Bart Gulley

Contradictions amplify the enigmatic and pictorial sensations in my work. These oppositional qualities include combining the temporal with the concrete, the physical with the pictorial, representation with imitation. Constructions and shapes appear to reference specific things in the world but have multiple references. The result is reductionist but employs a complex aesthetic.

This work is influenced by Pop, Minimalism and Color Field painting, and has further roots in mid-century design. I draw on other diverse influences including film, photography, literature, fashion, graphic and industrial design, architecture and the American landscape. These influences are part of my historical past.

I’m drawing from across these disciplines to extend the American vernacular, with a style and vision that is strongly rooted. Reconciling these influences and identifying congruencies, divergences and multiple meanings among them is my present focus.

Critic Dominique Nahas writes:
Gulley’s attention to the phenomenal and the analytical speak a mixed grammar of parts and wholes that permeates his thought and process … these remarkable pictures find their measure through a scrupulous blending of visual elements which achieve the right balance between containment and release, compression and relaxation, sensuousness and rectitude. There is nothing casual in Gulley’s work. His work makes manifest a stringent mindfulness in which fastidious buoyancy, unexpected flexibility and lightness of being become imminent.