Neil Gall "The Great Constructor"
David Nolan Gallery
This event has ended.
David Nolan Gallery presents the opening of "The Great Constructor," the first solo exhibition in the United States of the British artist, Neil Gall (b. 1967, Aberdeen). Gall specializes in the magical transformation of the everyday, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary through a complex process of assemblage, photography, collage, painting, and drawing.
The title of the show is a tribute to Ferdinand Léger's "Les Constructeurs" (1951), a painting that reveals Léger's preoccupation with the mechanical and geometrical aspect in the human environment. Gall shares in Léger's enthusiasm, finding beauty in manufactured products and found objects such as wire baskets, cardboard packaging, paper towel tubes, plastic toys, and colorful ribbons. He invests the unmonumental objects in his work with the uncanny, with an otherworldliness that elevates them to a level of sophistication on par with modernist abstraction and figuration. Gall defamiliarizes the banal objects in his paintings by fragmenting them, generating a kaleidoscopic effect that dazzles the eye. The exquisite detail and precision of his technique are seen most clearly in his "S & M sculpture paintings," originating from models made of ping pong balls bound in colorful tape. The luscious surfaces and voluptuous volumes of these staged still life paintings bring to mind the Surrealist "doll" project of the German artist, Hans Bellmer. Gall states: "In our very un-magical world, making illogical artworks or paintings is a totally mad thing to do. I do believe there is a hint of real madness in creativity."
Media
Schedule
from March 25, 2010 to May 01, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-03-25 from 18:00 to 20:00