GIBSON CONTEMPORARY

I want to share with you the recent work of Josh Peters , whom I first met in 2010, when he was living and working in Northampton, Massachusetts, taking a break from his workaday life to devote himself to his painting. His studio was housed in the same building where I had organized a group exhibition at a printmaking studio. A mutual friend had recommended him to me. Never one to pass up a possibly interesting encounter, I agreed and dropped by the next day when I had some time to spend. I was not disappointed. In recent years Peters has moved from New York to Los Angeles, where he has seen some definite career high points: a solo exhibition at ACME Gallery in 2013, having his work added to the Artist's Pension Trust, and a forthcoming inclusion in the Pacific Coast Edition of New American Paintings, selected by Apsara DiQuinzio, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Berkeley Art Museum. His work has changed considerably from then to now, but a cert...

The Paintings of Elsie Kagan Elsie Kagan's painting is a form of revelation. It commingles a search for beauty with a sustained effort to manifest how reason, reality, and temperament can aid us in the creation of something new. Mining the history of artistic expression, searching for touchstones and wellsprings of inspiration, and being able to turn that research into a living and breathing new expression that can aptly invigorate the contemporary perception of beauty, is what Kagan does in her work. Kagan's is not only a technical virtuosity but an educated way of painting that refuses to lean on ability alone. It desires a greater statement, one that is filled with the promise of creation and the threat of destruction. There is a primal element in abundance that builds and drives her interest in genres and art movements: a systematic use of energy that creates a dynamic force within each work and throughout her entire oeuvre. Kagan's system is her c...

Next meetings: Sundays, July 19 & 26, from 12 to 3 PM Since the beginning of my curatorial career I have encountered artists who have struggled with, and even actively resisted, the practice of writing a statement to accompany their work. With my new seminar I hope to successfully address that concern, and work through the issues related to it, helping you to address the theoretical and operational aspects of your creative process and discovering how to address them in language that allows others, from the gallery visitor, to the curator, to the museum director, to relate to what you make in terms they can immediately comprehend and enjoy. Please join me in my home, in a casual setting, to discuss and find the answers to the quandary of having a statement.  These will be small groups of no more than 5 people, and aside from the general topic of discussion, I hope that each person will be able to discuss their own work in the context of the seminar theme. ...

Peggy Bates is a New York based artist with a history of successful solo exhibitions, participation in international art fairs, grants and awards, works in select corporate  collections, and effusive critical praise and context in nationally recognized media sources such as The New York Times, Art in America, Vanity Fair, and Elle. Bates has been exhibiting i n New York since the early 1990's. Her work has been highly exposed by her participation in several art fairs such as Art Miami, Art Wynwood,  AQUA Art Miami, Scope, and the Pool Art Fair. Recently she was selected to participate in "70 Years of Abstract Painting" at the Jason McCoy Gallery. Bates is often referred to as a 'material painter'--someone for whom the paint itself is the primary motif, alternating between formal and symbolic qualities, which are orchestrated through a rigorous practice and a deft understanding of how the elements of color, mass, transparency, and gesture can express both a b...

THE PAINTINGS OF DEIRDRE SOLIN  There exist certain elements of painterly description which are so central to the rigor of artifice that they have flowed from one art form into all the rest, even into contemporary technology which allows us a further degree of reflection upon the idiosyncrasies of the natural world such as digital media. Such elements are so essential to the practice of art that we cannot imagine art not having them, nor a world that can be described without them. Most central among these is Color. Just to say the word itself is to speak volumes, while at the same time to be separated from adequate knowledge as needed to explore its capacity for meaning. In the paintings of Dee Solin we encounter an obsessive engagement with color that operates in the stylistic milieu of painters like Julian Stanczak, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Alfred Jensen, and Bridget Riley. Each of these artists attended to color and structure not as naturally opposed aspects of the same experientia...

The contemporary artist, given a particular education and overall attitude toward what is considered historically important today, may struggle to communicate in terms that challenge them formally while at the same time addressing the need for a creative language. They may find themselves reacting to the scene overall or to specific artists who are lauded as the paradigmatic models for ‘quality’. In this situation, one expects to compete not for a position of mastery, or to produce a new generational legacy, but only to hold onto whatever degree of notoriety is bestowed upon them. Although genius is still a prized quality, it has become a quantifiable commodity, and not the ambiguous measure of idiosyncrasy that it once was. It becomes necessary for the artist of vision to look back upon art history for cues as to how to express oneself. In the case of Daniel Sewell, he chose Cubism as a creative language to reinvigorate a contemporary dialogue on form, esthetics, and the uses of ...

Pink Sky~North Shore c. 2050  (The Lessons of Rapa Nui), 2007 Oil on Panel, 45 x 56 inches If the need is pressing and the world is not forthcoming, then vision will dictate how the object of desire can be created (James Elkins, The Object Stares Back, pp 30-1). A picture is not only a view onto the world, or onto someone’s imagination: it is a peculiar kind of object that sets us thinking about desire…. Looking immediately activates desire, possession, violence, displeasure, pain, force, ambition, power, obligation, gratitude, longing…there seems to be no end to what seeing is, to how it is tangled with living and acting (Ibid).     It’s long been said, to the detriment of true understanding, that artists live outside of society; what artist really desire is to understand society. Once they have expressed this understanding in their work, they can begin to make their place in it. The recent paintings of Thomas Frontini are proof of this. T...