Biographical Information:

If you look at a Gary Komarin painting for any length of time, you will begin to see it differently. For all the loopiness you might immediately see in Komarin's Pop-ish subjects -- and what appears to be an insouciance by the artist in creating the work -- his paintings, after you spend time looking at them with relaxed attention, start offering lessons about how genuine art transmits feeling.

Over and over, Komarin produces works with such recurring subjects as French wigs, stacked cakes and palm trees. But his paintings and drawings really aren't any more about these things than Giorgio Morandi's still lifes are about clay bottles. Komarin's paintings are about painting. As quirky as their subjects might be, they seem to have been almost arbitrarily chosen.

No single label seems serviceable in describing Komarin's art, but a classification like Minimalist/Abstract Expressionist/Neo-Expressionist art might begin to describe the intention of his painting. What are the most elemental components a painting needs before it can take its place in the realm of art? Komarin provides part of the answer in painted lines that are sometime fat, sometimes thin, sometimes sinuous and flowing and sometimes broken and stuttering. He amplifies the answer by his use of color. Now and again he employs such startling hues as chartreuse and pink, but other times he reminds us of the colorfulness of blacks and grays. The texture of a painting's surface may be as important to Komarin as anything. In the sometimes slick and smooth and sometimes swiped, scumbled and rubbed areas of his surfaces, we always sense the artist's hand.

The wonder of Komarin's paintings is that they resonate with so much poetry, especially since the artist may be trying to fool us into thinking that they were produced without the slightest fuss or guile. His pictures look like no others, although intheir cartoony drawing style, their attention to surface and the feeling radiating from the wigs, frosted cakes and other whimsical subjects, the works clearly make a connection to the late paintings of Philip Guston. Certainly the artist would be the last person to deny such a tie. Komarin studied with Guston in the 1970s while he was a graduate student at Boston University. Later, he became a studio assistant to the famed painter.

Komarin is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Prize in painting, an Edward F. Albee Foundation fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant and many other prestigious awards. He has had numerous one-man exhibitions in the US and abroad, and his work is included in dozens of museum and corporate collections, among them those of the Houston Museum of Art, the Newark (NJ) Museum, the Montclair Museum, the Arkansas Museum of Art, Microsoft, AT&T and Continental Airlines.

Selected Exhibitions:

• 1979 Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York
• 1981 The Museum of Fine Arts, Eugene Oregon
• 1982 Wunsch Art Center Exhibition, organized by the Whitney Museum, NY
• 1986 The Longview Museum, Longview Texas
• 1987 San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio Texas
• 1995 New Work/New York, Gagosian Gallery, New York
• 1996 Guston, Basquiat, Komarin, Traylor, John McEnroe Gallery, New York
• 1997 University of Hawaii, National Invitational Drawing Exhibition
• 1997 The New Americans, The John McEnroe Gallery in Kobe Japan
• 1998 MOFA, New Orleans, Louisiana
• 1999 The Newark Museum, New Jersey Biennial
• 1999 Rutgers University, Rutgers New Jersey
• 2001 Masur Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
• 2001 Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee
• 2002 National Academy of Design Museum
• 2002 The University of New Orleans, New Orleans
• 2002 NJ State Museum, Morris Museum, Noyes Museum
• 2003 Galerie ProArta, Zug, Switzerland
• 2003 Art of This Century, The Armory, New York
• 2003 Galerie ProArta, Zug, Switzerland

Price Range: $1600 to $6500