Laura Rathe Fine Art is opening its doors for a free reception celebrating Golden Hour, a group exhibition uniting three artists whose sculpted canvas, gold-leafed portraits and carved wood forms are all designed to catch and bend light. The opening reception runs from 6 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 26, at the gallery's River Oaks District location at 4444 Westheimer Rd, Ste D135. Admission is free, though attendees should confirm the event is proceeding as scheduled since it remains subject to change due to weather or other concerns.
The show, as detailed by CultureMap Houston, features work by Pacific Northwest duo Stallman Studio, Italian painter Marco Grassi and Texas-based sculptor Gil Bruvel. According to the outlet, the artists' work explores themes of harmony, transformation and perception, and all three share a close attention to how their materials interact with light. That shared sensibility is what pulls three otherwise distinct practices into a single, cohesive exhibition.
Three Artists, Three Ways of Bending Light
Stallman Studio is the working name of Stephen Stum and Jason Hallman, who developed a signature process called Canvas on Edge, in which hand-cut and painted canvas strips are sculpted into three-dimensional compositions, per Laura Rathe Fine Art. The technique causes the works to shift color gradients as viewers move around them, an optical effect built directly into the material itself. Their sculpted canvas pieces are held in corporate collections including Microsoft and Facebook and are regularly shown at international fairs such as Art Miami and Art Basel, according to Stallman Studio's own account of its exhibition history.
Marco Grassi, born in 1966 and based in Lugano, Switzerland, brings a very different approach, creating hyper-realistic portraits of women on aluminum dibond set against textured, baroque gold-leaf backgrounds that reflect light back at the viewer. Gil Bruvel, meanwhile, was born in Australia in 1959 to a French cabinetmaker and now works out of Wimberley, Texas, constructing abstract geometric sculptures from wood, bronze and stainless steel that explore fluid movement and light. The gallery's stated curatorial concept ties the three together: twisted canvas edges, carved wood ribbons and reflective metallic leafing are meant to interact dynamically with light, evoking the glowing atmosphere of twilight and dawn.
Part of a Bigger Light-Themed Run at River Oaks District
Golden Hour is not an isolated booking. The River Oaks District gallery has made light and temporal perception a recurring exhibition theme throughout 2026, following earlier shows Daybreak in July and Fragments of Time in May. The pattern suggests the gallery is building a season-long thread around how materials register the passage of time and the shifting quality of natural light.
A Houston Gallery With Statewide Roots
Laura Rathe founded her business in Houston in 1998, after starting out as a private art dealer who transported works in a van to host pop-up viewings inside private homes, according to the Dallas Design District. That itinerant beginning has since grown into a four-gallery footprint across Texas, including the River Oaks District space and a second Houston location on Colquitt Street known as Gallery Row, plus outposts in the Dallas Design District and Austin. The River Oaks District venue itself sits within a high-end outdoor shopping, dining and cultural destination along Houston's Westheimer corridor.
For anyone planning to attend, the reception is free and open to the public, though organizers note the event could shift because of weather or other concerns, and attendees are encouraged to check with the gallery to confirm it is happening as scheduled.
