Foundations III: Part 2

Cosmic Attraction: Works by Dorothy Hood and Don Redman

Basilios Poulos: A Moment in Time

Dick Wray: Select Works

November 10, 2018 to January 5, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 10, 2018  5:00 to 8:00 pm

Please join us for the second part of our Foundations Series exhibitions this fall season!

As one of the early Texas abstract artists, Dorothy Hood was born in Bryan, Texas in 1918. Hood was raised in Houston and won a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design and then studied at the Art Students League in New York. Moving to Mexico, Dorothy Hood was front and center in the cultural, political, and social activity of Mexico and Latin America during a period of intense creative ferment. She developed close friendships with all the European exiles, Latin American surrealists, and Mexican social realists of the time — artists, composers, poets, playwrights, and revolutionary writers that influenced her art. Upon returning to Houston in 1961, Hood started to create the epic paintings that evoked the limitless skies and psychic voids of space, years ahead of NASA images. Over the next four decades, she became a renowned and highly collected Texas painter whose works were collected across the United States. Her works are included in over 30 major museums throughout the United States, as well as the collections of many individuals, corporations and foundations.

A large-scale exhibition of Hood’s opened in 2016 at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, which marked the first major retrospective of her artwork and included paintings, drawings and collages from the 1930s to 2000.  Dorothy Hood’s work is currently being featured in the Museum of Fine Arts – Houston exhibition, Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood. Deborah Colton Gallery re-introduced Hood’s work to Houston in September of 2016 with a magnificent booth featuring Hoods work at the Houston Fine Arts Fair, then in a solo exhibition of her work at Deborah Colton Gallery in November 2016 to January 2017. Dorothy Hood’s work has also been exhibited in major group exhibitions at Deborah Colton Gallery including Focus on the 70’s and 80’s Houston Foundations II in 2017, which included 26 well-known artists who contributed to the vibrant Houston art scene during this era.  Hood was also included in the 20th anniversary exhibition of Deborah Colton Galley, DCG Looking Back and Beyond earlier this year.

Don Redman was born in Houston and spent much of his childhood near the Gulf of Mexico. His father was a ship builder and provided him his first opportunities to work with steel, while his mother supplied him with stockpiles of wood with which he could carve, saw and paint. After attending the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and the Art Institute of San Francisco, he was fortunate to become the apprentice to several internationally recognized artists; among them Luis Jimenez, James Surls, and Salvatore Scarpitta. Over his forty plus years as a sculptor, his work has grown from a fascination with kinetics to a more subtle utilization of movement created by light. His sculptures are in public, private, and corporate art collections throughout the United States and around the world.

Don Redman was first shown at Deborah Colton Gallery during Focus on the 70’s and 80’s: Houston Foundations II. Since then Redman has also been featured in the 20th anniversary exhibition of Deborah Colton Gallery, Looking Back and Beyond in February 2018.

Basilios Poulos came to Houston in 1975 from New York to be Artist-in-Residence at Rice University. He was born in South Carolina and went to the Atlanta School of Art for his BFA and Tulane University for his MFA. His many art career honors include French Government Grant from 1965-1966, Guggenheim Fellowship 1974, Artist Residency at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris 1983, and Visiting Professor for the University of Georgia Studies Abroad Program, Cortona, Italy 1997. His solo exhibitions in Paris, Athens, New York City, Atlanta, San Francisco, New Orleans, Houston and others comprise forty-eight years of painting. Retiring from teaching at Rice University in 2008, Poulos has continued to paint in his Houston studio.

Basilios Poulos first exhibited at Deborah Colton Gallery during September – October 2017 in Focus on the 70’s and 80’s: Houston Foundations II. A Moment in Time is Basilios Poulos’ first solo exhibition at Deborah Colton Gallery and features his works from the 80’s.  These paintings are about mark-making, whereby Poulos creates singular pictorial imagery that is not about storytelling. The beautiful colors are the carrier of emotion with the acrylic paint applied by brush and squeegee. The painting is the image.  Now and in the past, Basilios Poulos has always strived to make beautiful and provocative paintings that are open and accessible.

A native Houstonian born in 1933, Dick Wray, was an artist of incomparable talent and personality who played a critical role in the development of Houston’s contemporary art scene since the 1950s.  Often categorized as an Abstract Expressionist, Wray is best known for his explosive and dynamic abstractions that received numerous accolades from Houston’s critical community as well as notable arts figures across the United States throughout his career.  Wray attended the University of Houston’s School of Architecture followed by the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, Germany. Returning to Houston in 1959, he began seriously working as an artist.  Over the next fifty years, he participated in a large number of important exhibitions nationally, including his first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 1975.  Dick Wray was an instructor at the Glassell School of Art from 1968 until 1982.  Wray was awarded the Ford Foundation purchase prize in 1962, a prestigious Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978 and named Texas Artist of the Year by the Art League of Houston in 2000.  His work is in major collections, including the Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

The works of Dick Wray were first shown at Deborah Colton Gallery during Focus on the 70’s and 80’s: Houston Foundations II. Dick Wray’s work was also featured in DCG Looking Back and Beyond in 2018.  A comprehensive solo exhibition of Dick Wray’s work will take place at Deborah Colton Gallery in September – October 2019.

These three exhibitions are the second part of Deborah Colton Gallery’s Foundation III exhibition, with the recent Identifiably Houston being the first part. Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance, conceptual future media and public space installations. The Gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artists to make positive change and to help Houston become a leading destination city of the arts.

Since 2013 especially, Deborah Colton Gallery has had a strong focus on establishing HOUSTON FOUNDATIONS, which reveres our city’s artistic roots. By understanding where we came from, we can build on this foundation to become an even more dynamic and empowered “City of the Future” in the national and international art world. Deborah Colton Gallery’s Foundations I was Suzanne Paul’s PROOF exhibition in 2016, which the gallery actually started researching over a decade earlier when it started to house this important archive after Suzanne Paul’s passing. Suzanne Paul’s archives are the most comprehensive photographic documentation of Houston art scene from the 1970’s to 2005.  September – October of 2017, Deborah Colton Gallery organized and exhibited Foundations II: Focus on the 70’s & 80’s which featured 26 of the most significant artists of that time period who have made a major impact on who we are as an art city today. The Foundations Symposium Series of panels and lectures was part of this exhibition. Deborah Colton Gallery has a permanent Foundations Room in the back of the gallery that highlights Suzanne Paul’s photographs of the Houston art scene plus a video excerpt of our Foundations Symposium Series from 2017. The video was created by Lee Benner. There also is a library of publications on Houston artists.

For more information on our Foundations Projects, please access our website.