Aaron Parazette

Provenance: Courtesy of the Artist

Aaron Parazette is most known for his iconic word paintings in which he turns letters on end, stacking and overlapping them to create a nest of curving, linear forms. In the lineage of Hard-edged painting,  Parazette more recent Color Key series often on shaped canvases devises a compositional structure wherein flawless planes of color unabashedly confront each other, yielding vibrant and vivid color relationships.  Fluorescent-infused acrylic paints nearly jump from the background and further point to the artist’s attempt to create a three-dimensional space upon a two-dimensional surface.  

Aaron Parazette (b. 1960) grew up in Ventura, California and holds an MFA in Painting from the Claremont Graduate University. In 1990, Parazette relocated to Houston as a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Houston.   

Among the institutions in which Parazette has shown are the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Austin Museum of Art; Lousiania State University, Baton Rouge; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, North Carolina. Reviews of his work have appeared in ArtPapers, Art Lies, Art in America, the Houston Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the New Art Examiner, and the New York Times.  His paintings are included in numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Houston Branch. He was the recipient of a 2005 Artadia Fund for Art and Design and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1994. He was given a solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2012 and was the Art League Houston’s Texas Artist of the Year in 2012.