Celia Eberle b. 1950 — Celia Eberle is a Dallas-based multimedia artist, with a nearly cult-like following, who describes her artistic pursuits as both “inexorable” (that which cannot be changed) and “inevitable” (that which always happens). Eberle’s work follows in a similar vein as Méret Oppenheim, taking on a Surrealist quality that both bends the mind and consumes it.

Eberle’s works are often not just artworks, but worlds we step into. Aesthetically, Eberle’s work combines a mixture of the fantastical, whimsical, and sinister. She creates grottoes and hands larger than the body all within the gallery space — creating new environments in unexpected places. For Eberle, anything outside of math or science is myth. Eberle’s work is all about the subversion of what we believe to be true. She creates castles out of bone and delicate flowers painted from blood. We believe we enter another world when looking at Eberle’s work, one where we are no longer in control of our surroundings. Instead, her artwork dictates how we interact with the world around us, as she pulls our attention from ourselves and into each specific work she creates. Her concept of myth shows us a new view of our own world, where the “possibilities are practically endless.”

Eberle is interested in mankind’s need to control the natural order and of disposability, both of which negatively affect the world we live in. There is another underpinning that can be found throughout her oeuvre; the great equalizers, death and decay, are represented through many of the natural and fragile materials used in Eberle’s work. She sees a continuity across humanity of this basic understanding of human existence that she defines as mythology. Eberle’s mythology meets us today but transports us to the past — as she engages with ideas and materials that speak to another time in human existence.

Celia Eberle has exhibited extensively throughout Texas as well as in Chicago, New York, and Oregon. Eberle was awarded the prestigious Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation’s Individual Support Grant as well as the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Likewise, she is an inaugural recipient of the Nasher Sculpture Center Artist Microgrant. Eberle’s mid-career retrospective, In the Garden of Ozymandias, debuted at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas. Her current show, She, is being shown at Artpace in San Antonio and is curated by Beverly Adams, the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work is currently in the collections of The Dallas Museum of Art, the J. Wayne Stark University Gallery at Texas A&M, the Longview Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas.