Alexander Gray Associates is pleased to present an exhibition of recent abstract paintings by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Working as a critic and an artist since the late 1970s, Gilbert-Rolfe's commitment to advancing theoretical questions surrounding beauty has been unwavering. A fierce proponent of p... Read more
Alexander Gray Associates is pleased to present an exhibition of recent abstract paintings by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Working as a critic and an artist since the late 1970s, Gilbert-Rolfe’s commitment to advancing theoretical questions surrounding beauty has been unwavering. A fierce proponent of painting and its historical roots, his new work squarely locates painting as a Modern and post-Modern medium that is ripe with possibilities and experimentation, metaphor and content.
In the five abstract paintings in this exhibition, Gilbert-Rolfe revisits the grid and the vertically oriented canvas. The grid, which possessed a more architectural look when it first appeared in his paintings in the late 1970s and early 80s, becomes a mesmerizing force in new paintings such as Pynchon. Covering the entire canvas with a meticulously rendered rectangular grid, Gilbert-Rolfe uses the grid in Pynchon to suggest the depth of a screen and the temporal duration associated with music. An empathetic relationship with the viewer’s body is encouraged by all of the paintings’ verticality, which also shifts their compositional foci to the center, where a crevice runs down the center of each painting.
Gilbert-Rolfe has said that he “want[s] to reverse the relationship between color and drawing in painting.” In this new body of paintings, he has continued this pursuit by almost completely abandoning painterly gesture and instead using the grid to feature color in its most exuberant forms. Using a technique that involves building layers of glazes, Gilbert-Rolfe flaunts color, punching up the brightness of his pinks and yellows by juxtaposing them with dark browns and blues.
Gilbert-Rolfe’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, including group shows such as 100 Artists See God (2004), curated by John Baldessari and Meg Cranston for Independent Curators International; Extreme Abstraction (2005) at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Drawing, Stretching and Fainting in Coils (2007), curated by Diana Thater at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Recent solo exhibitions include the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas (2006) and Frank O. Gehry and Associates, Los Angeles (2004). Gilbert-Rolfe’s work is in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo; The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, among other institutions. He has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in painting and criticism, and received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association. Gilbert-Rolfe has authored numerous critical and theoretical essays, many of which appear in the collections, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (2000) and Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts 1986√¢‚Ǩ‚Äú1993 (1995). He is Chair of graduate studies at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and a visiting tutor for the Royal College of art in London.
