Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting

June 11 – August 17, 2014

McNay Art Museum
San Antonio, Texas

Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting, organized by René Paul Barilleaux, the McNay’s Chief Curator/Curator of Art after 1945, assembles the work of 13 intergenerational emerging and mid-career abstract painters whose art is characterized, in whole or part, by high-key color, obsessive layering of surface imagery, use of overall and repeated patterns, stylized motifs, fragmented representation, and a tension between melancholy and the sublime. To date, little focus has been placed on works which celebrate the exoticism, exuberance, and optimism found in the work of the painters assembled in Beauty Reigns.