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Deep Skin & Strokeworld Paintings a solo exhibition of new and recent paintings by Luke Gray
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1
LUKE GRay november 15 – december 11, 2010
deep skin & strokeworld paintings
2 front
Cover and right:
strokeworld 0529, 2010
varnished acrylic on canvas
46” x 46”
luke gray november 15 – December 11, 2010
deep skin & strokeworld paintings
David Richard Contemporary130 Lincoln avenue, suite d, santa fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284
www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]
GalleRy DirectoRs
david eichholtz & richard Barger
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L.G. (speaking of a personal library of
books on psychedelia, shamanism, and par-
adigm shifts…) i did all this reading, back
in the 80’s and early 90’s, when i was in my
twenties and early thirties. You try to situate
yourself in your culture, and you try to figure
out where you’re located, where your spirit
is located, where your thoughts are located,
and it’s a long process, and eventually your
work fuses with your thoughts, in the sense
that you don’t really need to think anymore,
beyond a certain point. and i think that’s
the whole intent, of the project, to get to
that point where your work fuses with your
thoughts. sometimes i feel dumb, because
i don’t read that much anymore toward my
work, but i don’t feel like i have to, until i
have a new crisis, and my work has to be re-
defined. it’s really just a question of getting
to that point where the work comes from, in
all the tumultuousness of my daily life. i’ve
always believed in speed of execution as a
way of short circuiting a certain analytical
process. i think it started with seeing Keith
haring in the subway in the early 80’s, just
do his thing in 15, 20 seconds, and just walk
away. and that was the work. there was
something about the immediacy of that and
the power of not looking analytically at what
you’ve done, and trying to figure out how
to make it better. i was really just trying to
cultivate a process inside myself where all
these things would work themselves out in-
ternally before the work was done.
G.S. daniel, Luke’s process of painting is
an extremely spontaneous one, very much
about being in the moment, and i always,
somewhat naively i see now, thought it was
about being in the moment, almost like a
jazz musician, but i’ve come to see that a lit-
tle differently now. i used to see it as a world
that was out there, like a weather system, or
a quantum field, but i now see it as a world
that he’s created, that is very diverse and
very complex and very meaningful, a world
that i don‘t quite know yet. What i do know
is that part of the power of the work is in its
daniel Pinchbeck is the editorial director of reality Sandwich (www.reality sandwich.com)
and the author of Breaking open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Con-
temporary Shamanism and 2012: the return of Quetzalcoatl.
LUKE GRAYDEEP SKIN & STROKEWORLD PAINTINGS
excerpts from a Studio Conversation with Artist luke Gray,
Author daniel Pinchbeck, and Gary Snyder of Gary Snyder
Project Space in NYC
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rapidity, and in its attempt to almost vibrate
on the same level as other things.
D.P. how quickly do you do these?
L.G. these paintings are done in…about 20
minutes…
D.P. Wow! (laughter)
L.G. When they’re done they’re done. i just
step away and never touch them again. i
think basically the thing is resolved inside
before it’s put out there, and obviously
i can’t work that way all the time, i have
months when i’m able to access that and i
have months, or even years, when i’m not
able to access it. for me paintings happen
in little moments. i’m not about to punch
the clock in my own studio…
G.S. Luke paints in series…and my observa-
tion is that there’s always been this build-up
of energy, which releases itself in a series
of paintings, then Luke may not paint for
a long time. he doesn’t paint again until
something builds up again and it releases,
and he’s very very tough on himself about
that. he’s not one of those guys who comes
into the studio every day and has to paint.
it’s much more of an intuitive, mysterious
process, and sometimes a deeply disturbing
process…you’ve gone through long periods
where you haven’t been able to paint.
L.G. Basically daniel, what i’m trying to do
in these paintings is create extremely asso-
ciative spaces that every viewer will bring
their own history to, they’re own vision to,
it’s all about a world in flux, a world that is
mutating and isn’t static in any way. there
are a lot of things that are just on the cusp
of being, but they’re not solidified. each
painting is almost like a frame in a never-
ending film, which is all about transforma-
tion and change, which is what i feel our
world is about. so it’s about trying to cap-
ture that…that fleeting moment and make it
solid for a second, and then to make it an
object of contemplation. another one of
the foundational thoughts is the idea of the
brushstroke as a kind of pixel, or building
block, of all painting. and then, trying to
re-imagine a world where that brushstroke
is set free to do what it wishes to do. not in
the service of describing something, neces-
sarily, but just being unleashed to become
almost like an actor on its own stage…fly-
ing through the space, stopping, build-
ing structures, dismantling structures, this
whole notion was very important to me.
i wanted this world i was imagining to be
a very illusionist one also, not the two-di-
mensional space of greenberg’s new York
school. i still believe that illusionism is the
holy grail of painting, and always will be.
