John Gibson

Fine Art Connoisseur magazine on John Gibson HERE

For over thirty years, John Gibson has focused exclusively on the shape of the ball, using it as a tool for exploring the space of painting. Often decorated with a minimal pattern to emphasize its illusory curvature in space, he uses his subject to comment on the elusive goal of depicting life in a way that captures and approximates, but never quite aligns with, three-dimensional reality. The tension between flat and dimensional space has always been central to painting; in a sense, the history of painting is the story of its engagement with this concept, from the invention of perspective to the breakthrough of cubism, which fused the two, to the flattening of the picture plane in modern abstract painting. Gibson’s patterned spheres allude to this history while at the same time retaining their integrity as basic objects—an interplay of opposing forces: flatness and roundness, lightness and darkness, simplicity and complexity.

Sue Miller, best-selling American novelist and owner of a Gibson painting, noted that “there’s an enormous tension, in this seemingly light-hearted painting, and the mind doesn’t tire of trying to work through it somehow, revising it endlessly, imaginatively, attempting to resolve the conundrum John has created—al the while relishing the close observation which that attempt demands.” The resulting paintings seem to contain a powerful kind of potential energy, the spheres on the verge of rolling out of the composition and into reality. At the same time, they’re silent and still, restrained by the materiality of paint, the flatness of canvas. With subtly rich colors and finely balanced compositions, Gibson’s paintings project intelligence, grace, and a hint of mystery.

John Gibson is a native of Massachusetts, born in Boston in 1958. He attended the Rhode Island School of design (where he earned a BFA in 1980), before earning his post-graduate degree from the prestigious master’s program at Yale. Gibson had his first one-man show at the University of Massachusetts in 1984, and he began showing in group exhibitions in the Boston and New York areas in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s Gibson’s paintings began to focus on pyramidal compositions of spheres resembling children’s playground balls, decorated in the manner of colorful soccer balls. Executed in oil on wooden panel, these pieces began to attract generous critical praise for Gibson from the pages of the Boston Globe, the Partisan Review, and the New Yorker, among others. Gibson’s paintings are filled with subtle yet provocative disjunctions, which challenge the viewer’s initial perceptions of the pieces. While these images would seem at first to be fairly simple atmospheric, realistic renderings of colorful balls, a closer examination will reveal that the surfaces of Gibson’s paintings are deeply scored by the artist in geometric patterns that sometimes conform to, and in other instances defy, the outlines of the spheres rendered in paint. An invisible substructure is suggested in these incisions, which also serve to reinforce the physicality of the painting. Some pieces also include incised and/or painted suggestions of shadowy architectural spaces (arches, hallways, shallow niches) in which the balls are placed. The scale of the objects rendered is ultimately unclear: the balls could be of the large, inflatable type, but they alternatively suggest the density of much smaller decorated wooden croquet balls (a disjunction heightened by the scale of the paintings, which range from larger-than-life to miniatures of only 10 by 6 inches or less). Additionally, the multiple-ball, open-pyramid arrangements depicted in Gibson’s paintings are impossible structures, suggesting that however realistically they may be rendered, they are in fact constructs of the artist’s imagination, straddling the divide between representation and geometric abstraction. John Gibson’s work is currently to be found in numerous corporate and public collections around the country, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, University of Massachusetts, the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the New York Public Library.

John Gibson has been painting delicate still-life arrangements of balls since the 1980's. This focused body of work originated from his desire to successfully depict 3-dimensionality within the constraints of a 2-dimensional surface. Playing around with patterned surfaces and the careful organization of his subject matter, Gibson builds a subtle complexity within his compositions. In this way Gibson’s work is similar to that of Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, whose still-life of earthenware objects served as a constant influence.

Education

1980 B.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design

1982 M.F.A Yale University

Solo Exhibitions

2018 “Pieces” – Caldwell Snyder Gallery, St Helena, CA

2018 “New Works” – Gerald Peters Gallery, NY

2016 “The Space in Between” – Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco

2014 “Opposing Forces” – Brattleboro Museum of Art

2012 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco

2011 “Black” – Gerald Peters Gallery, NY

2009 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco

2009 “INTERPLAY” – Muse Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

2008 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco

2008 “Fifty” – Gerald Peters Gallery, NY

2007 Muse Gallery, Jackson, Wyoming

2006 Gerald Peters Gallery (watercolors), New York

2006 Gerald Peters Gallery, Sante Fe

2005 Miller Block Gallery, Boston

2004 Hampshire College, Amherst

2004 Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

2003 Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe

2002 Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

2001 Miller Block Gallery, Boston

2001 Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte NC

2001 Wendy Evans Fine Art, New York

2000 Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe

1999 “Painting the Improbable” – FMCC, Johnstown, NY

1998 Wendy Evans Fine Art, New York

1997 Miller Block Gallery, Boston

1996 Fine Arts Center, University of MA, Amherst

1996 Rosen Gallery, Paris, France

1995 Perspective Fine Art, New York

1995 Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe

1994 Miller Block Gallery, Boston

1994 Perspective Fine Art, New York

1990 Allan Stone Gallery, New York

1989 Harcus Gallery, Boston

1988 Allan Stone Gallery, New York

1987 Harcus Gallery, Boston

Selected Public Collections

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design

Ackland Museum Chapel Hill, NC

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton MA