Dick Wray

(American, 1933-2011)

Untitled [brown and gold], 1961
Mixed media; 19 ½ x 35 ¼ inches
Gift of Linda and William Reaves, The Linda and William Reaves Collection of Texas Art at UHV, 2022

Like a realist still life, Untitled [brown and gold] is formal in its composition and color. Any perceived light falls directly on the crumbling mass of pale yellow in the foreground. The surroundings swaths of muddy orange and brown accentuate the yellow mass. When read as a still life, the yellow mass, with it fissures and scratches, acts as a substitute for more conventional subjects, like fruit and flowers. Untitled, captures the ephemeral and places it center stage with a formality characteristic of the still life genre. But instead of seeking illustrative or mimetic representation, Untitled confronts and controls the ephemeral, the unrepresentable and fleeting qualities of reality, through abstraction.

The formality of Untitled is counterbalanced by its gestural markings, emotive cuts, and off-kilter proportions. These oddities and imperfections emit an aura of spontaneity, frankness, and simplicity. The work, in totality, is faux-naïve. Like Dubuffet’s abstractions from the 1950s, the work evades naturalism and meaningless abstraction by way of careful construction. It is a sophisticated abstraction that interweaves formality and informality, rigidity and chaos, in a way that challenges the specious hierarchy of aesthetics as laid out in the Western artistic tradition.

It is unsurprising that Untitled stylistically resembles and spiritually embodies the art of Dubuffet. Wray was highly inspired by the European postwar avant-garde. In a 2006 interview with historian Sarah C. Reynolds, Wray recollected the way the art of Dubuffet and Appel informed his art and the greater postwar Texas art scene. In his own words, the French avant-garde made him realize “how backwards we were” in Houston. Born in 1933 and raised in Houston, Wray graduated from Lamar High School in 1953. Following graduation, he enlisted in the Army. In 1955, Wray received an honorable discharge and enrolled in the University of Houston’s School of Architecture. In 1958, he left Houston for Europe. In Europe, Wray was introduced to new artistic ideas and movements, including CoBrA and other modes of abstraction. At age twenty-six, Wray returned to Houston. In the years following his return, he exhibited at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Between 1969 and 1982, Wray was on the faculty at the Glassell School of Art. His works have entered into numerous permanent collections including the Albright-Knox Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

Location

University of Houston-Victoria

North Building Second Floor

Other Artworks by this Artist

Untitled, 2007