Gerard Mossé Exhibition

Marlborough (Midtown)

This event has ended.

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery present an exhibition of paintings by the artist Gerard Mossé.

The artist was born in Casablanca and spent his formative years in Marseille, Paris, and Los Angeles. It was in his early 20s that Mossé began his artistic career in Venice, California. He later obtained his MFA in painting from the Claremont Graduate School of Art and moved to New York in the late 1980s. As Mossé honed his painterly practice, a unique kind of color-saturated abstraction became his focus, and each composition—resolutely visceral and layered with pigment—is a depiction of luminosity itself.
On each canvas, the artist coerces colors into glowing forms which throb with their own kind of electricity. The pictorial space possesses colors so intense they seem to vibrate and even hum. As writer Lilly Wei states, “Mossé is a committed abstractionist with time and space on his mind, a light in his eyes and paint on his hands.” She continues, “The paintings fall into two compositional types, the scale variable, the tonalities of the grounds alternating, some darker, some paler, the overall orientation vertical. One grouping consists of multiple vertical shapes, the other of a single vertical shape. These uprights are self- referential forms, deliberately echoing the format of the painting as paintings within paintings. But it also purposely evokes much more, the vertical images assuming figurative, totemic import.”

Mossé takes his time achieving the final visual effect, frequently reworking a single canvas over months— even years. The end result is intriguingly paradoxical: an image of an instant, a sublime, significant flash forever captured on canvas. As the painter himself puts it, “What I’m working toward is the moment when color becomes light. That’s where the life is.”
Gerard Mossé has mounted solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, California; Berlin, Germany; and New York, New York over the course of his career. He has been included in group exhibitions in Tokyo, Japan; Seattle, Washington; Boston, Massachusetts, and New York, New York. The exhibition will remain on view through December 29th.