Gary Komarin

< BACK TO ARTIST PAGE (WORKS) >

“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.”

Dean Jenson
New York 2005

Bio

Born in New York City, the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer, Gary Komarin is a risk taker and considered a modern master in post painterly abstraction. Komarin’s stalwart images have an epic quality that grips the viewer with the idea that he or she is looking at a contemporary description of something timeless. For painter Gary Komarin, abstraction has never been a formal dead end. Rather, it has allowed him to challenge the limitations of the style to make painting ‘include more’ precisely because a recognizable image excludes too much. Komarin has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia. He recently returned from a solo museum exhibition at the Musee Kiyoharu in Japan. The exhibition and catalog, Moon Flows like a Willow, was orchestrated by the Yoshi Foundation in Tokyo and Paris. Komarin was also invited to show his work at the privately owned Musee Mougins in the South of France where he exhibited Vessel pieces from Twenty Four Vessels at Kit Mandor.

In 1996, Komarin’s work was included in a pivotal exhibition at 41 Greene Street where his work was shown with the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston and Bill Traylor. Gary Komarin was invited to show in a catalog exhibition with Robert Motherwell and Sir Anthony Caro in Dublin in 2009. One of the paintings in this exhibition was recently acquired by Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma. And in 2016, Komarin was invited to show with Joan Mitchell and Manuel Neri in Denver. In 2016, a 60 Minutes Producer, Harry Moses, shot, produced and directed a short documentary film on Gary Komarin titled, The Painter’s Path (below). This follows Komarin’s invitation to participate in a film titled, The Chalkboard Chronicles, narrated by Spalding Grey. He was also included in a recent documentary on American master Clyfford Still, which was aired at the New Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, where Komarin’s work was also acquired for their permanent collection.

Articles and essays about Komarin’s work have been published in the New York Times, Art in America, and Arts Magazine among others. His work may be found in many noted public collections including: Galleria Nazionale d’ Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; Denver Art Museum, Denver; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Yoshii Foundation, Tokyo; Musée Kiyoharu Shirakaba, Hokuto; Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins, Mougins; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; The Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Boston University Museum of Fine Arts; The Microsoft Corporation, galleries Proarta, Zurich; Blount International, Atlanta; The United Bank of Houston, The Hyatt Corporation and American Airlines.

Private collections include: Sheila Simonian, New York; James Maher, New York; John McEnroe, New York; Candace Bushnell, New York; The N. Horiuchi Collection, Tokyo; Maxwell Davidson, New York; The Gisep Biert Collection, Zurich; The Abrussezze Collection, New York; The Broadbent Collection, London; The Ron Gremillion Collection, Houston; Mason Klein, The Jewish Museum, New York; Kathryn McCarver Root, New York; Tim Jefferies, London; Robert Lamb, Chicago; Toby Clarke, London; Meredith Long, Houston; David Alan Greer, Los Angeles; Jeffrey Hoffeld, New York; Like Honey, London; Marian Boesky, New York; Tim Culbertt, New York; Wendy Olsoff, New York; The Gonzalo Alvar Collection, Madrid; Ruth O’Hara, New York; Visko Hatfield, Connecticut; Florence de Dampierre, Connecticut.

critical reviews

Komarin makes no distinction between painting and drawing; there are no preparatory drawings for his paintings. Like Jackson Pollock he has pushed aside the classic dichotomy in painting between design and colour, and works on the canvas directly. Sometimes lines and at other times forms serve as carriers for the colour. The equilibrium the artist strikes between colour, line, and form carries us back to an original impulse towards communication - the mark. With his simple and childlike sophistication he opens up questions that force us to address painting as a means of communication on a par with written language. When does a series of brush strokes of a form limit the imagination from finding a range of significance and focus our interpretation of the painting on a specific subject?

