Jeremy DePrez

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This solo exhibition marks the beginning of a new chapter for the artist as he returns to the city where his practice first took shape. After earning both his BFA and MFA from the University of Houston, DePrez spent seven years living and working in New York while exhibiting internationally. This is his first show in Houston since 2017.

Night Worker: Works on Paper 2018–2025 is an intimate exploration of nocturnal studio practices, cultural debris, and drawing’s evolving role in a multidisciplinary practice.

Drawing has long served as the structural backbone of Jeremy’s work, especially during periods of transition or instability. Unencumbered by the logistical demands of painting, drawing is a flexible and immediate space for experimentation. The works in this exhibition reflect this freedom: created mostly at night, they map a shifting psychological terrain, informed as much by media saturation and mythic fragments of American culture, as by internal states of restlessness, observation, and critique.  

“Drawing has always kept my practice alive during moments when painting felt logistically stuck or temporarily unavailable,” the artist explains. “It’s the undercurrent, and the most essential part of what I do.”

Fragments of mid-century comic books—especially from the Golden and Silver Ages—surface frequently in the drawings. These references are not nostalgic but diagnostic, pointing to a generation raised in the long, flickering afterglow of mass cultural mythologies. The artist sees this material not as heroic, but as hallucinatory: escapist media engineered to simplify complexity, now drifting into a cycle of manufactured meaning and quiet collapse.

This exhibition features a body of drawings made over the past seven years, alongside three paintings that emerge directly from the artist’s drawing practice. While the drawings are not conceived as studies, they inevitably inform the paintings—functioning more as 'conceptual models' than preparatory works. The paintings are not intended as definitive 'end points,' but rather as containers for fleeting visual experiences, preserving the immediacy of drawing while bearing the historical and material weight of painting. For the artist, painting is simply an object—or a vessel—that holds an experience, a premise that informed the title Reality’s Coffin for his 2024 exhibition at Post Times.

Together, the drawings and paintings in Night Worker form a visual field of fragments—cultural, emotional, and psychological. They point to a world perceived through layers of myth, memory, repetition, and internal distortion. The exhibition title references the solitary protagonists of Paul Schrader’s films—figures who operate in the margins, obsessively reflecting while the world moves past them. Night Worker captures that spirit, situating the artist’s practice not in the spotlight, but in the charged quiet of the after-hours. At the center of it all is drawing: fast, untethered, obsessive, and essential.

Reception: Saturday September 6, 6-8 PM 
Gallery Hours: Saturdays 2-5 (beginning September 13) and by appointment.

1412 Bonnie Brae Street, Houston 77006
www.frontgallery.com
@frontgallerytx
713-298-4750