Overgrowth | Erin Cluley Gallery

Erin Cluley Gallery is pleased to announce Overgrowth, a group exhibition of work exploring wild ecologies and landscapes. The exhibition features work by an international roster of artists including, Hidenori Ishii, Isabel Lee-Rosson, Reyna Ramirez, and Rachel Wolfson Smith. In painting, drawing, and sculpture, these artists consider our connection to the natural environment and significance in the untamed and ungroomed. Overgrowth reframes the landscape, not as something to lose oneself in, but as a dense reflection of our emotions, culture, and history.Across global art history, artists have employed landscapes as a vehicle to communicate emotional states and cultural context. Early American landscape painting featured the colonial bourgeoisies dramatically posed against manicured fields attesting to ownership and wealth; in the 19th-century, the Hudson River School removed the figure altogether, taking instead the perspective of a deity overlooking the wild topography of America’s wilderness and legitimizing European settler’s claim to Native land.In the 20th-century, Surrealist painters—Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, etc.—broke the symbolic barrier between natural and psychological landscapes. Land artists of the 1960s and 70s directly intervened in the environment, rethinking our relationship to nature in an increasingly urbanized world. Today, landscape artists reckon with realities of climate catastrophe onset by industrial growth, violent enforcement of geographic borders, and historical representations of the environment. The artist’s featured in Overgrowth explore these issues largely outside of figural representation. Their work allows the natural world to speak for its wild, undomesticated self.Overgrowth will be exhibited concurrently with the debut solo exhibition by Dallas-based painter Jessica Vollrath.Works included by:HIDENORI ISHII (Long Island City, NY)ISABEL LEE-ROSSON (Dallas, TX)REYNA RAMIREZ (Dallas, TX)RACHEL WOLFSON SMITH (Amsterdam, Netherlands)