Dimmitt Contemporary Art Houston is pleased to announce ELEMENTAL THINGS, a joint exhibition of paintings by artists Steven Alexander and Laura Duerwald. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 19, 2024 from 5:00 - 8:00pm with the artists in attendance. The exhibition will be on view through October 18, 2024.
The title of the exhibition, borrowed from a poem by Michael Glaser, highlights the artists’ interest in those aspects of reality that form the foundations of feeling and perception. The works of Alexander and Duerwald explore both the layered microcosms and the broad inclusiveness of the natural world in its complexity and wholeness. Alexander’s paintings employ uncomplicated geometric structures that are activated by color. Composed as sensate visual events that embody potential states of being, they present color situations that mirror the viewer, alluding to rhythms, tensions and dualities of the body and the psyche. Duerwald’s highly detailed patterns create earthy visual matrices layered with a mysterious atmospheric presence that emphasizes the materiality of her repetitive process. Her paintings assert the relationship between human and natural rhythms as a foundational principle. Together the works possess a deep sensuality combined with an openness and ambiguity, inviting meditative encounters with the viewer’s perception and imagination.
Steven Alexander studied art at Austin College with Vernon Fisher and received an MFA from Columbia University where he studied with Richard Pousette-Dart and Dore Ashton. An elected member of the American Abstract Artists group, he has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Belin Foundation, and studio residencies at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland. He has been a visiting artist at Parsons School of Design and Bowdoin College, an artist-in-residence at Studio Arts Centers International in Florence, Italy, and a professor of visual arts at Marywood University. His work has been widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States and abroad.
Laura Duerwald received a BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University before moving to New York City, where she worked as an illustrator and graphic designer. Turning her focus to painting, she studied at the Art Students League, undertook independent studies in Italy, and earned an MFA in painting from Marywood University. Duerwald has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the NES Foundation in Skagastrond, Iceland. Her work has been exhibited in solo and curated exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Houston, as well as in national and international group shows, and is held in numerous private collections throughout the United States.
