Archive

Larry Scholder at Flatbed Press, 2009

A reception is planned this Friday evening, June 21 at Flatbed from 6 until 8 pm for Larry Scholder celebrating his exhibition Archive.  This exhibition of works does not constitute an archive or a collection of every print Larry has created, but in this case the title refers to Larry's shapes, lines, forms and minimal color that have become more than a visual vocabulary.  They are his Archive.

The show has been up for a few weeks now, and I get to linger and look longer than I usually do at exhibition openings.  I am reminded of Girogio Morandi and his archive of forms.  Like Morandi, Larry works with minimal forms and repeats them.  He also works with minimal color.  Stripping most of the color away from what might be considered biologically based shapes, we are left with bare, flattened shapes and the spaces between them.  These forms themselves are not the subject matter, but the relationship of the forms to each other and the space they occupy seem to become pressingly important.  Some of Larry's prints at times seem visually playful.  Two of Larry's relief etchings hang side by side.  Spawn I and Spawn II at first seem the same, and yet, with close inspection the minute difference start to sharply erupt on our vision and our visual memory is acutely challenged.

Scholder, After, aquatint, 2006

-->

The exhibition represents nearly twenty years of Larry Scholder’s work as an artist/printmaker and constitutes a retrospective of his developing vision. Archive was first mounted at the Pollock Gallery of the Meadows School of Art at Southern Methodist University, where it was exhibited in the fall of 2012.  Scholder served as professor at SMU from 1968 until 2012.  In 1994, Flatbed published one of Scholder’s prints as a part of the Flatbed Portfolio and since that time he has continued to work with Flatbed on various intaglio projects.

Scholder, Apogee, aquatint, 2005

Archive will be up until August 24. Flatbed's gallery hours have changed and now are Tuesday - Friday 10 am until 5 pm and Saturday from 10 am until 3 pm.  We are also open by appointment.