David B. Smith Gallery is pleased to announce its return to the Dallas Art Fair for its seventh year, presenting woven abstract paintings by Oakland, CA-based artist Miguel Arzabe and porcelain sculptures by Bentonville, AR-based artist Linda Nguyen Lopez. In this year’s colorful booth, historically craft-oriented modalities of weaving and handbuilt ceramic sing in their respective material histories through modern aesthetic sensibilities.
Material and cultural histories collide with the woven paintings of Miguel Arzabe. Holding master’s degrees in both fine art and engineering, Arzabe’s artistic practice is multimodal. He begins with creating abstract paintings on canvas, which are then cut into thin strips and meticulously rewoven by hand. Works featured in the booth this year include flowing lines that serve to guide the weaving pattern. Through this process, he explodes and reimagines the image plane, literally intertwining the aesthetics of his Bolivian heritage and his Eurocentric arts education into powerful, rhythmic compositions.
Linda Nguyen Lopez’s unmistakable porcelain sculptures adeptly use color, form, and gesture to capture a distinctly modern aesthetic sensibility. Presented on an intricate hand-tiled plinth, her Dust Furries, an ongoing series of chromatic pigmented porcelain works, use repeating, finger-like rows of hand formed porcelain shapes to create abstract sculptures that blend the lines of modern design and craft. At first glance, Lopez’s works read almost as digital; seamless gradients of tropical color perfectly blend on each charismatic piece, whose softness and shaggy, pendulous fringe delightfully defy the material reality of vitrified porcelain.
