Works by UTSA alumni featured at Dallas Museum of Art
(Feb. 26, 2003)--The artwork of University of Texas at San Antonio Department of Art and Art History alumni Augusto DiStefano, Juan Miguel Ramos and Chris Sauter are featured in the Dallas Museum of Art exhibition "Come Forward: Emerging Art in Texas," running Feb. 23 - May 11.
Pictured are pieces by Juan Migel Ramos.
The exhibition of work by 11 Texas artists encompasses a broad range of art forms from video and mixed media installations to traditional painting and sculpture.
The exhibit presents a view of a new generation of artists that exemplifies the vitality of art in Texas. Rather than looking back on an artist's career to determine the turning point that launched his or her success, the exhibition selects the artists' first critically successful works completed when they were in graduate school or soon thereafter.
Augusto DiStefano earned a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from The University of Texas at San Antonio. His recent solo exhibitions were at the Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, Calif., and Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio, Texas. Informed by a complex combination of processes and sources, Di Stefano's handsomely executed paintings are reductive and spare. His process includes many coats of priming, sanding and several applications of paint. His technique conveys duration of time and evokes the process-oriented oil and wax panels of Brice Marden and the white paintings of Robert Ryman. DiStefano's addition of thick marks in a single line, cluster or pattern of colors introduces narrative and associative elements.
Juan Migel Ramos earned both his BFA (1995) and MFA (2001) from The University of Texas at San Antonio. His comic-inspired yet sophisticated drawings are based on photographs of friends and family. Drawings include the richly colored "Mirror Maps," "Sophia's Map," which incorporates digital prints, and "Secret City," which uses photocopied drawings. His nonlinear work portrays a world in which Mexican and American cultures meet and mix with a sense of identity, location and place. Combining drawing and photographs, the hand and the mechanical, subjectivity and objectivity, Ramos questions viewers' perceptions and notions of reality. Ramos was recently the recipient of a prestigious Artpace international artist residency.
Chris Sauter received a BFA from University of the Incarnate Word and an MFA from The University of Texas at San Antonio. Although his work makes no direct reference to Hans Haacke, his finely designed and crafted large-scale installations layer aesthetic, biological and cultural systems, conceptually akin to similar to Haacke's work of the 1960s and 1970s. Haacke used nontraditional materials to reveal the flux and transformation of physical or inorganic systems. With his multimedia bull-riding project, "Engaging the Minotaur," commissioned for this exhibition, Sauter refines his use of medium and processes to explore the intersection of the body and culture, the real or physical, and the constructed or metaphorical. The work has two major parts: a wood-paneled living room (using brown carpet from his parents' house) raised off the floor with two-by-fours, and an arena shaped like a dining room with furniture-quality bleachers with beautifully crafted, lathed legs of white oak. In the arena hang three projection screens showing a bull ride from three different angles.
For more information, contact Frances Colpitt, chair of the Department of Art and Art History at (210) 458-4386.
Download an overview of works by UTSA alumni in the Dallas Museum of Art exhibit (Word document).
--------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
© The University of Texas at San Antonio, 2003