A Storied Texas Artist’s Latest Exhibit Arrives With a Celestial Scream at Kirk Hopper Fine Art in Dallas

In a year defined by escalating crises — ecological, political, moral — Texas talent Lynn Randolph’s latest exhibition, Dark Revelations, at Dallas’ Kirk Hopper Fine Art arrives with a celestial scream echoing throughout the gallery. Across 23 passionately rendered paintings produced over the last decade, Randolph channels the chaos of the present moment into visions of cosmic delirium and spiritual reckoning.

At 86, the Art Basel Miami Beach-exhibited Randolph is not retreating into any retrospection. Instead, she thrusts herself body, mind, and brush into a maelstrom of emotions.

These paintings are not decorative objects or quiet contemplations. They are visceral acts of resistance and reclamation.

Thoroughly saturated in myth, astronomy, and the language of dreams, Dark Revelations is unmistakably urgent, rooted in disillusionments of our time: an unraveling democracy, systemic violence, environmental collapse, and a cultural disconnection from our shared truth.

Citing curator Susie Kalil: “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.” (Read more about Lynn Randolph’s history and influence here.)

Gallery visitors encounter an artist functioning as a spiritual cartographer — charting territories between the real and the imagined, the material and metaphysical, mending into mytho-political allegory.

Randolph’s work offers haunting visions of the human condition viewed through the lens of cosmic time. And yet, for all their scale and metaphysical ambition, these canvases remain intimately tethered to flesh and feeling.

“Full of Away” stands out. An image of a woman tethered to a burning tree forces viewers to confront unceasing feelings that we are both bound to nature and the chaos that surrounds it. The protagonist’s stare demands engagement, accountability, and perhaps complicity.

Randolph’s visual language throughout Dark Revelations is lush and hallucinatory. The artist’s brushwork, layered and ephemeral, evokes the opalescent quality of nebulae and gas clouds, while her color palette —  burnt oranges, heavy lavenders, and piercing blues — feels plucked from deep space and dreamtime alike.

There is a tangible spirituality at work here, a sense of conjuring rather than painting. Randolph doesn’t depict the cosmos; she communes with it.

These works are not merely speculative; they are deeply moral. Whether addressing climate collapse, gender politics, or hyper-capitalism, Randolph renders the horrors of our current reality not to shock but to transform.

Her art is both elegy and exorcism, a practice of imaginative resilience in the face of despair.

Intriguingly, Dark Revelations navigates that thin line between dread and wonder. For every vision of impending ruin, Randolph offers a counter image of interconnectedness and mystery. The cosmos in her work is not indifferent, but inviting.

These paintings suggest that even in the darkest times, there is still room to dream, to mythologize, to imagine differently.

In the end, Dark Revelations offers a cosmic sermon for a secular apocalypse. It reminds us that beauty can still be radical, that art can still carry the weight of truth even in the vast emptiness of space, conveying meaning that is not only possible, but necessary.

Lynn Randolph may be gazing into the void, but her paintings are anything but empty.

Harrowing and unflinchingly poetic, this show is just an exhibition — it’s an act of witness. Randolph turns the end of the world into a canvas for possibility, proving that painting can still matter, perhaps now more than ever. Randolph’s tour de force is recommended to those unafraid to confront beauty, collapse, and cosmic questions in equal measure.

Dark Revelations at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, through Saturday, October 11, 2025. Find more details and read Susie Kalil’s catalogue essay here.