Inman Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new paintings and works on paper by Kristin Musgnug entitled Low Down and Close Up: Paintings of the Forest Floor in the Main Gallery. In the South Gallery, Spring, an exhibition of new sculpture by Texas Modernist Gene Owens will be on view. This will be Owen's first solo show with Inman and Musgnug's seventh. Both shows will open Friday, May 20th with a reception from 6 to 8, and continue through June 25th.
In the popular imagination, the forest is little more than setting: a site of savagery or renewal, a backdrop on which to project fears and ideals. In Kristin Musgnug's (b. 1959, Buffalo, NY) paintings, the scenery is foreground: stumps and embankments jut high and imposing, occluding the space beyond and asserting a specificity that resists easy generalization. Musgnug makes drawings and studies on site and works off those sources in her studio, and the resulting paintings blend close observation with imaginative elaboration. Rather than fade into memory or metaphor, her heightened palettes and canted perspectives describe locales that pulse with the vitality of lived experience.
Gene Owens' (b. 1931 Birdville, TX) sculptures venerate the natural world in both subject and technique. It's most obvious in his cast-bronze chairs, whose functional geometries are destabilized with florid branches and vines. Owens dips his wax models (from which the bronzes are cast) into alternately hot and cool vats of wax, letting chance and natural process augment and erode the original structures. In another body of work, Owens imagines himself inside his forms, pressing against their surfaces until protuberances suggest themselves. This will be Owens' first exhibition of new work in more than twenty years, and if the late efflorescence suggests anything, it's that his process is a true collaboration with nature: instinctive, unpredictable, but irrepressible once it takes root.
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