Return to 2009 Press Releases
Three concurrent exhibitions, opening January 28 and 29, 2009, at The University of Texas at San Antonio, at the San Antonio Museum of Art, and at the Southwest School of Art & Craft, will reflect different facets of the respected artist Marcia Gygli King during her 40-year-long career.
King is considered a leading artist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and has produced work of note in multiple styles, from minimalist to expressive abstraction to bold figurative wall-size paintings. No matter what the genre, however, she has said that “the need to translate nature’s energies has never left my work.”
Entitled Marcia Gygli King: Forty Years, the three exhibitions in San Antonio represent her many phases and interests. Early works on paper, under the heading “Spontaneous Combustion,” will be exhibited at the Southwest School of Art & Craft. The San Antonio Museum of Art will present her “Botanical Paintings,” a body of work she began in the early 1990s and continues to pursue. The UTSA Art Gallery will exhibit a selection of her most recent works, “The Culture Series.”
With studios in both New York City and San Antonio, her decades of work reflect the important give-and-take between regional artists and the New York art world.
King’s extensive record includes numerous awards, frequent discussions of her work in magazines, journals and in a documentary, and a long list of national exhibitions. Her work is included in the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Arkansas Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the McNay Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC – among many.
The trio of retrospective exhibitions in San Antonio will kick off with an opening reception at UTSA’s 1604 Campus Gallery on Wednesday, January 28, with the evening’s centerpiece being a lecture on King’s work by renowned New York art historian and critic Robert C. Morgan, at 7pm.
King is a UTSA alumna, having received her MFA from there in 1981.Marcia Gygli King: Forty Years
will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an introductory essay by American art critic and historian Robert C. Morgan, who speaks to King's universal appeal: "her paintings... are a heroic consolation that the artist is still capable of opening people's eyes, hearts and minds everywhere." Other essays in the catalog were written by Paula Owen, President of the Southwest School of Art & Craft, David S. Rubin, the Brown Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art at SAMA, and Scott Sherer, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the UTSA Art Gallery.