Joan Waltemath - London,2008

For painter Gary Komarin, abstraction has never been a formal dead-end. Rather, it has allowed him to challenge the limitations of the style, to make painting "include more" precisely because, to quote Komarin's early mentor, Philip Guston, a recognizable image "excludes too much." While Komarin is not the type to write a manifesto, he embraces the philosophy that intention is but a small fragment of our consciousness, that painting should be more about experience than a statement of intent. For nearly three decades Komarin has steadily produced a seemingly endless reconfigured vision - saturated and loose color fields punctuated by drips, splotches, and ghostly drawn geometries - indifferent to the ebb and flow of taste. And throughout he has remained quite content to allow each viewer "to bring something different" to his work.

Mason Klein - New York, 2012

THE SOLACE OF REPETITION - MASON KLEIN, NEW YORK, 2017

As abstract painting experiences its latest resurrection, questions about the nature of its revival arise as well. Shunted aside by the art world as if it were a dead language, its renewal prompts the ironic realization that very little in modern art has, in fact, been abstract. Even Picasso never produced a wholly abstract work. He simply questioned the myriad ways in which the world could be represented.The vitality of abstraction today assures us that abstract painting can bear a profusion of contemporary narratives. This sense of art’s ability to engage the present has encouraged a diversity of practices, allowing cultural and social issues to coexist with abstract form. Freed from the tyranny of labels and categories, the conceptual nature of painting has reemerged in the service of a multitude of voices—from a techno-conscious generation referencing unprecedented modes of communication to individuals wishing to incorporate all manner of autobiography and identity.

For painter Gary Komarin, abstraction has never been a formal dead-end. Rather, it has never been a formal dead-end. Rather, it has allowed him to challenge the limitations of the style, to make painting “include more” precisely because, to quote Komarin’s early mentor, Philip Guston, a recognizable image “excludes too much.” While Komarin is not the type to write a manifesto, he embraces the philosophy that intention is but a small fragment of our consciousness, that painting should be more about experience than a statement of intent. For nearly three decades Komarin has steadily produced a seemingly endless reconfigured vision—saturated and loose color fields punctuated by drips, splotches, and ghostly drawn geometries—indifferent to the ebb and flow of taste. And throughout he has remained quite content to allow each viewer “to bring something different” to his work.

Not all of the artist’s painting are abstract. Komarin’s work over the years has involved various series of objects, abundant reiterations of seemingly innocent, idiosyncratic motifs such as wigs and cakes. Seen up close, however, these portraits of garish confections and artificially curled hair read almost as caricatures. Isolated or propped up on stands or supports, these hirsute and sweet items take on cartoon-like qualities, both touching and pathetic, as they conjure up myriad spectacles—from a wilting triple-tiered cake, its cloying decoration just off enough to remind one, sadly, of the clownish excess of an elderly woman’s makeup, to hairdos and don’ts, whose teased styles, fraught with insecurity and hope, become surreal vagaries borne aloft with an air of pomp and pretense.

These discrete motifs contrast significantly with the serendipitous invention of Komarin’s larger, abstract paintings. The latter are far more unconscious in as much as the artist, in both intention and execution, relinquishes a certain command of his work. He begins most if not all his paintings by placing stretched canvas on the floor and working horizontally, a technique that enables him, “to get lost inside the painting, to rapidly move about with a large brush in order to get something going, where I am painting faster than I can think, and allowing in most if not all cases for the paint to lead me. I usually sense immediately if something is happening and when I do, I put the brush down and leave the studio without looking back. When I return, I hang the canvas on the wall.”

Throughout his career, Komarin’s repetitive, albeit improvisational, method has resulted in the accretion of a childlike visual vocabulary. Typical of this mannerism, for example, are the smudged, scrawled squares and cubes, tic-tac-toe grids, and bulbous fishlike shapes of the The Blinding of olyphemus, playful elements that parallel the deceptively uncomplicated character of his wigs and cakes. All these elements share a quirky, unsophisticated quality that flirts unknowingly with the potentially dangerous unknown, not The Solace of Repetition unlike the subversion to which his smaller, propped desserts and items of masquerade are subject. In addition to this array of shapes, Komarin reinforces the notion of innocence through various stylistic tendencies: the repetition of form, or the retention of drips and scumbled, gritty surfaces. Moreover, and perhaps the most obvious, yet subtly childlike aspect, is Komarin’s penchant for hyperbole, reflected in his painting’ beguiling titles.

