Larry Graeber and Sterling Allen: Formal Proof

Often starting from physical and image-based debris gathered from various sources, both artists generate works responding to their materials’ histories, the language it employed in the previous context from which it came, crossed with how it confronts formalism and can exist within each artists’ established vernaculars. This repurposing, remixing, and accumulating, build on energies generated in the previous lives of the materials and artists process itself to channel it into new interpretation where the observations sit momentarily to be picked up and rolled along for future images, objects, and efforts.

Artist Bios

Sterling Allen holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College. He is a co-founder and co-director of Okay Mountain, an artist collective and former gallery based in Austin, Texas. As a solo artist and in collaboration with the group, he has exhibited and completed projects at venues throughout the United States and received several residencies, including the Artpace International Artist-In-Residence Program in San Antonio, Texas. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at Texas State University.

Larry Graeber is a Texas-based artist, born in San Antonio, the oldest of three children, raised in Austin, the son of an architect, and homemaker. Larry was always involved in making things: forts, treehouses, and downhill coasters. As a teenager, junior high – high schooler he worked summers at Graeber Lumber, his granddad’s San Antonio lumberyard. In college, Larry initially studied architecture, then discovered the art department where things came naturally, studying painting, printmaking, jewelry, and filmmaking. By his second year, he had already found a studio in downtown San Marcos devoted to painting. Graeber began exhibiting in 1971 and was included in Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. His first major one-person exhibition was in 1974, Works From a Small Duplex, curated by director John Leeper at the McNay Art Museum. His work is included in the book Texas Abstract, Modern/Contemporary, and he continues to exhibit in group and one-person shows regularly. Graeber also paints in west Texas where he has a small studio.