D.P. Luke, we’re both sons of painters.
What kind of a dialogue did you have with
your dad about painting?
L.G. We actually didn’t talk so much about
painting in general, although we were very
supportive of each other. i think an artist of
our generation has to me more self-aware.
an artist of my dad’s generation was able
to just dissolve themselves into their work,
but we have to straddle both sides of the
line between the conscious and the uncon-
scious because we’re post-modern. it’s a
completely different relationship to paint-
ing. What was required of my generation
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was to be both inside and outside of the
painting at the same time.
D.P. a job i had in my late twenties was
writing for art magazines, for example, the
art newspaper of London, and then i got
into, you know, psychedelic shamanism, i
went to the Burning Man festival, and i got
less interested in the traditional containers
of the art world, and everything that’s in-
volved and associated with them, and what
i loved about Burning Man is that the art
that’s made there is kind of anonymous,
you can look it up, but it’s mostly sculptural,
and it’s mostly made to solicit the maxi-
mum amount of enjoyment and community
interaction…
L.G. …and be a spark for ritual…
D.P. exactly, exactly, the construct of the
art world is so much more involved with
making this object that’s going to have
an archival life…one of the most liberating
things about Burning Man is that a lot of the
stuff gets burned at the end of the festival…
it’s like a release of one’s attachments…to
this idea that it’s going to be something
permanent…
L.G. Like a tibetan sand painting…
D.P. exactly, it’s like a ceremony that our
culture has constituted, like a Lakota sun
dance…
L.G. the fact that you mention anonym-
ity is very important to me because i think
really from the very beginning my great-
est influences were always tribal, whether
it was Mayan, egyptian, or australian ab-
original painting, which first came to new
York in the early 80’s at the asia society, i
remember that really opened my eyes, and
i was always trying to develop a language
that had the anonymity that tribal art has.
it’s not the anonymity of a technological so-
ciety, which is a very cold and isolative one,
it’s the opposite of that…it’s the anonym-
ity of an artist in a group of people where
individuality is not celebrated to a certain
extent, and painting is a vehicle for ritual, so
there are certain types of marks and certain
ways of producing work that can be individ-
ually interpreted by each artist, but it’s pret-
ty much all subsumed in a common vision,
and one that‘s very familiar to the tribe. in
my work, by reducing the painting stroke to
this kind of unit, this dna-like building block,
it becomes a neutral, anonymous structure,
it’s not my brushstroke, not my signature,
it’s the brushstroke.
D.P. My question is this: could the creative
impulse that goes into making beautiful
works such as these, be shaped into a tool
that helps bring about a different kind of en-
gagement? how can that be harnessed at a
time of species-level crisis to bring about a
transformation in practice and habits?
G.S. one could argue that being moved by
a work of art, the feeling of humanity, the
touching of something real, is working in it’s
own way toward that goal.
