d berman gallery is pleased to present Provisional Beauty: New Work by Lance Letscher.

The gallery’s exhibit of newly created work will complement Letscher’s solo show at the Austin Museum of Art (June 5 – August 29, 2004). The museum show is a traveling eight-year survey of Letscher’s work, Books and Parts of Books, 1996-2004, originating at the Galveston Arts Center.

“Lance Letscher is an Austin, Texas-based artist whose meticulously pieced collages reference the modernist tradition of the juxtaposed fragment. His side-by-side found paper elements not only describe a physical reality whose precedents include the tightly formed vernacular of Kurt Schwitters’ merzbau, but also, in his employment of used materials, embody the steady march of time itself, its transformation of the present into faded yet inherently eloquent pieces of memory. … Letscher’s collages communicate an ardent wish to recognize, or re-experience, the way our culture shores up its fragments in the search for meaning, whose wistful goal is not just to suggest, but also to capture distillations of time.

- Jonathan Goodman, poet and visual arts critic based in New York City

“Letscher’s rough geometry is impure, composed of scraps, cast-offs and things salvaged from dumpsters. It is a geometry suffused with melancholy and as a spiritual vision it has a cobbled-together, provisional nature. It is what will do for the time being. And it is amazing and beautiful.”

- from essay in catalogue for Books and Parts of Books, 1996-2004 by Charles Dee Mitchell, freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas

This exhibition opens on May 27, 2004 with a reception from 6 – 8 PM, and will continue through July 3, 2004. A gallery talk will be held at 1:00 PM on Saturday, June 5, 2004 (the first Saturday of the month*).