Cris Worley Fine Arts is pleased to announce our seventh solo exhibition with Texas’ preeminent Contemporary artist,Celia Eberle, in her latest series entitled, The Angels Exit. The exhibition will open with an artist’s reception on Saturday, January 10th, from 5 – 7 pm and will run through February 14th. The event is free and open to the public and the artist will be in attendance.
The Angels Exit is a series of iridescent acrylic paintings on pink insulation foam board that examines the seductive, toxic nature of the built environment and its inescapability. Rendered on non-traditional materials, the work envisions a post-human, post-natural world in which imagined beings remain fixed within artificial systems, while only disembodied spirits are able to escape.
The title references a theatrical stage direction, signaling departure and finality. Angels—traditionally symbols of transcendence—emphasize forsaken potential and a condition of voluntary immobility. This quiet abandonment calls for a surreal visual language that mirrors an environment persisting beyond meaning.
Material choice is central to the exhibition. Foam insulation board, a ubiquitous architectural material, reflects the constructed systems that surround us, while acrylic paint and glitter introduce a seductive artificiality that complicates distinctions between critique and allure. Together, these materials underscore the tension between permanence, excess, and value.
Marking her return to painting as a primary medium for the first time in nearly two decades, Celia Eberle reengages painting through deliberate material subversion. By pairing a historically revered form with construction-grade and synthetic materials, The Angels Exit positions painting not as a nostalgic return, but as a strategic tool for examining environmental estrangement and the quiet withdrawal of transcendence from the contemporary world.
Celia Eberle was born in East Texas in 1950 and grew up in the Piney Woods, a place more Southern Gothic than many people would imagine when they think of Texas. She received her BFA with Honors from Stephen F. Austin State University in 1974. She dates her professional career from her inclusion in Women of the Big State at Women & Their Work in Austin, juried by Lisa Phillips in 1986. From 1987 to 1992 she was a member of the historic Dallas co-op gallery 500X, where she first began working with the themes regarding the persistence of ideas and images across time, which she continues to develop.
She has had numerous solo exhibits in Texas, and her work has been included in shows in Buffalo, New York; Portland, Oregon; and Chicago. In 2024, she was selected by Beverly Adams, Curator of Latin American Art, MoMA, for an Artpace residency and exhibition. She had a one-person exhibit as part of the Nasher Public program at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, in 2022. In 2017, she was included in Commanding Space: Women Sculptors of Texas at the Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, and To See is to Have at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio.
Honors and awards include the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Individual Support Grant; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant; the Nasher Sculpture Center Microgrant; the Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art; a Merit Award Grant from the Friends of the Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, Massachusetts, juried by Walter Hopps; and an M-AAA/NEA fellowship. Public collections include the Dallas Museum of Art (Texas Artist Fund), the J. Wayne Stark Gallery at Texas A&M, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Longview Museum of Fine Arts (Purchase Award), and many private collections.
Cris Worley Fine Arts is a Dallas, Texas based contemporary art gallery located in the Dallas Design District. With over 20 years of experience, Cris Worley is dedicated to promoting innovative work by contemporary artists at various stages of their careers.