April 6 - May 26, 2024
McKelvey Charitable Fund Gallery
Reception Saturday, April 13, 5-7pm
Water’s Edge, the boundary between land and water where their distinct properties, solid and fluid, meet one another. Whether salt or fresh, river or lake, borders of a frontier. Essential and consequential in every way a boundary of resources and conditions.
Over the years Larry Graeber’s paintings, drawings and sculpture have frequently drawn on these unique regions. This group in particular, some pieces dating back as early as 2015.
Whether vast like here at the coast or intimate as a small pond, they have been influential to his worldview. Unique as they are, these places where land and the water reach one another are profound to him. Their interactions are usually dramatic, they develop distinct habitats and trade that often spawn influence. Mythically too, usually special, they frequently conjure far reaching worlds, maybe of peace, maybe conflict, beauty or destruction. It particularly strikes him how essential their resources are to one another to be all that they become.
Thinking about his reaction to such places, maybe our reaction to where water and land meet. What do I feel? What am I seeing? What to think? How to use it? How responsible should we be?
HIs work has and continues to be about convergences, subtle and consequential.
He loves the phenomena of three or more elements spurring a reaction that settles into a new condition. That it can be familiar or unfamiliar, subtle or remarkable, and that it is going on all the time intrigues him.
As confidants his painting, sculpture and works on paper are about weaving a tale descriptive of these experiences. Ignited by imagination they become memories and symbols evoked by these convergences as the journey resumes.
When he was a boy, his granddad was already visiting the area from San Antonio, having bought a small cabin cruiser for pleasure and to fish from.
One of his dad's first architectural projects was the design of the now Motel 6 across from the Rockport Marina. It wasn't too long after Hurricane Carla rampaged the coast that his granddad took the opportunity to buy some waterfront property on Indianola Bay and build his retreat. It was there they spent many evenings red fishing from the slip into the bay and at night listening to short wave radio of distance ships. Dark and remote, with only small and few far away lights, and the ship short wave radio traffic connecting them to distant places that he really gained an appreciation for the coastal water and its connection to the planetary scheme, it was humbling.
As a painter, whether working on canvas or foam board my medium can include oil, enamel, foil leaf, tape, and the use of such tools as trowels, sticks and squeegees, even the conventional brush.
When making sculpture, all sorts of ingredients can be involved: wood, cardboard, tape, paint, twine etc., often referred to as debris.
His work on paper is mostly collage instigated using miscellaneous materials: foil wrappers, portions of other drawings, etc. to get a work started that then might include oil stick, graphite, felt tip with no particular rules or limits.
Larry Graeber, a Texas-based artist, considers himself a painter and sculptor. He presently works in San Antonio and Marfa TX studios.
Raised in Austin the oldest of three children, the son of an architect, and homemaker/ volunteer. Larry was always involved in making things: forts, treehouses and down hill coasters. In school it was the industrial arts and architecture classes that peaked his interest, learning to use tools and to draw ideas. Summers were spent working in his grandad's lumber yard, Graeber Lumber.
Thinking he might follow in his dad's footsteps college studies began with architectural intentions. Challenged by academia and dyslexic complications Larry changed direction to studying printmaking, jewelry, painting and sculpture, even a little filmmaking. By his second year he had already found a studio in downtown San Marcos that he devoted to painting.
Graeber began exhibiting in 1971, curated into Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. His first major one person exhibition was in 1974, Works from a Small Duplex, curated by then director John Leeper and hosted by the McNay Art Museum in their upstairs galleries. After a brief hiatus Larry acquired gallery representation in Houston and Dallas spending subsequent years devoted to these venues and some sizable steel sculpture making. These years also included inclusion in two books; Art at Our Doorstep 2008 compiled by Riley Robinson (Artpace) and Trinity Press. Texas Abstract; modern/contemporary, 2014 Michael Paglia and Jim Edwards, Frisco Books.
In 2011 Larry turned his attention to curating, mounting the exhibit Margins; six artists, catalog with essay for the campus gallery, UTSA. In 2016 he was invited to participate in the first pop-up exhibit at the McNay Art Museum, Meet the Future 2016, curated by Rene Barilleaux. Just prior to the pandemic he and Sterling Allen collaborated in the project room of Blue Star Contemporary, with an exhibit of wall and floor sculpture titled Formal Proof, an accompanying catalog with essay by Anjali Gupta, Fall 2019.