What does all of this have to do with the real subject of Komarin’s work? The answer lies in his own childhood experience and its formative influence on him and his abstract language. Komarin’s need to work from an instinctual, semiconscious state of mind is critical to understanding the evolution of his style and its deeper significance. One of his painterly goals is to create a work that is formed, in a sense, as it is made. In other words, that the picture not be preformed, that it reflect Wittgenstein’s distinction between the way something says and shows what it means. In a statement that Komarin says underwrites his own aesthetic and philosophical position, Jasper Johns remarked: “I think one has to work with everything and accept the kind of statement which results as unavoidable, or as a helpless situation. I think that most art which beings to make a statement fails to make a statement because the methods used are too…artificial. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final statement has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement…To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.”

In addition to this conceptual underpinning, Komarin’s art has always been concerned with focusing attention on visual nuances that he believes will convey enough meaning to constitute a substantive painting. His painterly process and symbolism, however, are tied to certain lifelong preoccupations. They are what lend a particular poignancy to his uninhibited process and childlike visual mannerisms and to his use of repetition and underscoring mistakes. The first revolves around water, specifically the lake whose opaque depths he grew up fearing when, as a child, he was taken fishing by his father. The second haunting and similarly unfathomable experience is one that involves his grandfather, who somehow survived the nightmare of Buchenwald where he spent his time moving rocks from one point to another, only to have to break them, and begin again. Both of these autobiographical strands have become deeply rooted in Komarin’s work and, indeed, inform the process and visual language of his art. On the surface, the artist’s paintings proffer any number of scapes: a window, a beach, the sea. Sometimes the subject is self-evident, as in Between Blue and You and Then Some, where the application of a small white piece of canvas within an expanse of aquamarine and green suggests a shimmering sail, a nautical note barely noticeable on the horizon. While the initial issue of orientation and view is inevitable, it remains of secondary importance. The language of abstraction is rarely transparent; its meanings are often oblique, and as in most of these paintings, the nuances of form signify their meanings in ulterior ways. What begs investigation in this otherwise straightforward seascape is the schematic repetition of form typical of Komarin’s work. The triangular sail, for example, is re-articulated more than once, literally extended, drawn out as though doodled into a tent-like form, and, echoed, again, by another similar, though now looming cone-like geometry, which, cropped by the left margin, encroaches and dwarfs its counterpoints at sea. The additional presence of a dark form behind the sail, perhaps another boat, a hulking barge or freighter, easily morphs into a vase and as quickly into a still life reminiscent of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi.

Although the image is not strictly surrealistic, its forms elicit a kind of dreamlike metamorphosis, a latter-day Basquiat with a touch of Tanguy. We are torn between the elemental language of form—the shifting dynamic fields dictated by color, texture, and shape—and the suggestion of the most ordinary of objects, the flotsam and jetsam that wash up on endless shores, a cacophony of plastic cups, Styrofoam containers, soda bottles, balls, pickup sticks, paddles, which litter Komarin’s paintings. This tension is consonant with the fundamental undertow of meaning in the painter’s work, the resonance of the conflict children experience as they confront their messiness. Komarin’s awkward metamorphosis of shapes and coalescing of forms thus speak to that early phase of development, when society imposes on children its “civilized” constraints of tidiness and order. The erasure and constant sense of loss of an object, either as it inverts in shape, fades away into the depths, or becomes thoroughly elided into a white blankness, as in His Mind Like a Greek Motel, suggests an absence that could be read as death.

