McClain Gallery is delighted to announce Stray Cats with Kittens, a solo exhibition of Aaron Parazette’s new paintings alongside a range of works from early on in the artist’s career. The show explores Parazette’s long interest in abstraction, and like any artist's stray thoughts, the progeny lives in the same neighborhood, wanders at will, howls in the night, and sometimes produces offspring. Works on panel and plaster from the 1990s draw a continuous conceptual line through the artist's formal approach to painting; several new shaped canvas pieces and the debut of a new series utilizing online image generator technology round out the group. 

The earliest works, a series of small paintings from 1991–92, proposed that the “touch” of the artist’s hand was the critical element in resonant art. Their compositional structures draw from the vocabulary of contemporary abstract painting and common household patterns, with titles like Shower Curtain and Bathroom Floor. Pure Beauty, a series of cast plaster rectangles emblazoned with small logo decals from AmEx to Nike, is intended to suggest and capitalize on the power of corporate sponsorship. The imperfect material and wear emphasize the soft edges of age, like artifacts from an industrial past. This early use of text cues the later word paintings, which consumed much of Parazette’s studio practice in the early 2000s–2010s, and the examples in this show provide a synergistic beginning and end to the exhibition: So Soon?

Aaron Parazette (b. 1960 Ventura, California) holds an MFA in Painting from the Claremont Graduate University. In 1990, Parazette relocated to Houston as a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Houston. 

Among the institutions in which Parazette has shown are the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas; Austin Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada; and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina. Reviews of his work have appeared in ArtPapers, Art Lies, Art in America, Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, New Art Examiner, and New York Times.  His paintings are included in numerous collections including Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; and many others. He was the recipient of a 2005 Artadia Fund for Art and Design and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1994. He was given a solo exhibition at Dallas Contemporary in 2012 and was the Art League Houston’s Texas Artist of the Year in 2012. Parazette has had three solo shows at McClain Gallery, in 2008, 2011, and 2022, and was part of a two-person exhibition in 2018 as well as a group show in 2014. He also curated a lauded group exhibition at the gallery, In Plain Sight, in 2012. Parazette is represented by McClain Gallery.