Gary Komarin

In his third solo Robischon Gallery exhibition, internationally-exhibited painter Gary Komarin again offers his free-wheeling, yet serious-minded, sophisticated abstract works. Combining the saturated color of spackle-laced house paint, drawn eccentric forms, drips, and gestural brushwork, Komarin’s enigmatic visual vernacular converges in a selection of intriguing paintings on canvas and paper. Coupled with the artist’s quizzical, evocative titles – Her Dutch Shoes Treated Her Well, referring to art student practice, or Who is Hercules… Why Are You Calling Him? referencing an inadvertently comic interaction after dialing a wrong number –  Komarin’s sharp wit and extraordinarily free intuitive process becomes evident. His work is a visual puzzle sparking revelation through mark-making and narrative to which the artist states, “I think of my paintings as pre-linguistic. Forms travel and co-mingle through time and space, free from the order of tyranny and reason.”  Through Komarin’s singular approach to paint, art critic Kenneth Baker states that Komarin’s “unlovely methods makes paintings that vibrate with historical memory, echoing such things as Matisse’s driest, most empty pictures, Robert Motherwell’s spare abstractions of the 1970s or the early New Mexico and Berkeley paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.”

Awarded the Joan Mitchell Prize in painting, among other honors, Komarin has received world- wide notoriety through solo exhibitions in Zurich, Switzerland, London, England, Kiyoharu, Japan, Dubai, UAE and New York in addition to being in numerous museum and private collections, including a 2011 acquisition by the Denver Art Museum, entitled Yamagata.  Additionally, Gary Komarin is featured in the documentary film entitled Still, directed by Colorado filmmakers Amie Knox and Chad Herschberger, which relates Clyfford Still’s contribution to American art and the influence of Abstract Expressionism on generations of artists like Gary Komarin.