James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997

Monday, 19 September 2005 11:17

HOUSTON, TEXAS.-The Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston presents James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997. James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 will be the artist's first major scholarly exhibition in over twenty years and offers American audiences a rare opportunity to fully assess the depth and breadth of Surls' important contribution to the field of contemporary sculpture. James Surls: The Splendora Years, 1977-1997 offers a survey of sculpture, wall works, drawings, and prints, focusing on a singular twenty-year period in the career of this remarkable artist. During this period, Surls' artwork and career come together in a compelling story that interweaves the unique aspects of a specific landscape, his personal story, and the tumultuous nature of art practice in the latter half of the twentieth century, into a mélange capable of reconciling counterculture utopianism and the rigor of post-minimalist sculptural approach. James Surls makes art to embody the inherent dualities of natural forces-positive and negative, fluid and static, male and female. His work is simultaneously joyously optimistic and darkly expressionistic and his signature forms and images, such as diamond shapes, whirling vortexes, needles, knives, and houses, infuse highly personalized folk idioms with the aesthetics of high modernism. His forms are imbued with a visual poetry that arises from the dexterity with which he manipulates wood, steel, and bronze to craft simple, even homespun narratives into objects that are freighted with universal meaning. Surls balances his creative process between structure and intuition. On the one hand, his compositional approach was forged from his education and professional instruction in studio art in undergraduate and graduate art school. On the other hand he believes in the invisible, underlying forms inherent in natural materials like wood or stone, his preferred materials. Wood is his signature material, and carving and cutting his preferred gesture. This is a natural outcome of his childhood. With his father a carpenter, Surls grew up sawing cedar logs for lumber, making wood beams for housing construction. He is as confident of his mastery of tools as he is with his artistic vision and his ability to see the possibilities trapped within natural materials. He speaks of "powerful forces waiting in the wood just to be released. In 1977 Surls acquired a large tract of land in Splendora, Texas where he built a spacious studio. The ensuing twenty years in which he worked there was a period of remarkable growth and development. These Splendora years were an especially productive period for him, a time when his art "exploded" in a rapid succession of artistic breakthroughs. Surls also views this period as his "romantic" period, because of the synergy between his artistic development and the east Texas landscape from which he took both raw materials and his intellectual inspiration. No artist of his generation has had a greater impact upon the development of Texas as a locus of vibrant creativity than James Surls. Surls is a self-described "eternal optimist," and his infectious enthusiasm for all matters artistic made him a catalyst for a generation of young artists during these years.

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