STEPHEN BATURA | Fixtures

In his fifth solo Robischon Gallery exhibition, Stephen Batura returns with “Fixtures,” an intimate exhibition of paintings investigating a demanding and complicated abstract mark-making technique with chandeliers as his subject. Previous solo exhibitions included the artist’s very large-scale casein and acrylic paintings such as floodplain, which was nearly the same size as the gallery’s main wall, and his very large-scale train derailment paintings that filled the entire gallery – some based on Batura’s decade-long Charles Lillybridge series project paintings of early Denver, its surrounding environs, and its citizens engaged in work and recreation.

With “Fixtures,” Batura’s interest shifts to the possibilities of abstraction in smaller format paintings created with a technique of assembling individual elements of dried paint so that each inhabits the role of a single brushstroke adding to the layered, aggregate whole. The painting style offers shifts in perspective with paintings appearing more abstract up close, and more realistic from afar. For the series, Batura’s process involves spreading a thin layer of acrylic paint on glass with a spatula. When dry, he peels off a sheet of pure color which he cuts into hundreds of small elements to be painstakingly fixed to a panel with gel medium. Washes of color amplify this materiality with the assembled compositions of some of the chandeliers becoming blurred in a disintegration of color. Further intrigue for the artist in this series comes from thinking formally about chandeliers as industrial objects while not emphasizing any particular class distinction that might be suggested by such an ornate object – one that seems to him like it should be obsolete. He states, “Chandeliers, meant to be status symbols, can be both grand in moneyed homes or restaurants, and, also so humble as to be available at any home improvement store.” The sheer ubiquity of the lighting fixtures, taken from the artist’s own photographs from Venice, Italy to Denver, offer Stephen Batura an opportunity to seize on a new method of painting while capturing each subject and its subsequent illumination as form and color.

Stephen Batura received his B.F.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum and the Fine Arts Collection of the US General Services Administration along with additional private collections and has been shown in the US and internationally at the Denver Art Museum, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Arvada Center for the Arts, Denver Public Library and Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, Pueblo, CO. Solo exhibitions include exhibitions at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, the artist has created several public commissions including Rehearsal, a large-scale lobby mural in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House at the historic Auditorium of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts along with other commissioned paintings and murals at the Red Rocks Amphitheater Visitor’s Center, Denver, the Denver Public Library, James Walsh United States Courthouse, Tucson, Arizona, and Denver’s Union Station.