L.G. daniel, in some of the discussions on
your website and in your writing you’re talk-
ing about alchemy, and the transformation
of matter. this is important, and i’d like to
talk about it. When i’m doing paintings, i
want the work to be about paint, and the
essential language of painting - the brush-
stroke. When i’m doing drawings, i want it
to be about the essential language of draw-
ing, which is the line. and there’s always
5
been this attempt to make the narrative in
my work about genesis, which is transfor-
mation of matter, so in the paintings you
have these kind of building blocks, or brush-
strokes, which are in the process of build-
ing something. the drawings are all about
the line, which is in the process of creating
something. it’s animist, you know, which
again betrays my deep relation to the tribal,
to tribal art. speaking of animism, Jose ar-
guelles, in his book the transformative Vi-
sion, showed a very intuitive understanding
of painting. he spoke about the watercol-
ors of turner (JMW) in the same terms i’ve
always thought of them. especially at the
end of turner’s life, he did paintings on pa-
per where it appeared that the watercolors
had become the very elements that he was
describing in his paintings. the watercolor
became the clouds, became the ocean, so
there’s this very animist thing also happen-
ing there, a one-to-one correspondence be-
tween paint and phenomena. this relates
to what i’m talking about because it‘s con-
nected to a post-modern way of thinking
and working. While you’re creating, while
you’re in the moment of creation, you have
to have this kind of hyper level of awareness
of the significance of the tools that you’re
using. this is what focused my efforts on
trying to question, at the beginning, what
the building blocks of the language were,
be it painting or drawing, and using that as
a kind of animistic tool that took on it’s own
life, almost as if it were happening by itself,
building itself, as opposed to being con-
trolled by an external force. there is also an
aspect to post-modernism where it is break-
ing through the illusion of the utopian dream
of modernism, accepting its failure. never
again dissolving oneself in a kind of abso-
lute vision which would not allow any type
of self-criticism. Clearly i felt that i couldn’t
just paint. You couldn’t just paint and lose
yourself in the painting the way Pollock or
deKooning did. You had first to go through
a certain amount of deconstruction of the
tradition that you were involved in, and take
responsibility for your choice, and some-
how work another level of awareness into it
all. this often took a purely intellectual turn
at that time, but the deconstruction taking
place was absolutely necessary. drawing
had been deconstructed to the line, paint-
ing had been deconstructed to the brush-
stroke, and i thought, let’s now take those
elements and build a whole new world out
of them. and i think that’s very much what
happens daniel, when you have a shamanic
experience of the type you‘ve written about,
you do go through a kind of deconstructive
experience, where the reality that existed
for you before is no longer, and it‘s then up
to you to piece it back together again. i re-
ally felt, by the late eighties, that analysis
and deconstruction had just sapped the art
of any life force whatsoever. i felt the only
way i could take up the brush with meaning
would be to take the work that had been
done and use it to build a new world. that’s
what postmodernism meant to me. it was
a period of severe analytical thinking where
things were stripped of their meaning and
historical context.
D.P. What comes next?
L.G. Well that’s exactly it. for a lot of peo-
ple it was the end of something. for my
dad’s generation it was the death of some-
thing, like an ice pick in the heart. for my
generation it was an opportunity to remake
art.
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Strokeworld 0907, 2010
42” x 40” varnished acrylic on canvas
7
Strokeworld 0529, 2010
46” x 46” varnished acrylic on canvas
8
Strokeworld 0321, 2010
40” x 40” varnished acrylic on canvas
9
Strokeworld 0516, 2010
46” x 46” varnished acrylic on canvas
10
Strokeworld 0705, 2010
36” x 36” varnished acrylic on canvas
11
Strokeworld 0701, 2010
38” x 36” varnished acrylic on canvas
12
Strokeworld 0415, 2010
42” x 42” varnished acrylic on canvas
13
Strokeworld 0718, 2010
40” x 38” varnished acrylic on canvas
1414
Strokeworld 0708, 2010
38” x 36” varnished acrylic on canvas
15
Strokeworld 0712, 2010
40” x 38” varnished acrylic on canvas
1616
deeP SkIN 0825, 2009
56” x 48” varnished acrylic on canvas
17
deeP SkIN 0815, 2009
56” x 48” varnished acrylic on canvas
18
deeP SkIN 0213, 2009
52” x 44” varnished acrylic on canvas
19
deeP SkIN 0123, 2009
50” x 42” varnished acrylic on canvas
20
Luke GrayLives and works in Brooklyn, nY
artist’s Birthdate: 1961
Education:
B.a. in fine arts and Literature, University of Pennsylvania, 1982, Philadelphia, Pa.
skowhegan school of Painting and sculpture, 1979, skowhegan, Me.
rhode island school of design, summer session 1978, Providence, r.i.
