“The act of painting and the condition of being an artist is about making choices and wrestling with the unknown. Putting paint to canvas in the age of the microchip keeps me rooted to earlier times and all times.”
“My work proceeds largely without preconception, and unfolds step by step. Painting travels along a road from mystery to order, chaos to illumination. Whether the image is narrative or not, the commitment to plastic concerns: color, line, and space are as important as image. My ideas come from practically everywhere: art history, popular culture, dreams, drama, and melodrama. The paintings that work best are those that don’t answer all the questions.”
In these statements, Gary Komarin expresses the outlook by which he is guided in his work, and his opulent, robust abstractions resonate with a witty vitality, both innocent and knowing. They counter our screen-dependent lives with surfaces that are boldly gestural yet softly, subtly layered, elegantly harmonious yet cartoonishly playful. The artist constantly reconfigures his vision as he explores aesthetic and psychological revelations.
The energy at the opening of Komarin’s second solo exhibition at Spanierman Modern, which occurred last Wednesday (September 9), matched that of his work. Above, photo of Gary Komarin with Ira Spanierman and others in attendance.
The energy at the opening of Komarin’s second solo exhibition at Spanierman Modern, which occurred last Wednesday (September 9), matched that of his work. Above, photo of Gary Komarin with Ira Spanierman and others in attendance.
For information on, and purchase of, the catalogue accompanying the show, including an essay by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D., click here.
In the show, Komarin’s paintings carry out a discourse, but one that each viewer is challenged to read in a different way. Gregarious and sociable, evoking baseball in the backyard in the summer, footprints on stepping stones, The Digressive Interlocutor (right) reaches out to the more introverted In Praise of the Canadian Navy (below), where an upside down heart floats and pulsates within a realm of varied blues evoking unquiet contemplation. The contrast expresses the complexity of personality and subtleties of mood and unspoken human interactions. 
Born in New York City, Komarin is the son of two immigrants: his father was a Czech architect who fled the Holocaust, and his mother was from Vienna, where she developed the skills at baking the cakes that have become a leitmotif in Komarin’s art. Komarin studied with the New York School painter Philip Guston at Boston University, where he received his MFA. For more on the artist, see Komarin's biography.
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