Krieger is a locally-based artist, and this exhibit surveys his work of the past 25 years or so, primarily drawings and box constructions. The early boxes (from about the turn of the 1980s) are nearly cubical in proportion, and are sturdy yet refined in their materials. They often represent domestic interior spaces—kitchens, bathrooms.

Generally lined with the artist's drawings and populated by cutouts and paper constructions, a dehumanizing mechanization of the human form is already at work. Heads are spindly places to hang visual puns ("head cheese" is a favorite of Krieger's). Or a body becomes a tapering Dalek-like cylinder. Even more troubling are the torsoless forms that are nothing but huge legs and hips, usually ominously labelled by the artist as "dominant forms."

There is a period of transition in the late 1980s: the boxes have been cut away into corners, often with pleasant associations: "poetry corner" or "beautiful corner." A corner can be a place where one waits to meet someone else, and the latest pieces pick up this theme.

Moving to exteriors, Krieger has embarked on a series of fanciful structures for a place called Deep Ellum. (There are relatively more studies and drawings in this section of the exhibit.) Nearly all are waiting stations of some sort, or kiosks. The proportions have changed dramatically, each tower being five of six times taller than it is wide, and the towers have become their own boxes at this point. The draftsmanship has changed, too: it is a friendly, spindly, angular yet biomorphic line with nervous hatching, something that suggests both Ralph Steadman and Dr. Seuss.

One wonders whether Krieger is familiar with the funky downtown Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas.

A review of a previous show by Jessica Dawson includes an image of one of the Deep Ellum drawings.

The work is intriguing, and I suspect that it will continue to develop and deepen.

posted: 7:50:41 PM