Raul Rene Gonzalez, Doing Werk | Artists-Parents
Exhibition • February 6–March 3, 2023
Gallery hours
Saturday Feb 11, 11am-3pm
Saturday Feb 18, 11am-3pm
Saturday Feb 25, 11am-3pm
Friday, Mar 3, 6–9pm
Saturday Mar 4, 11am-3pm
Artist’s Statement
As someone that has a career that allows me to spend time nurturing my children, I know the moments I share with them are precious and extremely valuable, especially as a father. This exhibition is about sharing those moments, between parent and child, between father and daughters. I spent several years after grad school as the “stay-at-home-parent” in our household, while simultaneously balancing my art career. After a few years of creating paintings and drawings about my own experiences, I began to collaborate with other working artists, sharing a glimpse into their world as parents.
This exhibition features select works from my Doing Werk and Artists-Parents series. The Artists-Parents series was funded by a 2020 Artist Grant from the Luminaria Artist Foundation and the City of San Antonio.
About the Artist
Raul Rene Gonzalez is a multidisciplinary artist who incorporates an astonishingly wide range of mediums and methods in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, clothing, murals, installations, live and recorded dance and other performance-based work. Largely autobiographical in nature, his work explores topics such as fatherhood, gender roles, labor, identity, pop culture, science, and abstraction.
A prolific creator who finds inspiration anywhere and everywhere, Gonzalez is known by art critics, curators, and friends alike for his unwavering energy, ambition and experimentation that has led to the creation of several hundred unique works over the past decade. He truly lives his motto: “Werk. Hustle. Sleep. Repeat.”
Gonzalez earned his M.F.A. in Art from the University of Texas at San Antonio and a B.F.A., Magna Cum Laude in Painting from the University of Houston. Raul is the Director, Curator, and Resident Artist at Clamp Light Studios & Gallery, an artist-run space in San Antonio where the artist currently lives with his wife and two daughters. Raul also manages WerkHouse SA, a short-term rental property.
A Houston native now based in San Antonio, Texas, Gonzalez’ experiences living in two of the biggest metropolitan cities in the country influence nearly all his bodies of work—from detailed urban landscapes that pay homage to the workers who build and maintain our cities, to large-scale duct-tape and cardboard installations, to his paintings that document key features of San Antonio’s musical history displayed permanently in San Antonio’s City Hall.
Gonzalez has been featured in New American Paintings No. 162: West Issue, Harper’s Magazine, Southwest Contemporary Vol. 5: Collectivity & Collaboration, Create! Magazine, Glasstire, The San Antonio Express News, La Prensa Texas, Spectrum News, The SA Current, The Austin Chronicle, and Whataburger.
Gonzalez’s work has been exhibited and featured widely throughout Texas and the United States. Since 2012, his work has been added to permanent collections such as the National Mexican Museum of Art (Chicago), the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum (Albuquerque), Benson Latin American Collection (Austin), Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin), the McNay Art Museum (San Antonio), the University of Texas at San Antonio, Capital One Financial Services (Plano and San Antonio), the City of San Antonio, The Woodlands High School Art Trust, Artes de la Rosa (Fort Worth), the Whataburger Museum of Art, and The San Antonio Art League & Museum.