Artist: Daniel Sutherland

The Painting Center presents Fragile Intervals, a solo exhibition by Daniel Sutherland in the Main Gallery.

Fragile Intervals features a new body of work that explores the shifting space between depiction and abstraction—between elaborate ornamentation and reductive flatness. Through oil paintings and drawings, Sutherland examines how perception and memory transform the familiar into something uncertain and strange. His compositions merge historical and contemporary references, creating images that are both structured and fluid, tangible and elusive.

“Painting, for me, is an act of negotiation—between image and surface, memory and perception,” says Sutherland. “These works question what it means to depict, to ornament, to simplify, and to see.”

Sutherland’s process is iterative and pluralistic, allowing depiction, abstraction, and pattern to coexist in complex tension. Many of his current works begin with imagery drawn from Western European domestic interiors—spaces lifted from art history, architecture, and design magazines—then reimagined through distortion and instability. These visual sources are fragmented, reassembled, and transformed into compositions that resist fixed interpretation, suggesting a world in motion.

His influences span Dutch Still Life, Illuminated Manuscripts, Analytic Cubism, Romantic Landscape Painting, and Post-Impressionism. Each tradition informs his approach to color, shape, and spatial construction, resulting in paintings that hover between historical memory and contemporary immediacy.

Daniel Sutherland received his MFA from Syracuse University and his BFA from James Madison University. He lives and works in Austin, Texas, and is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, including in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Houston, and the Dallas–Fort Worth area.