McClain Gallery

McClain Gallery is pleased to present Tim Braden: The Colouring Garden, our first exhibition of the British artist’s work. The exhibition will feature works from a new series that gathers both interior scenes and abstracted landscapes. A carefully orchestrated riot of colors pours from the paintings, and Braden’s attention to art history and the methods that make artists artisans is on display in this enchanting group of works. Wielding a delicate brush on his spare surfaces, Braden’s impeccable understanding of color, light, and places shines through. Braden will join us for the opening on Saturday, January 18. Often utilizing doubling and repetition as a method and a theme, Braden made the paintings in our show after meeting friend and fellow artist Yto Barrada and her garden. Located in Tangier, Morocco, The Mothership is a wild yet calculated place that Barrada cultivates with plants used for natural dyeing. Braden’s landscape paintings repeat multiple views of the same garden scene, which almost becomes archetypal through picturing and repicturing. The tale of Braden’s arrival at this wonder-filled landscape is one of coincidence, chance encounters, and inescapable connections. Braden explains the twists and turns that led him to making these works in a straightforward series of serendipities. The interiors are from various found sources. Braden’s interior views, usually made quite quickly, are frequent motifs that he thinks of as source material. By cropping and zooming into areas of interest in certain paintings, the artist then borrows incidental marks and generates areas of color harmony for larger, more abstracted paintings. Braden isolates particularly compelling instances of marks and brush strokes in these abstract compositions. Braden’s oeuvre is a testament to painterly observation, translating a saturated color palette into a light-filled vision that sometimes calls forth a narrative but can just as well remain mysteriously visual. McClain Gallery is grateful to Ryan Lee Gallery for their collaboration. TIM BRADEN (b. 1975 Perth, Scotland) is a London-based artist who works primarily in painting, incorporating a myriad of techniques and approaches. Using different types of paint, supports, and application to explore subtle shifts in space, mood and tone, Braden’s work is ultimately drawn from a close reading of his environment and an attempt to depict the act of looking at things. The work he produces ranges from tight figuration to total abstractions, in which he dissolves recognizable images and reconstructs them within his simultaneously precise and aerial style. His vivid and colorful works derive from a wide range of stylistic influences, including French Impressionism, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Sonia Delaunay and Roberto Burle Marx. Braden received his MA from Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University and attended Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited at The Corn Hall, England; Frac, France; Henry Moore Institute, England; Baibakov Art Projects, Russia; Gemeentemuseum, The Netherlands; Goethe Institute, New York, NY; Schloss Ringenberg, Germany; Van Gogh Museum, The Netherlands; Museum Van Loon, The Netherlands; Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany; and Kunstnernes Hus, Norway, among others. It is held in the collections of Ashmolean Museum, UK; Cazenove Collection, UK; Lazards Collection, UK; Nederlandse Bank (Dutch National Bank), Amsterdam; Pembroke College, UK; Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, UK and the Zabludowicz Collection, UK.

McClain Gallery is pleased to present Angelina Nasso: Venus Sequence, an exhibition of paintings on paper, each featuring vast flows of paint helmed by broad circles or half domes. Nasso unveils a vibrant meditation on the unseen forces that connect our inner and outer worlds. Rendered in tones of purple, green, and teal with phosphorescent pigments, these works explore the liminal – a space of spiritual openness and potential. In 2016, Nasso underwent a near-death experience. In this body of work, the artist attempts to parse what she went through by investigating dreams, visions, and altered states of consciousness. Nasso’s sweeping brush work and glowing, orblike forms embody a sense of energy and flow, suggesting a communion with nature and unseen realms. Her work serves as an invitation to pause and consider beauty beyond the material, where art becomes a bridge to the transcendent. By giving validity to transformative realms of creativity, Nasso opens a powerful gateway to affirming forces beyond what we can see, own, dominate, and market. In this way, and as in the work of other women and transcendentalists, Nasso’s paintings resist common misconceptions of spirituality in art and confront the exploitation of beauty by patriarchal culture. A writer as much as a painter, Nasso writes the below about Venus Sequence: Patient valley of the feminine heart backward and forward, atemporal and infinite, configurations and energetic potentials, reference the mystery of how things come to be. States of openness doing and allowing, friction and surrender, fluid and responsive. Divine ideation condenses, immaterial to material, form unfolding into existence. Can an object be made out of stars? Angelina Nasso: Venus Sequence will be on view at McClain Gallery through December 28, 2024. ANGELINA NASSO (b. 1973) explores the "space of potentiality" in which we live and move through on a daily basis in her paintings. After focusing on writing for a time, Nasso has returned to the studio with renewed purpose, continuing to expand on her exploration of the relationship between the individual and the universe. Throughout her two and a half decade career she has spoken about the interactive connection between the two, influenced by physicist John Wheeler's proposition that we live in a "participatory" universe. Nasso sees her work as an ongoing exploration of this planet, one that is a constant work in progress. When executed on a grand scale, these paintings seek the sublime: Nasso states that she is "in awe of the power of this beautiful world with its many extremes constantly pushing against itself and creating itself... it is a mystery." Angelina Nasso was born in Sydney, Australia and is currently based in upstate New York. She has studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, the China National Academy of Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Nasso's work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia and her work is represented in corporate collections worldwide including a major commission for Tiffany & Co. in Prague, Czech Republic.

