Sandra York

Sandra York, July & August 2011 at Nau-haus Art, 223 E. 11th St. E. 11th St. in the Heights of Houston Texas, exhibiting emerging and independent contemporary artists. Nau-haus Art & POP 3 Digital is open by appointment Wednesday through Saturday Noon to 6 PM, and by appointment - call 832-607-4378

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Sandra York: "trueorfalse"
opening reception Saturday July 9, 6 to 9 PM

exhibition runs through August 27, 2011

please note: summer hours - Fri. & Sat. Noon to 6 PM

Nau-haus Art, 223 E. 11th St. Houston TX, 77008

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I have always admired the abstract painters. They perform without a net. No distinct subject matter, politics and narrative to stand beneath and applaud their cause. These artists walk the wire alone and leave us with the evidence of a journey taken for it's own sake.

Sandra York comes from a generation of Houston's school of abstraction that was directly influenced by painters like Chuck Dugan, Derek Bosier, and John Alexander teaching at the Lawdale Art and Performance Center as part of the University of Houston program in the early 1980's.

Arshile Gorky and Joan Mitchell are historical influences in her work. Technically York begins her paintings with thin and brightly colored areas that are almost completely masked away with subsequent veils of translucent lighter color field work. Intentional or not I cannot say but for me the work directly relates as a next generation of what has been termed as the American Lyrical Field movement.

DMA - Nau-haus July 2011

Finding Her Feet., Oil on Canvas, 50 x 59, 2010

A Brief overview from Wikipedia about recent contributions to Lyrical Abstraction:

American Lyrical Abstraction is an art movement that emerged in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and then Toronto and London during the 1960s–1970s. Characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic staining, process, occasional imagery, and other painterly and newer technological techniques. Lyrical Abstraction led the way away from minimalism in painting and toward a new freer expressionism. Painters who directly reacted against the predominating Formalist, Minimalist, and Pop Art and geometric abstraction styles of the 1960s, turned to new, experimental, loose, painterly, expressive, pictorial and abstract painting styles. Many of them had been Minimalists, working with various monochromatic, geometric styles, and whose paintings publicly evolved into new abstract painterly motifs. American Lyrical Abstraction is related in spirit to Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and European Tachisme of the 1940s and 1950s as well. Tachisme refers to the French style of abstract painting current in the 1945–1960 eriod. Very close to Art Informel, it presents the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism.

As a movement, Lyrical Abstraction extended the post-war Modernist aesthetic and provided a new dimension within the abstract tradition which was clearly indebted to Jackson Pollock's "dripped painting" and Mark Rothko's stained, color forms. This movement was born out of a desire to create a direct physical and sensory experience of painting through their monumentality and emphasis on color – forcing the viewer to "read" paintings literally as things.

His Departure Her Response, Oil on Canvas, 49 x 60, 2010

During 2009 the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida hosted an exhibition entitled Expanding Boundaries: Lyrical Abstraction Selections from the Permanent Collection

At the time the museum issued a statement that said in part:

Lyrical Abstraction arose in the 1960s and 70s, following the challenge of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Many artists began moving away from geometric, hard-edge, and minimal styles, toward more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions worked in a loose gestural style. These "lyrical abstractionists" sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting, and to revive and reinvigorate a painterly "tradition" in American art. At the same time, these artists sought to reinstate the primacy of line and color as formal elements in works composed according to aesthetic principles – rather than as the visual representation of sociopolitical realities or philosophical theories.

Characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic staining, process, occasional imagery, and other painterly techniques, the abstract works included in this exhibition sing with rich fluid color and quiet energy. Works by the following artists associated with Lyrical Abstraction will be included: Natvar Bhavsar, Stanley Boxer, Lamar Briggs, Dan Christensen, David Diao, Friedel Dzubas, Sam Francis, Dorothy Gillespie, Cleve Gray, Paul Jenkins, Ronnie Landfield, Pat Lipsky, Joan Mitchell, Robert Natkin, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Garry Rich, John Seery, Jeff Way and Larry Zox.

Here Then Gone, Oil on Canvas, 18 x 24, 2010