Jeff Gibson and Richard Paul “Vertigo”

Theodore

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Theodore presents Vertigo, a two-person exhibition of new work by Jeff Gibson and Richard Paul. VERTIGO will be the first exhibition in our new gallery space in Tribeca.

For his contribution to “Vertigo,” Jeff Gibson presents five densely packed two-foot-square collages on wooden panels. Combining digital montages of Google-sourced images with pictures excised from books, magazines, and catalogues, these works intermesh—via an intricately handcrafted decoupage technique—high and low, old and new, to form poetic vortices of cultural and historical reference.

Richard Paul’s contribution to “Vertigo” is Diatomic Melodies, a series of five 3D lenticular prints, featuring images of round diatoms in colour spaces. The images conform to the relationship of figure to ground with the caveat that, rendered as they are in 3D, the ground becomes more medium than base. The name of the series - Diatomic Melodies – is derived from a half-remembered Kraftwerk song title Kommetenmelodie (Comet Melody), the images preserving (hopefully) the utopian futurism of the music. Diatoms are single celled algae whose cell walls are formed of striking geometric patterns in opaline silica; they produce 50% of the air we breathe. The idea of floating microscopic particles is, currently, something deeply discordant; Diatomic Melodies strives for a more harmonic effect.

Jeff Gibson is an Australian-born artist and occasional critic who has worked in a variety of media and contexts—photography, video, prints, posters, banners, and books for galleries and public spaces. Gibson moved to New York in 1998 to work for Artforum magazine, where he has been the managing editor since 2004. Since arriving in New York, he has exhibited on the Panasonic Astrovision screen in Times Square as part of Creative Time’s “59th Minute” program, and mounted solo shows at the New York Academy of Sciences; Stephan Stoyanov, and Theodore:Art (all New York); and the Suburban (Chicago and Milwaukee). In 2011, two of the artist’s videos were projected onto the facade of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, as part of a curated series presented by Light Work and the Urban Video Project. His video Metapoetaestheticism was exhibited in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2016, Gibson produced a billboard, titled Armagarden, for the I-70 Sign Show, a curated program of artworks occupying advertising sites on the Missouri interstate. Gibson’s work was also included in the “Digital Infinity” section of the 2018 Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

Richard Paul was born in Scotland and lives and works in London. His work is concerned with material transformation and subjective perception, recently taking the form of 3D lenticular photographs and 3D video installations. He has a BA (Hons) Drawing and Painting from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (now Dundee University), an MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins and an MA Aesthetics & Art Theory from Middlesex University. He co-directed Hoxton Distillery, a gallery in East London, in the early-mid 2000s. He was commissioned by Tate St Ives to produce the 3D video A circle is a sphere seen from afar, which was screened in the gallery in January and February and July-September 2020. He has had two solo exhibitions at Theodore:Art, curated the exhibition Joy before the object at Seventeen Gallery, London, and has participated in group exhibitions internationally. Paul has also written on other artists, most recently an essay on Erin O’Keefe for her solo exhibition at Seventeen Gallery in 2020.