McClain Gallery announces its participation in the Art Dealer's Association of America's annual art fair: The Art Show 2024 taking place October 30 – November 2 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. McClain Gallery will show a two-artist presentation featuring the paintings of Dorothy Hood and Delita Martin’s print-focused collage work. Both artists hail from Houston, Texas and its environs while representing the lengthy history of the region's art and culture. This year, ADAA The Art Show launches a new program titled "Spotlight On...," which will focus on a different city annually, beginning with Houston. Special programming will include panel discussions featuring Houston art luminaries, including representatives from esteemed Houston institutions: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC), The Menil Collection, Moody Center for the Arts, DiverseWorks, Project Row Houses, PAC Art Residency, and Orange Center for Visionary Art; as well as notable Texas-Based collectors. DOROTHY HOOD (b. 1918, Bryan, Texas, US; d. 2000, Houston, Texas, US) established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city in the midst of post-war and post-revolutionary bohemia. She befriended leading artists and intellectuals including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; among many others. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors including Philippe de Montebello, Dorothy Miller, Clement Greenberg, Jim Harithas, and Barbara Rose, among others. In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Dorothy Hood’s works and published a monograph about her life and career which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented an exhibition entitled Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists. In 2019, McClain Gallery began representing the estate of the artist, held by the Art Museum of South Texas, and mounted a solo exhibition, Dorothy Hood: Illuminated Earth, and, in 2020, Dorothy Hood: Collage. In 2022, McClain Gallery staged the group exhibition Cosmic Eye of the Little Bird, contextualizing the drawings of Dorothy Hood with the work of her contemporaries as well as younger artists. McClain Gallery mounted Strangeness, Tone, Translucency, a group exhibition of collages featuring Hood, followed by a solo painting show, Dorothy Hood: Celestial Voids, in 2024. DELITA MARTIN (b. 1972, Conroe, TX) is a master printer and draftswoman whose work explores the beauty and complexity found in the spiritual identities of African American Women. Through her mixed-media printmaking practice, which includes the layering of various printmaking processes, drawing, painting, collaging, and hand-stitching, Martin celebrates her sitters’ strength and resilience in a world that often overlooks or devalues them. Through her use of pattern, texture, and color, she creates immersive veilscapes that are deeply personal yet accessible to viewers. Her distinctive style combines elements of realism, abstractions, and symbolism, creating bold portraits of Black women. Martin received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas and MFA in printmaking from Purdue University, Indiana. Formerly a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is currently working as a full-time artist in her studio in Huffman, Texas. In 2024, Martin presented two major solo exhibitions. Sometimes My Blues Change Colors at the Featherstone Center for the Arts in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (July 28 – September 1, 2024) marked a historic milestone as Martin was the inaugural female African American artist to present a solo exhibition at this institution. The exhibition was curated by Dr. Myrtis Bedolla. Earlier in the year, Martin's solo retrospective Her Temple of Everyday Familiars at the Russell Hill Rogers Galleries, the University of Texas at San Antonio (January 26 – March 22, 2024) featured a retrospective of the artist’s career, including works produced in her adolescence, an interactive installation, and recent works. This exhibition was curated by Aissatou Sidime-Blanton. Select national and international exhibitions include National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas; the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined (curated by Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, Maryland, who represents Martin), Italy; Print Association Bentlage Residency Showcase, Kloster Bentlage, Rheine, Germany. Permanent collections include: Bradbury Art Museum, Arkansas; Gorman Museum, California; Crystal Bridges Museum, Arkansas; David Driskell Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; Minnesota Museum of American Art; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Petrucci Family Foundation, New Jersey; William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, Arkansas; U.S. Embassy, Nouakchott, Mauritania. Martin’s work was included in McClain Gallery’s group exhibition Strangeness, Tone, Translucency in 2024.

