May Issue 2001
Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC, Presents Two Solo Exhibits by John Gibson and Michael Gregory
Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC, announces the opening of two invitational, solo exhibitions, John Gibson and Michael Gregory, Friday, May 4 through June 30.
Two of Hodges Taylor's most popular fine print artists will bring their paintings and most recent prints to the gallery for this exhibition. Since the opening of the Fine Print Room in September, 1998, both artists have been represented in the gallery. Though the two painters are from opposite sides of the country, there are strong similarities in the their bodies of work, from an understated refinement to technical and conceptual mastery.
John Gibson
John Gibson is a New England artist, trained in painting, with a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and a MFA from Yale University. His work has been in solo exhibitions at Wendy Hoff Fine Art in New York, Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, and Miller Black Gallery in Boston as well as various group shows. The artist is represented in many collections including Morgan Stanley and Mass Mutual in New York, and in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in Massachusetts, and the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill. Master printer Peter Petengill, at Wingate Studio in New Hampshire, publishes the prints of John Gibson.
His subject matter consists of spheres, from simple solids to highly decorated surfaces. The spheres are carefully still life studies and become icons as the painter fills the compositions with these simple objects. Layers of paint and color, sometimes scratched through to reveal another layer, create an otherworldly mood, light and atmosphere in each work. Gibson manipulates pictorial conventions and abstracts the work while working in the grand still life tradition. His pyramidal constructions are often improbable, balancing without key supporting members. In other pieces, the artist depicts beautifully realized objects and reflections where the two are almost interchangeable. Gibson's apparent interests are in the use and application of paint, the rest becoming as abstraction for him. Nonetheless, he gives his audience a visually rich experience.
In her article, Painting the Improbable, on the artist's work, Karen Wilkin wrote the following, "John Gibson paints reticent, introspective pictures that are utterly convincing and wholly unreal. They can appear to be seductively naturalistic, but. they can transform themselves... into near abstractions... Nothing in a Gibson painting, is ever quite what we think it is, yet the conviction, the painterly intelligence, and the sheer pictorial richness with which he presents his ungraspable images make us not only willing, but eager to believe the improbable, even the impossible."
Michael
Gregory
Born in Los Angeles and trained at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1980's, painter Michael Gregory maintains a studio in northern California. Gregory creates compositions of quiet, understated grandeur and monumentally composed subjects. Glazed layers of paint over wood panels are reminiscent of the Dutch old master paintings as well as nineteenth American masters Albert Pinkam Ryder, George Inness, and Martin Heade. In the silo paintings, Gregory uses special tools created especially for the purpose of achieving the texture of aged wood. Some techniques of his craft were learned from a Jesuit-trained icon painter.
Gregory's subject matter ranges from buildings such as lighthouses or silos to still life objects such as tulips, subjects chosen for their symbolic resonance. The flowers evoke the fragility and temporal nature of life. Silos and lighthouses conjure up such images as the Tower of Babel, church spires, skyscrapers and the human need to reach higher, to reach heavenward The artist says of this striving for verticality as "...attempts to create an 'axis mundi' - earth and heaven connected." He carefully balances the earthly with the spiritual.
Memory is a key in element in Gregory's work and is from memory that he begins his search for what his subject suggests. His work is an ongoing exploration of perception and thought, of images as they remain with us when the eyes are closed, What the artist has mastered so well is the radiance of what appears to be an inner light in his still life objects. In both prints and paintings, Gregory shares his vision, what he sees in his memory with the observer, capturing the timeless essence of each subject.
Michael Gregory has a national reputation for his work and has participated in group exhibitions around the country with solo exhibitions in Idaho, New York, San Francisco and now, Charlotte. Gregory also has shown at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Boulder Center for the Visual Arts, Colorado, the Hunter Museum, Tennessee and San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, California. His work is held in the collections of Amerada Hess Corporation and Prudential Insurance Company of America in New Jersey, Arthur Andersen World Headquarters in Chicago, and the Delaware Art Museum to name a selected few.
For further information check our NC Commercial Gallery listings or call the gallery at 704/334-3799.
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