Textures of Place: Selections from the Museum’s Collection October 10, 2017–February 4, 2018
Helen Frankenthaler, Door, 1976–79, lithograph in colors on handmade blue wove paper, edition 6/34, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Janie C. Lee. © Helen Frankenthaler/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Howard Hodgkin, Moroccan Door, 1991, collagraph with carborundum in blue with egg tempera with hand color in ivory, black, and Veronese green, on wove paper, edition 23/55, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of the El Paso Corporation. © Sir Howard Hodgkin
Textures of Place: Selections from the Museum’s Collection brings together printed abstractions that conjure feelings of home. Elements of domestic architecture—such as windows, floors, and walls—provide sanctuary to those inside. Textural impressions—including decorated surfaces, textiles, and decor—personalize otherwise mundane rooms.
The exhibition showcases works on paper from the MFAH collection that reveal how feelings about home, so often associated with personalizing interior spaces through ornamentation and decoration, can also be found in the refinement of abstraction.
Artists such as Richard Artschwager and Sylvia Mangold find abstract patterns around the house. Recalling memories and experiences, Anni Albers, Sam Gilliam, Joan Lyons, and Louise Nevelson translate personal objects and surfaces of fabrics into print. Other artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Howard Hodgkin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Motherwell, utilize an austere language of Modernism, simply titling their prints after parts of the house—like the door, the wall, and the window—in order to imagine worlds within their works of art.
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.