For this exhibition, Gerber presents eleven artworks that span his artistic practice.
Gerber typically focuses on the normative aspects of visual language: the way we, as
part of a shared culture, accept certain forms, colors and situations as
institutional, or we take them for granted a... Read more
For this exhibition, Gerber presents eleven artworks that span his artistic practice.
Gerber typically focuses on the normative aspects of visual language: the way we, as
part of a shared culture, accept certain forms, colors and situations as
institutional, or we take them for granted as impartial common ground. These visual
norms act as grounds for all other forms of expression and we use them to register
difference and create meaning. Gerber’s work is often positioned so that it
highlights the relationships between the frequently invisible normative aspects of
visual language.
In this presentation, Gerber focuses attention specifically on artworks in which he
uses gray as the “neutral” ground against which we form meaning. This gray is present
in the painted frames employed in the earliest works in the exhibition, a series of
genre images of a still life that were realized between 1980 and 1982. In these works
the images appear to be distorted until they are viewed from an acute angle, at which
point they appear normal. This shift in understanding as we move around the work
focuses attention on the viewer’s activity and underscof both Gerber’s practice and of any interpretation.
