IOWA CONTEMPORARY ART | 58 North Main Street, Fairfield, IA 52556
641-919-6252 | bill@icon-art.org | iconbillteeple@gmail.com
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00 to 5:00pm and by appointment.
ICON is an IRS 501(c)(3) non-profit educational charity. All donations are tax-deductible.
IOWA CONTEMPORARY ART
Calendar Page
Robert Hoerlein Show Opens at ICON August 1st
A new exhibition “Robert Hoerlein: Works on Paper 2019-2025” opens at ICON Gallery on First Friday
Art Walk, August 1st, 6:30 to 10:00. It’s the first showing of new work by Robert Hoerlein in Fairfield in over
a decade. He was a resident of Fairfield for 25 years before moving out west in 2014. He now resides in
Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Robert was a founding artist of ICON Gallery and was on the ICON Board of Directors until moving west.
He has brought with him over 100 unframed works on paper which will be spread across the walls of ICON.
ICON Director Bill Teeple who has followed Robert’s career for over 30 years states, “Robert is a veteran
abstract painter. The adage that it takes 10,000 hours of immersion to master anything is appropriate to
Robert’s pursuit. He has put probably triple that much time into his work and that leads to an intimacy
with his practice that only he can understand. As an experienced observer of the way of art, I can tell you
that Robert is deep in. The subtlety and complexity of his paintings take you into an abstract world where
line, form and space become everything.”
“I love the small scale and immediacy of working on paper,” says Hoerlein. “Here I’m exploring gestural
energy encompassed by rigid geometry. An interplay of physical paint, instinctive choices, and geometric
boundaries.”
Robert will be in attendance at the gallery on opening night. A Zoom walk-through with him from Santa Fe
is being planned for later in the show.
A new show opens in the Hudson Gallery at ICON on First Friday, April 4th, 6:30 to
10:00 pm. A selection of 13 paintings from the ICON Collection of Shiva Linga paintings
will be on display. All of these works were made by tantrika families in the city of Udaiper
in Rajasthan, India. The exhibition will be on view through March, 2026.
The French poet Franck André Jamme first encountered South Asian Tantra paintings in
1970 in an art gallery in Paris. Jamme was fascinated by these paintings that were so close
to Western modern art, from Kazimir Malevich and Paul Klee to Agnes Martin and
Daniel Buren, and many others. During the subsequent years, Jamme discovered books
on Tantra art and he decided to try to find the artists who were creating these works.
Following several unsuccessful trips to India, including a horrific bus accident and three
years of recovery, he returned in 1989, beginning his search in the city of Udaïpur. There
he consulted a friend’s astrologer and soothsayer, who shed light on his mission and put
him in touch with two families of tantrika artists that were creating Tantra paintings. Over
the next few years, Jamme was introduced to a number of different tantrika families
throughout the state of Rajasthan and was given permission to bring some of their works
to Europe and America. Eventually he collaborated with Hudson, founder of the New York
gallery, Feature Inc., to assemble the collection of Shiva Linga paintings that now form
The Hudson Collection at ICON.
ICON Gallery is located at 58 N. Main Street, Fairfield. Gallery hours are noon to
5:00, Tuesday through Saturday. For more information iconbillteeple@gmail.com,
641-919-6252.
Tantra Art from Udaipur in ICON Hudson Gallery
NEXT 2025-26 ICON EXHIBITS:
Biennial Mini-Art Auction
November through December, 2025
Mini Art Auction
Flea Market and Print Sale
1st Weekend of December, 2025
COMING IN 2026…
Gillian Brown
Mark Petrick
Madeline de Joly Retrospective
