Heyd Fontenot occupies a world of cultivated friendships and cooperation. His delicate and fey drawings and paintings render the likenesses of friends and acquaintances in the tight-nit Austin art world which he inhabits. Yet while his nude subjects frolic happily across his wood panels and stark white paper, there is a sense of the diabolic in the work. Not only does the exhibition title Get Your Wood On imply the wood panels that Fontenot paints on but it also addresses the uneasy titillations which our culture associates with the nude.

Heyd Fontenot was born in 1964 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He has lived and worked in Austin, Texas since 1989. This will be Fontenot’s first solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery as a represented artist, though he is a well known Texas artist showing recently in such venues as Art Palace, Austin, TX; Inman Gallery, Houston, TX and Mulcahy Modern, Dallas, TX. In 2007, he was a resident at the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, Canada and in the same year was awarded Dallas Museum of Art’s Dozier Travel Grant.

Artists in this Exhibition

• Heyd Fontenot

Artist Video