Lynn Randolph: Dark Revelations

September 6-October 11, 2025
Opening reception September 6, 5:00-7:00 pm
Artist will be in attendance

Essay by Susie Kalil

Lynn Randolph's paintings come to grips with the realities of who we are, a spiritual tenor both dire and redeeming. Her works have soul as well as nerve—a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. For nearly a half century, the Houston artist has been known as a boundary-pushing painter, happy to break through the inexorable passage of time, the nature of truth and endless human yearning.

Randolph has always been something of an underwater archaeologist, diving into the twilight zones of our swirling mixed-up universe to create provocative works through metaphor, correspondences across disparate fields, frames of reference and states of being—between cosmos and mind, black holes and lost histories, freedom of conscience over adherence to dogma. One of Randolph's great strengths as a painter, along with her poetic understanding of our relationship to the elemental things—fire and water, celestial bodies and the metaphysical ones—is her ability to reflect our worst fears and anxieties back to us. In doing so, Randolph leavens even the grimmest scenarios with psychic agility, resilience and imaginative resourcefulness. Viewers who come to her works, having fallen under the spell and sheer inventive beauty of her primal realms, are likely to feel disoriented. The dreamlike intimacy of the figures belies the disasters and fresh hell that surely await for us.

At 86, Randolph is older, wiser and continues to find ways to energize her paintings with narrative possibilities that are as confrontational as they are open-ended. Nothing is certain, save for the subtle reality of the lived body. In Randolph's world, the past, present and future are combined to depict scenes of unadulterated innocence and apocalyptic violence, scenes in which the fragile precariousness of our existence is frankly addressed. At once epic, enchanting and bloody, Randolph's portrayals of men and women out-of-bounds give fleshy substance to life's antagonisms and mayhem.

The sense of a world in which the center no longer holds feels frighteningly relevant in this fraught year of 2025. Such times, as Randolph makes clear, are crucibles in which moral and mortal worth are tested. Few artists have a better eye for the dehumanizing parameters of our current culture of capital; fewer still cut as hard or as deep as Randolph does.

Accordingly, her recent series of paintings stake out emotional and psychological territory that Randolph has never quite ventured before. Kirk Hopper Fine Art is honored to present Dark Revelations, 23 searing works produced over the past decade that truly look into the abyss of our social and political malaise. By turns flinty and tender, haunted and enraptured, the paintings grapple with questions of higher purpose, of fate and self-determination, of belief and responsibility, and of connection and solitude. As it happens, the series seems extra tailored to this particular American moment. Against a backdrop of increasing barriers and tightened border security, a gutting of lifesaving aid to the sick and poor, an administration intent on obliterating any shared sense of common humanity, Randolph's paintings read as both elegy and repartee. At its core, the series represents a paean to the beauty that is vanishing from our world.

A spirit of political provocation has long pervaded Randolph's work. At KHFA, the artist blasts away at the greed, shallowness and constitutional dystopia in which we are now caught by situating us in a kind of cosmic game of checks and balances. If an ending must come, will it be from the stars? The universe gave us birth; will it give us death as well? Can the soul be somehow transfigured by galactic skeins of existence? Throughout Dark Revelations, Randolph empowers our ability to dream, to devise the kinds of mythologies that not only help us cope with our present hardships but also allow us to envision some familiar, yet parallel alien world. For Randolph, art is not an accessory to entertainment, but the means of our linkage to the cosmos. "When we experience art in a deeply personal way that connects us to something larger than ourselves, we understand that art and life are intertwined," says Randolph. "I searched for a world unmoored from old codes to project my visions on. I have taken flight in the cosmos. Using NASA's amazing photographs taken from satellite telescopes, I have wandered around infinite time and space. These images are remote and indifferent to our world, but they offer a free field in which to project and imagine new myths and meaning."