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
“Luke gray: strokeworld and deep skin Paintings”, david richard Contemporary,
santa fe, n.M., 2010
“deep skins”, gary snyder Project space, nYC, nY, 2009
“Luke gray: syncMasters and gestureglyphs“, gary snyder fine art, nYC, nY, 2002
hunter gallery at the William h. drury and richard grosvenor Center for the arts,
newport, r.i., 2001
addison-ripley fine art, Washington d.C., 2000
david Klein gallery, Birmingham, Mi., 1999
snyder fine art, nYC, 1998
addison-ripley fine art, Washington d.C., 1997
snyder fine art, nYC, 1996
galerie Ludwig, Krefeld, germany, 1996
thomas erben gallery, nYC, 1996
Selected Group Exhibitions:
“?abstraction”, gary snyder Project space, nYC, nY, 2008
“Contemporary new York” (curated by nabil nahas), J. Johnson gallery,
Jacksonville Beach, fla., 2004
“onLine”, feigen Contemporary, nYC, nY, 2003
“500 Works on Paper“, gary snyder fine art, nYC, nY, 2002
“drawings and Photographs”, Matthew Marks gallery, nYC, nY, 2000
“dorke Poelz and Luke gray: ort-Place”, Carmen oberst Kunstraum,
hamburg, germany, 2000
“Photographic Postcards”, Museum für Kommunikation, hamburg, germany, 2000
“der fliegende robert”, collaboration with dorke Poelz, Künstlerhaus Moorfleet,
hamburg, germany, 1998
“three: alex de fluvia, Luke gray, Pablo rey”, holland tunnel art Projects,
Brooklyn, nY, 1998
“a new naturalism”, snyder fine art, nYC, 1997
“in the garden room: Just the Way You Like it”, archibald arts, nYC, 1997
“Unresolved: drawings and Paintings according to... Chakaia Booker, Keith duncan,
Luke gray”, archibald arts, nYC, 1997
“Pentiment academy guest Professors 1997”, hamburg Museum für Kunst und gewerbe,
hamburg, germany, 1997
“affinities”, snyder fine art, nYC, 1996
“gallery artists”, thomas erben gallery, nYC, 1996
“vibology”, White Columns, nYC, 1992
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“Premio internazionale fiar” (nYC entry curated by dan Cameron), Museum of science
and technology, Milan, italy. traveled to rome, Paris, London, Los angeles,
new York, 1991-1993.
“in the Black”, PnYK gallery, Kent, Ct., 1990
“guillaume Bijl, Luke gray, robert hamon, Karen Kilimnik”, nicole Klagsbrun gallery,
nYC, 1989
Commissions:
350 West 51st. st., nYC, nY commissioned by rossrock LLC in collaboration with
Philip Babb architect to paint mural “traveler” in building’s lobby. Project
completed July, 2002
the robert Wood Johnson foundation, Princeton, n.J., commissioned to paint 30 ft. long
mural entitled Universal health” for new corporate headquarters. Project
completed July, 2001.
1500 Broadway at times square, nYC, nY commissioned by intertech to paint ceiling
mural, “transMission 1998” in building’s lobby. Project completed february 1998.
artist’s Books:
“neogenesis”, 1995, 662 driggs editions, Brooklyn, nY
“alien space invaders’ Book of days”, 1994, Black dog editions, nYC
“recent observations”, 1993, Black dog editions, nYC
“invisible Culture”, 1993, Black dog editions, nYC
“Musee Picasso”, 1992, Black dog editions, nYC
all books distributed by Printed Matter at dia, nY
Bibliography:
Chapman, frances (artburger), Waterfront Week, 1996-97, various.
diehl, Carol, art in america, november 1998, “Luke gray at snyder fine art”, review.
Janis, stefan, the Litchfield County times, april 16 1993, “Warren-Born artist’s Work
at Kent gallery”.
Johnson, Ken, the new York times, May 22 1998, review of snyder show.
Johnson, Ken, the new York times, June 13, 2003, review of “online” at
feigen Contemporary.
Kino, Carol, time out, august 1997, “Unresolved”, review of show at archibald arts.
Kino, Carol, art news, april 1997, “Luke gray at snyder”, review.
Kenny, Kay, Cover, July 1997, “organizing non-hierarchal space: Color is Key in
Luke gray’s transitional gestures”.
Maine, stephen, the new York sun, “a delicious Paradox”, June 2008, review of
“?abstraction” at gary snyder Project space .
Protzman, ferdinand, the Washington Post, January 2000, “Luke gray at
addison-ripley”, review.
smith, roberta, the new York times, august 2 1996, “across the generations,
side by side”, review of “affinities” show at snyder fine art.
smith, roberta, the new York times, January 8th, 2002, “frank stella Pops Up all over”
mention of exhibition at gary snyder fine art in relation to concept of “complexity”.
vogel, Carol, the new York times, March 6 1998, “the spirit of the square”, inside art
Column about “transMission 1998”, times square mural commission.
von Buchholtz, annegret, Westdeutsche Zeitung, september 12 1996, “Brushstrokes and
the self-organization of Chaos”, review of galerie Ludwig show.
2222
130 Lincoln avenue, suite d, santa fe, nM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284
www.davidrichardContemporary.com | [email protected]
isBn 978-0-9827872-5-0
PriCe $15.00
© 2010 david riChard ConteMPorarY, LLC