NYAB Event - Michael Gregory "New Work"

Michael Gregory "New Work"

Nancy Hoffman Gallery

This event has ended.

Over the past five years Gregory has focused on the barn as American symbol and icon. The barn, with its endless possibilities of shape and form, became a signature subject for the artist: round, peaked, with broken eaves, punctuated by many windows, clad with gables and siding. A few years ago, the barns were “up front,” the main focus of each painting, with bits of landscape invented by the artist as a stage set for each structure. Eager to push into new territory, to explore the line between land and sky, heaven and earth, Gregory amplified the scale of his works, doubling them in size, moving from panel to canvas. While the manifest content of each work is that line between heaven and earth, it is the underlying content, the metaphor that is most important in this new body of work, the balance between beauty, hope and despair; the loneliness of a starlit sky; the poetic and often pregnant sensation that is present where the horizon meets the sky in a way that does not address literal separation from earth. The potency of a mountainscape invented by the artist as background and backdrop for a lone barn or a community of buildings bathed in blue afternoon light reminds one of the writings of John Steinbeck when the West was young and the symbol of hope for so many who moved there. Gregory’s expansion of the landscape to include mountains at sunset, foothills at twilight, fields of golden grain and corn as the new moon rises in the sky seems more evocative and iconic than his earlier works. The poetry in the paintings is palpable, the sense of memory is undeniable, the depiction of a time and place, perhaps gone forever. Each painting--most named for places the artist has been where he has been inspired--seems to be the beginning of a saga.