Michael Gregory | Nancy Hoffman Gallery

MICHAEL GREGORY - ICONS
January 24 - February 24, 2004

Michael Gregory's paintings, icons of the American landscape radiate a contemporary old master look. Painted in many layers of oil on panel, his barns, silos, stucco structures, and praise houses (one-room churches) are quiet of palette, white, black, gray with a mere suggestion of warmth added by a sepia glow. Once a symbol of progress in American culture, his silos continue to stand strong; regarded by some as relics, by others as symbols of the Great Plains. The structures Gregory chooses to paint, ordinary structures, do not announce themselves in the landscape, they are the humblest of architecture's offerings. Gregory paints structures that are American at heart and could only rise from the American landscape, often the only vertical in sight, cathedral-like in their austerity.

As Gregory travels around this country, he is captivated by the "personalities" of structures, many of them barns of infinite variability. The barns, as other Gregory buildings, greet the viewer front and center with power, boldness, and assertiveness, iconic in their frontality. Gregory sets the stage for each structure, sometimes with the suggestion of a landscape-trees, telephone poles, and always with a dramatic sky, charged with mystery. These are not tranquil skies; they are evocative, cloud filled, disquieting ones. The viewer's equilibrium is further challenged by the absence of any mid-ground in the artist's work, thus giving little sense of perspective or scale. While representational, Gregory's paintings are not "true" to the landscape vista he has seen. He transforms the reality of a geometric structure into an icon, a structure that is the focal point, the subject, the object of the painting, and a touchstone to contemplation.

Michael Gregory, Adeline, 2003,
oil on wood, 40 x 30 inches

Michael Gregory, Bethel, 2003,
oil on wood, 37 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, Beloit, 2003,
oil on wood, 45 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, Caruth, 2003,
oil on wood, 49 x 42 inches

Gregory paints barns, silos and stucco houses of worship as single images dominating a vertical format. While singular paintings, the artist envisions these structures in a dia-logue of contrasts and similarities, of nuance, theme and variation. His tulips and orchids too, are single blooms set against a dark black background. Bringing each flower from darkness to light, the bloom stands regally in a vertical format of small scale. Symbols of impermanence and beauty, the flowers, like Gregory's structures, are a vehicle for meditation.

Gregory says of his new work: "I think the concept of the icon is important. I'm using it in the traditional sense of a picture as a vehicle for transcendence, something to meditate upon. I'm not telling a story, rather suggesting a point of departure for a topic for conversation. The paintings are not necessarily about what is pictured, i.e., a barn, a sunset or a flower, but rather a signifier. I know that the images are clichés and I like to play with that idea. They are clichés because they are very much ingrained in our culture as symbols and as such should be re-examined." The artist says, "My paintings are collages made up of personal observation and experience, art history and interests that extend beyond the formal language of painting. While I love paint, the act of painting is subservient to the picture which stands for the idea."

Michael Gregory, Ephram, 2003,
oil on wood, 41 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, New Gosport, 2003,
oil on wood, 45 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, Mt. Zion, 2003,
oil on wood, 48 x 42 inches

Michael Gregory, Druids Hall, 2003,
oil on wood, 42 x 54 inches

Often Gregory uses a composite of photographs he has taken as a sketch for his work. He finds color a "distraction" in his structures; painting in black and white, he uses a brush and a squeegee-like striping tool to enhance the illusion of authentic barn sidings. These vertical or horizontal striations create a meditative rhythmic surface on the barns, which appear to have aged and weathered. Gregory's stucco buildings emanate light, the bright California sun, in their pocked facades. While painted in oil, the illusion of stucco is palpably credible.

In the catalogue essay accompanying this exhibition, Mark Daniel Cohen writes: "These structures are invested--with the inscrutable, ominous feeling that has always marked the American imagination--with one of the dominant qualities of the American soulŠ They are reminders that we can still build on the landscape, that we can still act at the inter-section of land and sky--they are continuing reaffirmations of the hope that the settlers brought with them and that we require of ourselves to live at all. They are an essential ambiguity, struck through with our past and with our possibilities, with the genius of our place, and the climate of our minds, and the spirit of the very land we preside."

Michael Gregory, New Planes, 2003,
oil on wood, 45 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, New Harmony, 2003,
oil on wood, 45 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, Latah, 2003,
oil on wood, 45 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, Oulde Coote, 2003,
oil on wood, 45 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, Bin, 2003,
oil on wood, 42 x 54 inches

Michael Gregory, Nod, 2003,
oil on wood, 37 x 54 inches

Michael Gregory, South of Hailey, 2003,
oil on wood, 45 x 35 inches

Michael Gregory, West Plains, 2003,
oil on wood, 42 x 54 inches

The artist's work has been shown at The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Boulder Center for the Visual Arts, Colorado; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland; Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, Florida; Evansville Museum of Arts, Science and History, Indiana; Fine Arts Center Galleries, University of Rhode Island, Kingston; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Florida International University, Miami; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; Maier Museum of Art, Randolph-Macon Woman¹s College, Lynchburg, Virginia; Richmond Art Center, California; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, California; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, California; San Mateo Arts Council, California; Selby Gallery, Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida.

His work is included in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, Indiana; and numerous private collections.He was Martha and Merritt deJong Memorial Artist-in-Residence, Evansville Museum of Arts, Science and History, Indiana.Michael Gregory was born in Los Angeles in 1955. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. He resides in Bolinas, California with his wife and daughters.