McClain Gallery is pleased to present our second solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira in our Focus Gallery, featuring new wall mounted sculptural works created in his London studio. A multi-disciplinary artist, Oliviera makes paintings, sculpture, and installations including monumental immersive environments that evoke elements of both the urban diaspora and the natural world making them both organic and architectural.

The works in this exhibition span two series: Xilempasto, made with carefully bent sheets of delaminated plywood. The sculptures look as though they were painted through space. The other works are from an experimental series of small-scale, strongly impastoed gestural paintings. The two series merge at the intersection of material manipulation and frozen movement, one imitating the other with tactility and playfulness.

Henrique Oliveira is best known for his immersive and site-specific large-scale installations, such as his architectural Baitogogo at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and his 2009 Tapumes at Rice University Art Gallery. In 2015, the Houston Airport System commissioned Oliveira to paint Travessia, which is on permanent display in the Southwest Airlines International Terminal at Houston's Hobby Airport. Henrique began his artistic career as an abstract painter and all his work grows from this classical training. His paintings are seemingly chaotic expressions of color and gestural brushstrokes that reflect his ongoing interest in the lineage of abstraction.