The summer of 2014 featured an exciting exhibition of sculpture by Gwynn Murrill and encaustic paintings by Raphaëlle Goethals at the Morrison Gallery. The exhibition began with a reception on Saturday, June 14th at the gallery.
Drawn to aspects of the natural environment and the complex beauty of wildlife, Gwynn Murrill’s principal subject is the animal form. Early in her career as a student at UCLA, Murrill began constructing sculptures with wood as her main medium. In the mid 1980s, after receiving several prestigious grants, she transitioned to casting her work in bronze. In her essay “Gwynn Murrill – An Artist’s Journey” featured in the catalogue Gwynn Murrill, Early Wood Sculpture 1968-1995, Scarlet Cheng noted “her cats are sleek and expressive, as dignified as Egyptian statuary, and the paring down of detail makes them seem Modernist.” Morrison Gallery will be exhibiting both large and small bronzes.
Murrill has shown her work in galleries and museums throughout the United States and abroad and her sculptures are represented in many public collections, including those of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; and the American Embassy, Singapore. Her awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment or the Arts Individual Artist Grant, and a Prix di Roma Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. Recently Murrill’s work was featured in the inaugural exhibit of outdoor sculpture along Avenue of the Stars in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Raphaëlle Goethals work morphs the expressive and the minimal and her signature surfaces have turned increasingly rich and psychologically compelling. The work may be seen as referring to minimalism and the fundamentality of Light and Space, yet reformulate the “question of Painting” in the classical sense. The surface itself, the planes, the tones, the light as well as the grid system state their importance. The work unapologetically aims to reach a deep level of Beauty and emotional resonance. Goethals has said of her work: “My whole balance comes from not thinking about things - It is a dance of intuition, instinct, urgency and grace.”
Goethals’s work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections in the United States and Europe, and has been exhibited in international art fairs in Miami, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco. Her work is in permanent collections including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art, the Boise Art Museum, Hewlett Packard, the Millennium group, Time Warner, Paul Allen, and numerous corporate and private collections in the United States and Europe. Goethals lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