As Randolph understands it, humans are not just bystanders but participants in a sweeping evolutionary drama. Her paintings reveal the sinewy strength of everything knitting us together across the cosmos: dark matter and dark energy; the cataclysmic collision of neutron stars. Our atoms were born in the galactic deep. In "Elsewhere in the Tadpole Nebula with Birthing Stars" (2018), a beautiful young woman in diaphanous orange gown, knees drawn up and head cradled by her left arm, slumbers at the edge of a fiery celestial mass. Above the gaseous explosions are disembodied feet and legs, which hover alongside spirits and exomoons in the velvety blackness of space. "Catastrophic Change" (2019) depicts a young woman wearing a pinkish orange slip; she kneels amid the eternal cosmos and covers both ears with her hands. She is threatened by a terrifying black creature at right, juxtaposed by poetic counterworlds of orbiting planets with soaring birds and darting specters. There is no sunrise or sunset, and thus no sense of time.

For "Choreographer" (2020), an enormous octopus seemingly conjures and directs electrified cosmic rings through which ballerinas leap and pirouette. Its arms and tentacles wrap around a nude man and woman embracing in the throes of their evolution. At right, the explosive glow of new galaxies quivers in deep space. In "Back to Back Entanglement" (2021), two bare chested men—African American and white—lock arms at their waists and stare accusingly at the complacent viewer. They levitate in the bottomless black void, filled with neutron stars and distant galaxies. Surrounding the pair are mythical beasts—a ferocious, three-headed Cerberus; a flying green fish with red mouth and giant teeth—in addition to amoeba-like tendrils of luminous gases, fast-spinning stars and floating specters. In "Dancing Over an Abyss" (2025), a ballerina in a voluminous yellow dress pirouettes across a gravitational wave that ripples across the universe. The pull of the spiraling black hole is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. The dancer's leap, however, is ravishing in its fullness as her body stretches without tension in a way that gives her an aura of infinity. Another woman in a yellow gown ascends through a cosmic web of flickering purple and transparent blue nebulae. The dazzling scene is further enhanced by a confection of intricate brushstrokes and scintillating hues that glimmer like lambent jewels.

To each passage, Randolph adds whorls of gaseous formations in transparent sweeps and freely applied swaths, shot through with delicate opalescence. Randolph takes an unabashedly beautiful lavender and hazy yellow, or an intense burning orange and makes them float as if they were as ethereal as air. Her visceral understanding of the expressive range of wiry and gamboling strokes unpacks a vocabulary of furling shapes that hover on the border between material and immaterial. Randolph's thinly applied, layered brushwork swells into colored forms which are then pared back and coaxed into newly found volumes.

Whereas Randolph clearly revels in a medium that consistently astounds and delights her, the paintings of Dark Revelations also serve as an extended meditative vigil. Activism, abdication, grace: in Randolph's work no one of these paths is more important than another. Nothing can exempt us from these moral stains, or from mortality. Her provocations are intellectually grounded. Randolph cites the striking visionary symbolism of 18th century artist and poet William Blake, as well as the Spanish/Mexican surrealist painter Remedios Varo as important sources. Moreover, she developed a number of works in cooperation with Donna Haraway, whose groundbreaking "Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science" and " Modest_Witness@ Second Millennium. Female Man_Meets OncoMouse" are major works in the study of techno-science and feminist theory. More recently, Randolph has collaborated on projects with Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University.

Wandering through the breathtaking installation at KHFA, you get the feeling that these are paintings Randolph needs to make, a way for her to put a message out into the world that she would never be able to share otherwise. To that end, the paintings of Dark Revelations give rise to moments of unforetold horror and ravishing beauty. Randolph has produced a series unlike others, strange and profound and fiercely determined not to look away.

Lynn Randolph (b. 1938) grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, an oil refinery town on the Gulf Coast. Randolph earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, studying under the painter Kelly Fearing. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Houston where she continues to live and work. Randolph's paintings have been exhibited and collected throughout Texas and nationally by museums and other public institutions: the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe/Harvard University; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; the San Antonio Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Menil Collection, Houston; M.D. Anderson Hospital, Palliative Care, Houston; the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin; the Station Museum, Houston; David Lewis Gallery, NYC; Frieze Art Fair, NYC; Art Basel, Miami; the Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil.