Press Release

Ruth Bachofner Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by San Francisco-based artist Gary Edward Blum. There will be a reception for the artist Saturday, July 30, 5-7 PM.

In this new body of work, Gary Edward Blum continues his exploration of balance and dependent opposition. Utilizing a mixture of realism and minimalist abstraction, Blum creates a narrative between pictorial reality, artistic process and formal composition. The result is at once playful in its practice but earnest in execution.

Blum structures paintings around a series of grids that set into play a discourse between formal process and personal narrative. His gritty, buff backgrounds provide an architectonic framework for found objects that are at once still life, autobiographical record and instigators of compositional tension and examination. Paint swatch cards are rendered using trompe l'oeil, as is the painted tape holding the cards in place. Other 'incidental markings' such as more paint swatches, finger prints, and daubs of paint are carefully placed on the gridded fields comprised of hard edge linework and opaque quadrants of color. The seemingly casual, pin-board placement of objects are in reality carefully considered and strategically placed by Blum. These items are at once indicators of the artist's creative process and formal elements in the painting.

“The use of trompe l’oeil challenges the distinction between art and life and sheds light on the way in which representation is translated from experience,” Blum states. “Like miniature paintings, these tangible bits of paper often mimic the abstract passages and gridded backgrounds found in the composition. By employing divergent styles to create a picture within a picture, my hope is that the viewer comes away from my work with the understanding that oppositions can exist harmoniously in the same space.”

 

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