Garland Fielder: Bunkers 2020

July 13 - August 15,2020

Note: This exhibition in online-only From the Gallery: "Garland Fielder is an artist, architect and writer living and working in Houston, Texas. Fielder’s new body of work, Bunkers 2020, consists of large scale, intricate graphite drawings and wooden sculptures inspired by the architecture of Europe’s historic Cold War bunkers that are still sprinkled throughout the countryside of Albania. Navigating between reality and abstraction, Fielder revels the dichotomy of the dramatic Futurism movement and surreal Sci-Fi movie sets, visually referencing vintage movie stills. Fielder is a process driven artist whose methodology remains elegant and refined. His work spans many genres yet is identifiable through a consistent exploration of formal strategies engaging in a contextual language of abstraction and most recently, realism. Fielder employs architectural motifs such as scale models in a manner meant to re-contextualize the familiar and inspire further investigations into the link between past and present, the outlined and the mercurial." From the Artist: “Bunkers represent several architectural types simultaneously. On the one hand, they are a distilled form of  modernism - form-follows-function quite literally in that the concrete megaliths derive their structural expression solely from functional needs as dictated by the ravages of modern technological warfare. In another sense, the bunkers are a timely typology, even if at first they seem anachronistic. The stable forms, signifying a terrific solace against immediate annihilation have through time, become upended, so to speak, in their various strategic localities. Yet, they still present a contemporary visitor a sense of stability - a comforting psychological take-away in today’s uncertain times. These drawings depict one of western culture’s most striking architectural forms suggesting an unfortunate relationship between the current zeitgeist and a building strategy necessitated by a total war economy.” - Garland Fielder, May 2020 Garland Fielder has earned both a Master of Architecture from the University of Texas, Austin and a Master of Fine Art in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Texas, Denton. Fielder has exhibited in such venues as MADI Art Museum of Geometric Art, Dallas, Texas; Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, Texas; University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland; Pickled Art Center, Beijing, China; Tashiro-Kaplan Arts Complex, Seattle, Washington; and the Jung Center, Houston, Texas. In 2019, Fielder’s work was included in the book “Texas Abstract: Modern | Contemporary” and New American Paintings, No. 138. His work has been juried into exhibitions by such notable curators as: Rita Gonzalez of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dr. Kevin Salatino of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Robert Rosenblum of the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Working as a published critical writer, Fielder has contributed to numerous art journals, including ArtForum and ArtLies, In March 2019, Fielder completed his first solo architectural design, the ARC House in East Downtown Houston, Texas.

Anya Tish Gallery 4411 Montrose
Houston, TX 77006
Get Directions