Artist’s Reception: Friday, November 4, 5:30 – 7:30pm
LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Michael Roque Collins: Tides of Memory. On view from November 4 through December 11, 2011, the exhibition marks the first public presentation of the artist’s recently inaugurated sculptural practice and features important new paintings exemplifying the sustained relevance of the mythic in contemporary art. Through a dynamic engagement with these media, Collins cultivates complex relationships between cultural memory and personal history, mythology and the quotidian, abstraction and representation, as well as the spiritual and concrete.
Heralded as a key figure within post-symbolist Expressionism, Collins’s art is equally lauded for its visual and allegorical intensities. Dually portentous and promising, his works navigate between literal and symbolic landscapes that propose a dynamic plurality of possible meanings informed by both ancient and modern modes of transcendentalism. Analogizing the material and metaphysical to suggest archetypal forces of decay and renewal, his works are individuated by their assertive use of pentimenti and surface scarification, demonstrating the maximal aesthetic effects of subtractive visual strategies. Achieving formal additions through richly modulated areas of aggressive erasure, his pictorial techniques allude to the universal cycling between order and disorder, memory and history, enlightenment and darkness––root aspects of the human condition, the collective unconscious, and the natural order.
Michael Roque Collins (b. 1955, Houston, TX) earned his BFA from the University of Houston in 1978 and an MFA in painting from Southern Methodist University in 1998. Featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, his paintings have been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; the El Paso Museum of Art; the San Antonio Museum of Art; and both the Lowe Museum of Art and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami. Collins has been honored with significant awards from such institutions as the Mid-America Arts Alliance/National Endowment of the Arts; the Cultural Arts Council of Houston; the Watercolor Arts Society, and the Atelier House in Hilmsen, Germany. Most recently, he was awarded a Bioethics and Human Rights Global Art Competition prize from the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization; and, his work was selected for an exhibition sponsored by that organization that will tour between venues in Paris and Houston. The artist lives and works in Houston, Texas, where he has held numerous esteemed teaching positions and is current Director of the School of Art of Houston Baptist University.
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