Gabriel Phipps

Exhibition Dates: March 4 - March 8, 2025
Opening reception: Thursday, March 6 @ 6PM

39 White Street, Tribeca

Q&A with Gabriel Phipps

Tell me about the forms in your paintings—they bring the lumpy figures of Philip Guston to mind. How do you decide the content of a painting?

Form varies from painting to painting, time period to time period. The earlier paintings began with the idea of infusing human presence in abstract geometric structures. I used color vibration and pattern as a pulse or heartbeat. Light and form were to reside on the picture plane and push out into the viewer’s space, confronting them as an actual person would.

The recent paintings rely heavily on intuitive processes; figures and forms emerge out of tangled marks and painterly mud. Some present as volumetric and others two-dimensional; their full meaning and implications are unknown until each painting nears completion. As images unfold, themes personal and cultural materialize – conflict, longing, solitude. Imagery and texture call attention to the artifice of painting, prompting audience self-awareness and at the same time, pictorial escape.

As for Philip Guston, his influence is inescapable, especially for Boston-based art students, as I once was. Guston is to the Boston art scene, what Diebenkorn is to the Bay Area. I don't ever intentionally channel his ideas, though some of his sensibilities are certainly baked in.

Who/What are your biggest artistic influences?

In terms of painting, John Walker, Gerhard Richter, Guston (as you surmised), Picasso, Morandi, Rembrandt. Heavy hitters, all. There are others, too many to name.

Many of your paintings seem at once architectural and geometric, but also fluid. Would you agree? If so, what might this style communicate or evoke to your audience?

Those qualities are apt descriptions of an effort to communicate notions of paradox and simultaneity. The rectilinear units that reverberate throughout the abstract paintings are at once solid and ephemeral, synthetic and organic, static and kinetic, lighthearted and serious. They are structures seen from above and from the ground. They are free-standing and verge on collapse.

In the recent work, paradox manifests differently. In “About Looking”, the two figures represented can be read as a dog and a cat and as sculptures of a dog and a cat; the cat might also be a dog, the dog might have a little hog in him. They're hybrid forms. Moreover, the painting within the painting could be read as a window.

In all of my work, both the old and the new, mutability hopefully leaves viewers with questions to ponder.

How do you stay creatively engaged day-to-day?

For my part, it’s hard not to be creatively engaged. Working in the studio buoys my spirit, making it hard to disengage. There are definitely times when the demands of everyday life intervene, but remaining in the act of making as much as possible, touching paint to canvas or pencil to paper almost every day is what's necessary. Continuous engagement.

What non-art-related interests of yours affect and inspire your artistic practice?

Like it or not, everything in life affects my artistic practice — current affairs, politics, relationships, friends, family, teaching, music, film. For better or for worse, these realities and experiences work their way into the paintings, in direct and indirect ways.

Music is paramount. There was a time when I endeavored to make a painting that impacted audiences in a song-like manner; imagery that enveloped the viewer; something felt physically and emotionally. To a certain extent, that ambition continues today.

For Price List, please contact:
Quang Bao I quang@1969gallery.com

Gabriel Phipps | MVP, 2024
acrylic and photographic ink on paper | 5.75h x 5w inches
(13h x 12w inches with white wood frame)

Gabriel Phipps | Codger, 2025
acrylic and ink on canvas | 36h x 18w inches

Gabriel Phipps | About Looking, 2024
oil on panel | 7h x 9w  inches

Gabriel Phipps | Catch, 2010
oil on canvas | 48h x 60w inches

Gabriel Phipps | Nursemaid’s Elbow, 2010
oil on canvas | 39h  x 24w inches

Gabriel Phipps | Alone Together, 2012
oil on canvas | 8h x 12w inches

Gabriel Phipps | Tabled, 2024
acrylic and photographic ink on paper | 5.5h x 4.75w inches
(11.25h x 10w inches with white wood frame)