From Ruins to Resurrection: The Sacred Landscapes of Michael Roque Collins    Oct 30 - Dec 13, 2009

Lewallen Galleries is please to present From Ruins to Resurrection: The Sacred Landscapes of Michael Roque Collins. Coinciding with the book release and signing of a lavish new monograph of the same title, the exhibition showcases the artist's new body of works on linen, mixed media installation, and photo paintings.

Michael Roque Collins is recognized as producing some of the most profoundly affecting figurative expressionism seen in contemporary art. Frequently employing archetypal symbols of decay and regeneration, his paintings are recognized for their aggressive use of pentimenti and surface scarification, demonstrating the maximal aesthetic effects of subtractive aesthetic strategies. Achieving visual addition through richly modulated areas of violent erasure, his pictorial techniques allude to the universal cycling between order and disorder, memory and history, enlightenment and darkness - root aspects of the human condition, the collective unconscious, and the natural world.

Reinvigorating our contemporary landscape as a site of spiritual allegory, the artist's relentless examination of post-modern existential dilemmas has led critics to identify in Collin's works a distinctly American spiritual resonance to the output of Anselm Keifer and Gerhard Richter. Finding beauty resident in the terrible, Collins regards his works as mythic conduits to our memories of the sublime and revelatory visual parables of hope for the future.

A native of the Gulf Coast of Texas, Collins is a figurative symbolist whose images are drawn from a personal experience informed by lucid dreams containing icons from ancient cultures and mythic traditions. Exhibited in numerous museums and other public institutions, his work is included in prominent public and private collections internationally.