Is not the essence of the compulsion to repeat fueled by the need to play out over and over the traumas of childhood? Does not the artist’s tendency to replicate a form and move it from one space to another, such as happens in the unwieldy rocklike shapes in His Mind Like a Greek Motel, derive from a lifelong preoccupation with the fate of a man who did just that? There are many ways to view and understand the dots that Komarin literally connects for us in paintings like That She Had Wanted or Mrs. Langdon Afterward. We need not plumb the deepest meaning that his paintings reenact, nor care whether Komarin is himself attuned to the specific formative narratives that course through his psyche. What matters is this painter’s vulnerability, his willingness to explore the act of paintings as a process that ends in revelations both aesthetic and psychological.

WHEN PAINTINGS HANG FIRE - BARRY SCHWABSKY, LONDON, 2004

There is a stillness to many of Gary Komarin’s recent paintings, a sense of something becalmed that might recall the work of a painter for whom he has expressed great regard, namely Giorgio Morandi. Rarely in these canvases, for instance, will one encounter the axial dynamics typical of such otherwise seemingly dissimilar examples of modernist abstractions as Malevich’s Suprematist compositions and Pollock’s poured paintings. More to the point, in this regard, might be the looming color-chords of Mark Rothko but also the lumpen imagery typical of the late work of Komarin’s teacher Philip Guston – abstract or representational figures that inhabit pictorial space with stubborn persistence. Indeed,  the spatial sensibility evidenced in Komarin’s paintings is more akin to that in Guston’s than to any of the other artists I’ve mentioned, Morandi included, in that they both go further than the others in assimilating space and surface. An artist like Rothko could almost be said to have revived the 19th century academy’s idea of transparent surface, an effulgence capable of flowing outward from the painting to envelop the viewer and open up a depth that one can slowly sink into.

Such fluidity is not Komarin’s way. The scrubbly, almost coarse-grained surface of his painting seems to call it’s forms to linger there, to “hang fire” – a phrase I always find especially striking when it occurs, as happens more than be expected, in the fiction of Henry James, perhaps because his stories really are so often so much about just this experience of having to hesitate, to inhabit the realm of the unresolved, the unsettled. The phrase is an old one, of martial origin, from the days when arms were loaded by pouring a gunpowder charge, which was then ignited by a spark from a flint striking against an iron plate: It is, literally, “to be slow in the explosion of a charge after its primer has been discharged, “ as my dictionary tells me; it thus refers to a potentially or incipiently explosive capacity that is still on the way to becoming manifest. This quality in Komarin’s work, its tendency to hang fire, is quite at odds with the dominant trend in contemporary painting where quick, frictionless, “efficient” surface tends to be most valued, perhaps too often resulting in a phenomenon named by an even more familiar phrase that signifies the opposite of a shot that hangs fire, namely, a flash in the pan: powder burning so quickly and intensely that the charge never has a chance to ignite.

Hanging Fire, Komarin’s paintings affirm the potentially explosive character of aesthetic experience, but always in the future tense, never the verifiable past or even the eternal present of Morandi’s bottles or Guston’s clocks, shoes, and Klansmen. The recurrent recognizable forms that used to turn up in his paintings – a noose, a wig, and other simple pictograms – are less in evidence now, as if his old game of humoring ( and thereby subtly mocking) the viewer’s yearning for something graspable by offering something too obvious to be convincing were no longer indispensable. I detect a more take -it -or- leave -it attitude in these blunt forms that no longer appear to be bluntly something-in -particular. More like mere patches of color than proper shapes, gestures that have more to do with effacing form than with constructing it, they frankly avail themselves of the evasive capacity of abstraction as a value in itself. It’s as if, in the face of the continued and incessant demand that art display meaning, Komarin had decided instead to display deferral. A painting like his Natural Selection, for instance, seems gripped by a sort of fervor of self-restraint that is not exactly the pure inwardness of Romantic aesthetics but rather a determination to be seen kicking over its own traces. Of course, Natural Selection represents merely one pole in the spectrum of Komarin’s recent work, where it is joined by others like Numbering, Tightrope, or a painting whose very title seems to aspire to an ultimate in reticence, Innocent of What (possibly referring to, and if so, outdoing, a title Jasper Johns gave one of his paintings, According to What, 1964). The other pole would be represented by more overtly energetic paintings like The Bowman Sixpence, The Pectoral Fin, or The National Sizing Survey, in which what might at first appear to be a sort of demonstrative gesture of Expressionist stamp finally seem more concerned to contain their own theatrical potential to exploit it. Even in the most extrovert of these paintings, there remains a sort of reticence that allows the passions they communicate to keep smoldering at length, rather than to spend themselves in bravado – that allows them to hang fire.

