"Gail Roberts: Entanglement" at the Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles

Written by Alastair Reynolds Thursday, 14 April 2011 22:15

Los Angeles.- Luis De Jesus Gallery is very pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Gail Roberts, entitled "Entanglement" on view from April 16 through May 28, 2011. This will be Gail Robert’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. An artists’ reception will be held on Saturday, April 16th, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. In Gail Roberts’s new paintings, images of birds’ nests are paired with books, titles and passages of text, creating a vehicle for inquiry and commentary into the artist’s reflections on nature, culture, and man’s temporal existence. The paintings are a further investigation of themes that she has explored in different ways throughout her 35-year career as a painter. Books and, in particular, classic literature, came into focus several years ago when she created a series of paintings that referenced the accumulation of objects in her personal life — memorials to the amassing of material items that illuminate and reassess what is valued and what is discarded.

Roberts’s paintings of nests and books become stand-ins for the genres of landscape and still life, and, by extension — landscape as text, building upon the tradition of Emerson, 19th-century American Luminist painting, and the language-based art of the 1960s and 70s Conceptual movement. In addition to collecting classic literature, Roberts has acquired a large variety of birds' nests over a period of twenty years. The nests are accumulations of twigs, grasses, mud and miscellaneous materials (including dryer lint, shredded paper, carpet fiber, thread, human hair, and animal fur) and are interwoven to form cradles — architectural feats of strength and endurance. Enlarged in scale in these new paintings, the nests simulate land masses, planets in formation, swirling gases, and whirlpools of funneling debris. Roberts’s process is a literal structuring and forming of the nest through multiple layers of brushstrokes, creating a physical presence that hovers between abstraction and reality, order verging on chaos. In their larger-than-life grandeur, these containers of detritus reveal heightened contradictions of attraction and repulsion, simultaneously evoking references to birth and innocence, death and decay.



Gail Roberts received her BFA and MA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and attended Yale University Summer School of Music and Art. She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin; the Musee Rochefort-en-terre, Brittany, France; Galeria Nacional de Costa Rica, San Jose, Costa Rica; the Riverside Art Museum; and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; and the California Center for the Arts Museum, Escondido, CA. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Oakland Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, Lux Art Institute, as well as numerous corporate and private collections, and has been critically reviewed in publications such as Art in America, New Art Examiner, and Modern Painters. Visit the artists website at ... http://gailroberts.net

Located in Santa Monica's famed Bergamot Station Arts Complex, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is committed to working with international artists of all media who are engaged with fresh and intelligent thought-provoking ideas, who are fearless in their beliefs and execution, and who are taking risks. It is their intention to provide artists with a unique platform where ideas and concepts are manifested and realized — along with the support of collectors, institutions, and the public — through a program of consistently innovative, high quality, and conceptually rigorous exhibitions that serve to showcase the latest developments in contemporary art. Visit the gallery's website at ...http://www.luisdejesus.com/

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