Gary Komarin
Gary Komarin’s stalwart images have an epic quality that grip the viewer with the idea that he or she is looking at a contemporary description of something timeless. For Komarin, abstraction has never been a formal dead end. Rather, it has allowed him to challenge the limitations of the style–to make painting ‘include more’ precisely because a recognizable image excludes too much. Komarin has been called a “painter’s painter.” His status in this regard is based on the authenticity of his work, its deep connection to the tradition of modern painting as well as its sustained individuality as an utterly personal voice.
Guston’s influence is evident in Komarin’s merger of drawing and painting, often breaking the picture plane of his rich and elegantly composed color fields with an assortment of private iconic cake and vessel-like objects. Preferring non-art industrial canvas tarps and drop cloths, Komarin eschews traditional painting media and materials. He builds layered surfaces with latex house paint in a thinned out sluice mixed with spackle and water. The house paint offers hybrid colors that seem slightly ‘off’ and the spackle creates a beautifully matte surface. Using color energetically, the quick-drying materials allow him to paint with a sense …
Gary Komarin’s stalwart images have an epic quality that grip the viewer with the idea that he or she is looking at a contemporary description of something timeless. For Komarin, abstraction has never been a formal dead end. Rather, it has allowed him to challenge the limitations of the style–to make painting ‘include more’ precisely because a recognizable image excludes too much. Komarin has been called a “painter’s painter.” His status in this regard is based on the authenticity of his work, its deep connection to the tradition of modern painting as well as its sustained individuality as an utterly personal voice.
Guston’s influence is evident in Komarin’s merger of drawing and painting, often breaking the picture plane of his rich and elegantly composed color fields with an assortment of private iconic cake and vessel-like objects. Preferring non-art industrial canvas tarps and drop cloths, Komarin eschews traditional painting media and materials. He builds layered surfaces with latex house paint in a thinned out sluice mixed with spackle and water. The house paint offers hybrid colors that seem slightly ‘off’ and the spackle creates a beautifully matte surface. Using color energetically, the quick-drying materials allow him to paint with a sense of urgency, which mirrors the tension created by conflicting renderings of the spontaneous and the deliberate. The conscious and the unconscious or the strange and familiar. The resulting image is one that appears familiar but resists recognition.
Komarin displays several yearly solo exhibitions, most recently at Mark Borghi Gallery in New York, Galerie Design -e- Space in Paris, Galerie Baobab in Bogota, Columbia, Gallery 88 in Seoul, Korea, and Madelyn Jordon Gallery in New York. Additionally he shares work in group shows at locations such as the Pavillon Des Arts Et Du Design in Paris, Palm Springs Fine Art Fair, and India Art Fair in Cadiz, Spain. He has been awarded a number of prizes such as the Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting, Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in Painting, Elizabeth Foundation Prize in Painting, and The New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Painting.
Courtesy of the Artist
