Strand Gallery
August 24 – November 17, 2019
Opening Reception Saturday, August 24, 2019
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Erin Curtis
Night and Day
Erin Curtis’ exhibition, Night and Day, includes recent large-scale paintings that are dense with color and pattern. Her layered, cut-canvas works contain disrupted surfaces and reflect an interest in geometric abstraction and its historical roots in weaving, architecture, nature, and ritual. The paintings in Night and Day are nearly overwhelmed by an unreadable chaos that is pulled back to the edge of order by familiar patterns and forms. The works are rooted in landscape and domestic iconography, often sourced from textiles, and influenced by Curtis’ experience as a new mother. Just as night and day can be experienced as opposites, a continuum, or as cycles that shift subtly over the days and months, Curtis explores different ways of experiencing pattern and repetition, separateness and connectedness in her work.
Erin Curtis is an artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Curtis’s work combines utopian ideals of beauty and structure, with process and chance. Primarily working as a painter, she also creates large-scale, site-specific installations and public art projects. She has received grants from the Dallas Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the City of Austin and the District of Columbia. Curtis has had solo shows at Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX (2017), CalPoly, San Luis Obispo, California (2016), Big Medium Gallery, Austin, Texas (2015) and Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, DC (2015). She has created commissioned works for the Chicago Transit Authority, the City of Washington D.C., Facebook, Art in Embassies and the City of Austin. In the summer of 2019, a 20-foot tall cut brick mural commissioned by Intelligentsia Coffee will be installed in downtown Austin. Curtis attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2010 and was awarded residencies at Anderson Ranch (2012) and Vermont Studio Center (2014). In 2008-2009, Curtis was a Fulbright Scholar in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Curtis graduated from Williams College with a BA in Liberal Arts in 1999 and received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007.
