James Surls
Altar of the Sun
NOVEMBER 13, 2021 - JANUARY 25, 2022
PRESS RELEASE
In the energy begets energy world, we mark our time between light and dark.
We live in the center point space that measures length in every direction. How long has it been from the beginning to the new?
We rode with light across a universe divide, cloaked in compounding elements while evolving to seed the beginnings of Blue, Red and Yellow. The prism tells the story of our arching rainbow. We came in straight from the sun and slept between light layers moving from hill to hill, then woke to breathe and bathe in the new day's light. I am, and we are, as a living “Altar of the Sun”.
James Surls, renowned for his monumental works hand-hewn and assembled from the trunks of trees or cast in bronze and steel, have been exhibited, as have his drawings and prints, in such places as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art to Mexico City’s Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo and from Singapore to Peru.
His work has also been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Surls’ artwork has been hard to categorize, not quite fitting in any category of his time. At times he has been called expressionist, a minimalist and a neo-surrealist, his work mounted alongside that of Johns and Judd and been compared to Rauschenberg and Calder. What best distinguishes his vision, however, is a wild romanticism born of a childhood spent roaming the woods of East Texas, a fondness for Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge and a profound ardor for his wife of nearly five decades, artist Charmaine Locke.
There is an echo of something of the Southern Gothic in the objects Surls creates. A vague sense of unease surfaces as observers of his work realize they are the ones being observed, as countless eyes regard them with their own intentions. Flower petals are joined by thorns, elongated diamonds are flanked by knives, vortices threaten to swallow viewers. All appears to move.
The word “totemic” is used to describe Surls’ work. Mention is made of indigenous forms. These take on particular meaning when one considers that the artist’s mother, a story teller in her own right, loved to explain the unexplainable and conjured her stories from nature. Equally influential,
Surls’ father was a carpenter, a builder deeply steeped in the reality of the worth in hard work.
Surls was born in Terrell, Texas, in 1943. He earned a B.S. from Sam Houston State University in 1966. Two years later he was awarded an M.F.A. by the Cranbrook Academy of Art, after which he returned to Texas and developed his (now legendary) craft.
In 1969 Surls began teaching sculpture at Southern Methodist University. During this time, there were several extended stays at the school’s Taos, New Mexico, campus which proved catalytic. His work began to expand from the physical to the metaphysical — a landmark piece was born called “I Saw a Man With Shovels in his Hands Scooping Fire From the Sky”.
In 1976 Surls moved to Splendora, Texas, teaching sculpture at the University of Houston and building a studio (which eventually grew into the home where he and Locke raised seven daughters) on 22 acres of pristine forest. Their place of work and residence became so storied that it was featured in Architectural Digest.
During the Splendora years, Surls’ work was included in the Whitney Biennial (twice) and shown at New York’s celebrated Marlborough Gallery. This period was also marked by his founding of the Lawndale Art Center and his receipt of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
Surls has lived on a mountaintop in Carbondale, Colorado, since 1997. His work has come to encompass “molecular” structures likened to enormous chemistry models. His practice, meanwhile, has evolved to include massive public-art commissions, notably a 2009 installation along New York’s Park Avenue.
In the last few years Surls has been commissioned to create a sculpture for the 50th birthday of Singapore, as well as creating a monumental sculpture for the the new Holocaust and Human Rights Museum in Dallas, Texas. In 2020, Surls was awarded the “Lifetime Achievement Award” by the International Sculpture Center, this puts him alongside Abakanowiez, Bourgeois, Chamberlain, Christo and Rauschenberg.
Surls’ best known exhibitions include “Visions,” Dallas Museum of Art, 1984, “James Surls — In the Meadows and Beyond,” Meadows Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University, 2003, and “James Surls: The Splendora Years 1977‒1997,” University of Houston Blaffer Gallery, 2005.
