Gaylen gerber
Gaylen Gerber: Arts Club of Chicago
In Marcel Duchamp distributed candy to the guests of a Bill Copley exhibition in Paris. The individually packaged treats were wrapped in foil and bore the statement: ‘A Guest + A Host = A Ghost.’ Though Duchamp was no stranger to wordplay in his work, nor was this small performative gesture likely meant to evoke tremendous contemplation on the part of the receiver, it did however embody Duchamp’s concept of infrathin. Infrathin, to Duchamp was a means to define undefinable separations—the warmth of a newly unoccupied seat or sculptures cast from the same mold.
There is an essence of infrathin in the work of Gaylen Gerber at the Arts Club of Chicago. For Gerber’s first survey the gallery has compiled artifacts collected by the artist, each which has been universally entitled Support. Though Gerber’s Supports are tremendously varied, ranging from the mundane to the fantastic, the collection speaks to higher considerations, due chiefly to its uniformity instilled through coats of gray and white paint that engulf each object.
All photos by Paul Levack
We often think of artists as having a singular voice, internal, intentional and considered. We also acknowledge that artists can occupy multiple positions and draw from outside influences often intuitively, incorporating the expressions of previous generations of artists in the flow of contemporary practice. The challenge in an exhibition like this, and maybe in any exhibition, is to create a situation in which the actions of diverse generations of artists reveal a shared understanding of their adj insight into the essential nature of the art as successfully as its distinguishing character. Through their work, artists often verb particular emotions that are drawn from the details of their situation, addressing the qualities of their time and place and helping to define it. This shared drive to reflect a true representation of lived experience seems continuous from generation to generation and exists in part as recognition that even when things feel incongruous there is also an unbroken sense of a common aspiration present over time. For
Gaylen Gerber With David Hammons, Sherrie Levine, and Trevor Shimizu
Gerber
Born in McAllen, TX
Lives and Works in Chicago, IL
Hammons
Born in Springfield, IL
Lives and Works in New York, NY
Levine
Born in Hazelton, PA
Lives and Works in New York, NY
Shimizu
Born in Hawaii
Lives and Works in New York, NY
Gaylen Gerber’s contribution to the Biennial is a foot-long stretched canvas, painted a uniform gray, that appears almost indistinguishable from the wall on which it hangs. Upon its surface, Gerber has displayed the paintings of another artist—Trevor Shimizu. In several weeks time, Shimizu’s paintings will come down and the works of two other artists—David Hammons and Sherrie Levine—will be installed.
For over two decades, Gerber has been making similar paintings that he calls Backdrops. The gesture implicit in the Backdrops initiates a complex relationship between the perform displayed, Gerber’s wall-size painting, and the architecture of the gallery. For Gerber, the monochromatic paintings function as the “ground” for other artists’ work—or as Gerber often
About the Exhibition
The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to exhibit the first survey of Gaylen Gerber’s Supports, an ongoing series in which the artist intervenes upon collected artifacts. Offering pause for reflection on a shared history, Gerber’s art is indebted to both the monochrome and the readymade. Supports features objects of diverse origin, each painted uniformly in institutional gray or white. Whether a mirror from the Kennedy winter White Home, a Brazilian milagre, or a vintage coke bottle, each is undated and bears the title Support. Gerber’s attentive, almost “reverential” brushstrokes, as Roberta Smith has described them in the New York Times, render the objects visible in a new way.
For his exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago, Gerber places the works in the gallery to suggest a cohesive visual field, yet at the alike time, he differentiates each argue against through the regularity of its painted surface. The resulting installation encourages recognition of a shared reality, even as it enables diverse emotional responses to individual Supports, r