expected source of the ‘trouble’ is itself troubled, yet manifests its own tragic nobility. The focus of her darkly dramatic Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths is the young African-American male. She populates the corridors of her catacomb-like – or…
This will be a boring review. The reasons for its being boring are, however, exceptionally good.
Clyde Connell began making art when she was almost 50 years old — she is now 91 — and the contemporaries who most influenced her span several generations. Adolph Gottlieb’s paintings, new when she saw them, stirred her interest in pictographic forms; the example of Eva Hesse’s work a few decades later encouraged her pursuit of sculpture in low-art materials.
At her studio-home in old Metairie, energetic Ida Kohlmeyer creates monumentally successful sculpture and painting. In her youth (which she says lasted until her 75th birthday), the success was the plum she sought, as she strove “to be accepted, and to be acceptable.”
George Dureau: The Modern Heroic Figure BY TERRINGTON CALAS NO ONE WHO has seen — not merely noticed — great Mannerist or Baroque painting, can be unmoved by the sly and brilliant allusions to them in George Dureau’s new work (recently at the Arthur Roger Gallery). The allusions are perhaps unwitting, but they are there…
Artists in Search of Timeless Things BY ROGER GREEN EXCERPT Monumental drawings Dureau is known primarily as a painter and photographer. Lately, however, he has been working on a monumental sculptural project: a set of metal gates, with allegorical figures, for the New Orleans Museum of Art. The ornamental gates, on which he is collaborating…