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Graham Gillmore: SubmersionsPost an Event »

Gallery 16

March 8 - March 8, 2013

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501 Third Street San Francisco, CA 94107
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Graham Gillmore: Submersions
Graham Gillmore: Submersions A show of paintings and works on paper. March 8-April 30, 2013 Opening Reception Friday March 8th from 6-9 pm. Live music by Tiny Television Gallery 16 is honored to present our first solo show of renown artist Graham Gillmore. He is a Canadian painter best known for his vitriolic use of text as an art form within edgy and often controversial work. His paintings can be found in private, corporate and public collections around the world, including The Museum Of Modern Art in New York City, The Ghent Museum, Belgium, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. "Exploring the word as image, and the image as word, Graham Gilmore’s work balances between treacherous antipodes: pathos and wit, defiance and charm, and more basically, the anguish of experience and the rapture of its aesthetic expression. The twisting knife of a smartass remark, the threatening anonymity of a clinical evaluation. Employing puns and punch lines both lewd and mawkish, and referencing clichés, board games, rebuses, barroom banter, and graffiti, his paintings are by subtle turns playful, earnest, and caustic. Visually, Gilmore’s paintings vacillate between a sleek neon intensity bordering on the lurid, and a bumbling homespun quality recalling a troubled adolescent’s secret notebook. The quasi-confessional quality of certain paintings, meanwhile, intimates any urban sophisticate’s biography, suggesting the universality of both our humiliations and our kneejerk laughter at those of others. Gillmore`s is a unique painterly vernacular, equally streetwise and composed. He walks an emotional tightrope between heat and cold, and these paintings contain a sense of an ultimately ecstatic ambivalence. One trusts this work because it seems to reflect lived, felt experience and to have settled on a stance of hard-edged sympathy or laconic remove that glances back to include us, its ironies in the last instance sincere." —Thomas Breidenbach