Celia Eberle

The Drowning

April 25—May 31, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, April 25, 6—8 pm

Ulterior Gallery is pleased to present The Drowning, a solo exhibition by Celia Eberle, opening on April 25, 2025. This marks Eberle’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her debut solo presentation in New York. The opening reception will take place on Friday, April 25, from 6 to 8 pm.

Hailing from a small town in Texas and exhibiting in the region since the late 1980's, Celia Eberle creates work that is candid and vulnerable—charged with fear, anger, and humor—while deeply rooted in the cultural and geographical circumstances of a woman of her upbringing. Eberle works with a range of materials and is known for her ingenuity and experimental use of it. Her materials and techniques may be humble, but it supplies consistently honest and quietly powerful dialogue. 

At Ulterior, the viewer will encounter a sweeping installation of ceramic fish that cascade across the gallery walls. The fish—some with mouths agape, as if grasping for air or naturally filtering water—form an undulating wave that collects at the base of the wall.  There, the mass that accumulates at the foot of the cascade is attended by a grieving youth. Inspired by the Statuette of a Dead Youth (ca 475 BC, Greece) in the collection of the Getty Museum, two figures flank the ceramic fish waterfall. Fragile and naked, these forms—limp and exposed—echo both Icarus’ doomed fall and Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. They stand as elegiac spirits, metaphors for innocence and morality that reference a central idea in Eberle’s practice: the inexorable patterns, the rise and fall, of existence, and our persistent failures to escape them. In this immersive installation, while falling is the dominant motif, there also simultaneously exists the faint possibility of ascension, or floating.

Eberle notes, “I often tackle dark subjects with beauty or humor. The Drowning is an elegy for this moment. It's a reflection on the effects of extreme circumstances on youth, presented in mythic terms—Spirits are swamped by a flood of catastrophe.”

Celia Eberle was born in 1950 in East Texas and grew up in Piney Woods—“a place more Southern Gothic  than many people would imagine when they think of Texas,” as she puts it. Eberle received her BFA with Honors from Stephen F. Austin State University in 1974, and began exhibiting  professionally in the 1980s,  primarily in Texas. From 1987 to 1992, she was an active member of 500X Gallery, one of the longest-running artist-run co-ops in the country, where she had a particularly experimental and productive period. 

Now in her 70s, Eberle is experiencing a formidable and vibrant chapter in her career. In 2022, her solo exhibition Nasher Public: Waiting for Robot was presented at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX. Last year, she was invited to be a resident artist at Artpace in San Antonio, TX, where she realized another solo museum exhibition titled She. Her work has also been featured in numerous important solo and group exhibitions across Texas, including; Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, TX (2017); the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2017); and Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX  (solo, 2014). Eberle’s honors include the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Individual Support Grant (2019); the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015); the Nasher Sculpture Center Microgrant (2015); the Dozier Travel Grant from the Dallas Museum of Art (2002); and an MAAA/NEA Fellowship Award (1994). Public collections include The Dallas Museum of Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and the J. Wayne Stark Gallery at Texas A&M. Eberle works daily in her studio, a garage next to her house, in a rural area in Ennis, TX.