McClain Gallery is pleased to present Dorothy Hood: Celestial Voids, an exhibition of paintings by the late artist. This marks Hood’s second solo painting exhibition with the gallery among many other presentations since 2019. Best known for her monumental canvases that evoke fractured color fields, Hood used a similar approach in a spare and minimal series of paintings made in the 1960s to early 70s, wherein her color palette is limited to moody blues and gray washes. The exhibition focuses on this series of paintings and expands upon a theme of weightless expansiveness also present in other works with more open palettes; the show spans the late 1960s through 1993. The works are expressive, bestowing a cosmic scale to her sensitive staining techniques. These paintings explore the artist’s groundbreaking method of abstraction, her ideas about celestial landscapes, and the deep psychological undercurrents that defined much of her practice. A keystone for our exhibition, Ingeli from 1969 is a large canvas stained in gray then overpainted in warm sienna and burnt ochre tones. The upper half of this vertical composition features Hood’s characteristic fractures, made using tape and other materials to disrupt the flow of her thinned grisaille pigments. The angular and chopped lines are followed by surprisingly bright orange and pink passages, earthy green scoops and black paint tucked throughout the mostly brown of Hood’s overpaint. The result, with its vertiginous streak of gray plunging and thinning toward the bottom edge of the canvas, is spectacular. As a counterpoint to this muscular and powerful painting, the Illuminated Gray series, punctuating the latter part of the exhibition, veers toward a bluer tone of flowing paint. The compositions in this group of works are stripped down to spilling washes, interrupted by delicate forms that appear in the under layers. Some of these shapes are in-painted, resulting in floating and groundless objects in a breadth of ultramarine. Hood cleverly utilizes the direction of her pours to create a sense of weightlessness and reversal: the call of void, as it were, moves up, down, or sideways across the room, sending us skittering through the cosmos. With this presentation we hope to hone the understanding of Dorothy Hood's prolific career and the seemingly infinite source of ideas she engaged with. While her talent as a colorist is hailed widely, her contributions to a minimalist methodology and quietly surreal abstraction remain under-observed. Celestial Voids aims to fill this quiet chamber.

McClain Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition for summer 2024 featuring the work of Anne Deleporte, Mark Francis, Bradley Kerl, Bruna Massadas, Preetika Rajgariah, Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin, and Salle Werner Vaughn. Focusing on portraiture in an expansive field, I Came to See You bends the idea to include works where the sitter’s face in not visible, the shadow of the artist’s body is the figure that becomes mirror for the viewer, or where a body at rest, bliss, or holding the mantle of unrequested legacies is the thin line between subjectivity and object. Broaching topics such as Freudian lapses, surrealist symbolism, inherited societal mantles, finding the self through fabricated personae, and seeing oneself represented, the grouped artists draw a picture of what portraiture can do today through painting, photography, found photographs, cut maps, collage, and other unusual media.

McClain Gallery is pleased to present PRINTED FACES, a group exhibition held in partnership with PrintHouston Biennial 2024. The exhibition celebrates the diverse art of printmaking, showcasing the works of artists Emma Amos, Marcel Dzama, Dorothy Hood, Admire Kamudzengerere, Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Alice Neel, Danielle Orchard, Elizabeth Peyton, and Andy Warhol.

Collage, an additive medium by definition, consistently produces mystery. The technique allows artists to investigate layering, concealing, masking, and covering: all acts which have the potential to reveal histories and ideas often hidden from view. The superposing of disparate elements levels their original separation, sparking connections and a certain metaphysical space. The works in this show use opacity, texture, rhythm, and see-through veils to shake the ground on which the viewer stands - surrealist vistas seep, and the irresistible urge to hear, touch, and look take over. Built around the magical yet formally rigorous collage work of artist Dorothy Hood, Strangeness, Tone, Translucency is a wander through collage today and its history.

McClain Gallery is pleased to announce OBJECT/IMAGE, a solo exhibition presenting eight new shaped paintings alongside smaller works on panel and paper by David Row. These works feature matte, metallic pigments with discreet fluorescent underpainting that sneaks along the edges of the works. The paintings’ polygonal wood panels push beyond the confines of classic rectangular supports, eschewing tradition and orthogonal forms with a sense of lightness. This marks Row’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

McClain Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Donald Sultan: NEW WORKS, featuring a selection of paintings and drawings that are a continuation of Sultan’s ongoing investigation of abstraction using the aesthetic structure of the mimosa tree in bloom. Inspired by the plants found in the French Riviera, this body of work highlights the artist’s innovative use of materials. This is the first solo exhibition of Sultan’s works at McClain Gallery and comes after a ten year absence in Houston.