Austin Thomas: Time + Place

October 21 - 27, 2013
56, rue Chapon F-75003 Paris

Heiner Contemporary is delighted to announce its participation in Salon Zürcher-Paris, an intimate art fair that runs concurrently with FIAC. Now in its sixth year, Salon Zürcher-Paris has a reputation for bringing together select contemporary galleries from across North America, offering a refreshing change-of-pace from the large fair atmosphere.  Heiner Contemporary is pleased to feature new drawing and collage by New York artist Austin Thomas. Shifting between personal narrative and public action, Thomas' work ranges from sketchbook diaries that explore the artist's everyday experiences to hybrid sculptural/architectural objects created to facilitate thought and discussion.

The drawings on display will demonstrate Thomas' rigorous daily journaling practice, which involves sketching each morning over coffee with friends.  She creates her compositions while listening. The pages are constantly evolving notes on energy and sound, which represent the colorful language of daily conversations. Fragments of the drawings are sometimes re-purposed and transformed into larger compositions, as in Daily Bread. Thomas' journals, or "pocket utopias" as she has called them, will also be on view.

A graduate of NYU, Thomas is the recipient of several awards, including a current studio award from the Elizabeth Foundation, a Public Art Fund Commission, and a sculpture commission from Grinnell College. Thomas has exhibited nationally as well as internationally in Australia, Hungary and at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria. In Washington, DC, Thomas has shown at Heiner Contemporary, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where she is represented in the collection, and at the entrance to the Metro in Arlington, VA, where "Dreamer: An Eyrie Perch," one of her public sculptures, was on view in 2006. In New York, she has exhibited at the Drawing Center, the Sculpture Center, and Storefront Gallery in Brooklyn. In 2010, NYC's Department of Cultural Affairs awarded her a commission to create a permanent public piece for a new park in Brooklyn. Thomas' work will be featured in an upcoming book titled "Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists." She continues to foster community amongst artists through various curatorial projects including her gallery Pocket Utopia located in Manhattan's Lower East Side and maintains a blog titled "Drawing on the Utopic," where she writes about all things utopic.