WILLIAM CAMPBELL GALLERY

Recent Abstractions, an exhibition of works by nationally renowned New Mexico artist Kevin Tolman, will be on display March 29 through May 10 at William Campbell Gallery. The gallery will host an opening event on FWADA Spring Gallery Night, Saturday, March 29, at its new location, 217 Foch Street. The gallery will be open from noon until 9:00 p.m., and guests can meet the artist during the evening reception, starting at 6:00 p.m.

Recent Abstractions embodies Tolman’s characteristic approach to translating nature’s order and chaos in dynamic, nonrepresentational visual terms. The paintings echo the artist’s intimate relationship with the world around him—with the sights and sounds that give him pause and fill him with wonder. “I am a very keen observer of nature,” says Tolman. “It’s about looking, seeing the world on a daily basis.”

To that end, Tolman’s artwork serves as a visual response to his encounters with nature, both locally in New Mexico and in places as far afield as Portugal. His creative drive is fueled by everyday objects and occurrences that, for him, have extraordinary impact: the change of seasons, the formation of stone monoliths over eons, or the phases of the moon. As he observes these natural metamorphoses, he also considers how they converge with human constructs, how their power and resilience endure, regardless of the state of civilization.

Compositionally, Tolman’s artwork juxtaposes organic spontaneity with geometric restraint to create a complex visual interplay that reflects his process of balancing instinctual mark making with deliberate design. As much as he strives to incorporate chance and discovery into his painting practice, Tolman also remains mindful of structural components like balance and color arrangement. He remarks, “Painting for me is a rhythm between this type of focus on the one hand, and the relinquishing of control on the other.”

“I find myself often looking closely at details, forms, patterning and movement, and all these things, in a way, get stored up in me as information to be brought to a painting as I work,” he says. In that vein, Tolman’s compositions explore how abstracted visual elements interact with and respond to one another. Steeped in pigment, individual shapes, lines, marks, and drips abut and overlap, building in some places, eroding in others, and ultimately fusing together to reveal the evolution of layers as they transform into one cohesive discourse.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A native of Detroit who now lives in Albuquerque, Kevin Tolman has been painting professionally for more than five decades. He has exhibited work in galleries, museums, and universities across the United States, in Fort Worth, Dallas, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and New York. He has shown internationally in Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, England, and Portugal.

Tolman’s work has been featured in many publications, including Art in America, THE Magazine, Southwest Art, the Dallas Morning News, and the Albuquerque Journal, among others. It appears in various private and public collections as well, among them the Albuquerque Convention Center, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, the University of New Mexico, the New Mexico State Capitol, Bank One, the HGTV Dream Home 2010, Hyatt Hotels, Mutual of Omaha, Neiman Marcus, Union Pacific, and the Palazzo Resort in Las Vegas.

Kevin Tolman is a graduate of the Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. In 1990, he spent a year painting in Arraiolos, Portugal, and has returned to the country regularly, most recently completing two artist residencies with Cortex Frontal and the Obras Foundation. He has traveled and worked throughout Europe, Mexico, and South America as well. William Campbell Contemporary Art began representing Tolman in 1978.

Enigma
Maxine Helfman

March 29 through May 10th.

Enigma, an exhibition of new works by internationally acclaimed artist Maxine Helfman, will be on display March 29 through May 10 at William Campbell Gallery. The gallery will host an opening event on FWADA Spring Gallery Night, Saturday, March 29, at its new location, 217 Foch Street. The gallery will be open from noon until 9:00 p.m., and guests can meet the artist during the evening reception, starting at 6:00 p.m.

Enigma includes images from several of Helfman’s series incorporating elements of portraiture, still life, and collage to create striking vignettes that are at once familiar and unknown. In addition to these, Helfman will exhibit for the first time pieces from her newest endeavor exploring lenticular collages. These freestanding collages, comprised of multifaceted layers of visual information, add a new level of dynamism to Helfman’s body of work.

Inspired by her lived experiences, humanity’s collective history, and random occurrences, Helfman describes her images as “a consensus of everything I take in.” To that end, she uses found objects, fabrics, and wardrobe to create open-ended, visually evocative narratives that defy any one place or time. In doing so, Helfman invites viewers to contemplate each layer and every detail as they observe her images from their own point of view.

An artist forever fascinated by portraiture, Helfman seeks out live models for her images. As she works with them over fifteen to twenty sessions, the artist transforms her subjects into iconic protagonists embodying visual stories yet to be told. Such a transformation manifests as Helfman works—usually in unanticipated ways. “I just shoot,” she says. “I don’t stop. I don’t analyze it. It’s a wonderfully random process.”

The resulting works are indeed enigmatic. Helfman’s studies in figure, line, color, and texture exist outside of a prescribed time and space, fusing together objects simultaneously related and disparate, each one constructing its own storyline amid an atmosphere of soft tension wrapped in intrigue.

“You don’t have to have an answer for it,” Helfman says of her work. She encourages viewers to make their own decisions when looking at her images—to consider, process, and absorb the work in a way that makes it meaningful to them. “It is ultimately the viewer, through their personal experience and memories, that weaves together the stories.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Maxine Helfman began her early career as a commercial photographer. Her years as a highly regarded stylist and art director in a highly competitive field led to the development of her unique vision in fine art photography. She began to notice a shift in her vision that drew her away from concerns with peripheral aesthetics in addition to an interest in getting behind the camera to explore her passion for capturing a scene through her artistic lens. This newfound spontaneity offered her an aesthetic freedom where she could experiment with the dynamism of her subjects placed in tableaus challenging cultural norms of sex, race, power, and gender. Whether exploring such themes as the sacred or profane, Helfman’s images embody an array of formal qualities drawn directly from historical paintings, sculptures, and films.

To date, Helfman has exhibited her artwork in numerous venues nationally and internationally, in New York City, Bangkok, Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Paris, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Art spaces include the Dallas Art Fair, the RISD Museum in Rhode Island, Monticello, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Galerie Vu Paris, and Germany’s Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Kurpfalzisches Museum Heidelberg, among many others. Her work is in the permanent collections of Mount Vernon, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Minnesota’s Tweed Museum of Art, the RISD Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, National collections include the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart collection and the Sir Elton John Photography Collection.

Helfman’s work has appeared in such publications as Flaunt, Juxtapoz, Patron, Vice, and Zoom magazines; The Art Newspaper; the British Journal of Photography; The Telegraph(UK); Huffington Post; and on CNN. Her long list of professional recognition includes awards from Critical Mass, the International Photography Awards, Lensculture, the Lucie Awards, Photo DC, PX3, and American Photography, to name a few.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GALLERY

217 FOCH STREET
FORT WORTH, TX 76107
PHONE: 817-737-9566

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