Robert Houle Troubling Abstraction

Robert Houle has been a visionary artist since the beginning of his career. "Native artists," he wrote in 1982, "are committed to involvement in the polemics of modern art. Meaning derives from living in the twentieth century, where painting ranges from realism to abstraction and sculpture varies from shamanism to assemblage." Employing the traditions of modernist painting, particularly as practiced by Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Houle has tenaciously insisted on reciprocity among the aesthetic and cultural specificities with which he engages. After years of breathtaking solo exhibitions, he returns to his first stylistic impulse: abstraction and the parfleche figure. This important publication, with three essays and an artists statement, documents a unique and vital side to Houles innovative artistic practice.