ARTISTS
Ted Gahl: Towers
Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Towers, Ted Gahl鈥檚 first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will feature a new series of paintings that investigate the parameters of his signature painting practice.
The idea for the title came to the artist while revisiting a small painting he had done. The earlier painting consisted of pencils, upright, their sharp points facing to the stars. Gahl began to make drawings of the painting, reconstructing it and starting to include scribbles emerging out of the points as though the pencils were drawing into space. The pencils began to look like houses with smoke coming from the top, or industrial towers. As with much of Gahl's work, one simple image is mined and often serves multiples roles. "A triangle can be a sailboat, and at other times, a triangle is a pyramid. Sometimes, a triangle is just a triangle." Ultimately, what you see is what you get. But what you see is different from what another viewer sees as every experience is distorted by personal feedback.
For Gahl, painting is an autobiographical practice. The paintings preserve the presence of the artist's hand using the simplest of tools, and invite the viewer to share in the the intimacy of the experience. "I don't believe that genuine abstraction is possible without the concrete, the ordinary, and the figurative. I'm not convinced that there's a clear line between the two. I think there is always a real beginning or reference, and then a personal interpretation." With a deft understanding of painterly tradition and art history, Gahl independently traverses the pictorial plane, weaving in his own personal associations, meditations on the ordinary and stream of consciousness.
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Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Towers, Ted Gahl鈥檚 first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will feature a new series of paintings that investigate the parameters of his signature painting practice.
The idea for the title came to the artist while revisiting a small painting he had done. The earlier painting consisted of pencils, upright, their sharp points facing to the stars. Gahl began to make drawings of the painting, reconstructing it and starting to include scribbles emerging out of the points as though the pencils were drawing into space. The pencils began to look like houses with smoke coming from the top, or industrial towers. As with much of Gahl's work, one simple image is mined and often serves multiples roles. "A triangle can be a sailboat, and at other times, a triangle is a pyramid. Sometimes, a triangle is just a triangle." Ultimately, what you see is what you get. But what you see is different from what another viewer sees as every experience is distorted by personal feedback.
For Gahl, painting is an autobiographical practice. The paintings preserve the presence of the artist's hand using the simplest of tools, and invite the viewer to share in the the intimacy of the experience. "I don't believe that genuine abstraction is possible without the concrete, the ordinary, and the figurative. I'm not convinced that there's a clear line between the two. I think there is always a real beginning or reference, and then a personal interpretation." With a deft understanding of painterly tradition and art history, Gahl independently traverses the pictorial plane, weaving in his own personal associations, meditations on the ordinary and stream of consciousness.
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