The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present Joseph Havel: Library an exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Joseph Havel. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger@434, located at 434 Julia Street, from October 6–27, 2018. The gallery will host an opening reception, with the artist in attendance, Saturday, October 6 from 6–9 pm in conjunction with Art for Arts’ Sake.  

The mixed media sculptures and drawings in this exhibition explore books as an image and idea. Books are vessels filled with the ideas of authors but through association they fill with the reader’s memories, dreams, and speculation. Books form an architecture of accumulated knowledge which makes libraries cities of collected culture. Joseph Havel is interested in the physical and tangible presence of books as a representation of the less tangible realm of ideas. As we experience more of our mediated world digitally the physicality of books seems a resistance that asserts knowledge is concrete.  

Joseph Havel is director of the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. In 2010, the Art League of Houston named Joseph Havel as "Texas Artist of the Year." He was born in 1954 in Minneapolis and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota and a Master of Fine Arts at Penn State University. He has exhibited across the United States and abroad. His bronze sculpture "Exhaling Pearls,” from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, was included in the 1995 exhibition "Twentieth Century American Sculpture at the White House."  

Joseph Havel was selected to participate in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the 2001 Phoenix Triennial. In 2006, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston hosted the exhibition "Joseph Havel: A Decade of Sculpture 1996-2006." In addition to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Havel's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  

For more information please contact the Arthur Roger Gallery at 504.522.1999 or visit our website at www.arthurrogergallery.com.