GARY KOMARIN: ICONOCLASTIC ABSTRACTION, DONALD KUSPIT, NEW YORK

Can abstraction survive? That's the question with which Mark Rosenthal concludes his magisterial study of Abstraction in the Twentieth Century.( l) Now that abstraction has become established, the issue is no longer whether it can maintain the sense of "risk" and "freedom" that Rosen­thal notes were its hallmarks, but if it can avoid becoming "hidebound" in the twenty-first century. Now that it is no longer "experimental," can it continue to be vital? Or, as I would put it, can it continue to evolve, becoming something other than the labored formalism in which Rosenthal suggests it threatens to dead-end?

Komarin shows us one way in which it can: he breathes quirky new life into abstraction by making it witty. He takes what was once "forbidding" and "hermetic"-Rosenthal's terms for abstraction in its heroic inaugural period-and makes it ironically lyric by making it playful. He returns gestural-ism to its origins in landscape, but the abstract landscape is no longer "apocalyptic," as Kandinsky's have been said to be, but whimsical. He takes what had become closed systems of geometrical and non-geometrical abstractions and interbreeds them. The result is a kind of hybrid abstraction, less heavy-handed than traditional abstraction but still emotionally serious. It is an overtly hedonistic abstraction, rather than confrontational in the style of the Old Abstract Masters; there is a power in pleasure they, in their Puritanism, could not appreciate. Komarin also has the benefit of after-sight: he orchestrates the whole development of abstraction, bringing its different musical strands together in a sort of grandly ironical musical painting-an ironically symphonic painting not unlike Satie's witty music.

The point is clearly made by Van Dyke's Van Dyke (2007), not simply by way of the clever title, which suggests that Komarin's abstract painting has an elegance similar to that of Van Dyck's regal portraits, but by way of the witty play of shapes. Some are quickly and casually drawn, as though scribbled in a child's sketchbook or on a writing pad. These shapes seem easily changed­ they are on the verge of being free form, yet also readable as images (a sort of sailboat in the upper right corner, a kind of house in the lower right corner)-and even erasable. There are also painterly islands of dense color-seemingly solid ground on an otherwise quixotic field of darkish gray, marked by little eruptions of bright color. These eccentrically shaped forms-they seem to be slowly germinating, however concentrated in themselves-are ironic reprises of the patch (/ache) that has been the mainstay of modernist painting since it was first acknowledged by critics of Ma­net's painting.

Komarin's painting is a reprise of "thin-skinned" color field painting and "thick-skinned" gestural painting, with geometrical odds and ends added by way of the linear drawings. But it is a delicately clever reprise, opening up new expressive as well as perceptual territory. The three painterly patches-pink and dark pink, capriciously elongated into ellipses, and a squarish patch of pitch black-form an eccentrically open system ( a sort of orange colored cross-like star emerges from the "negative" space between them, marking their center). They are counterbalanced by the closed system of the green triangle on which the black patch is dubiously placed. The triangle itself is precariously perched on the tower-like tip of a flimsy rectangle. Hovering high above it is the sailboat, combining the triangle and rectangle forms (both the same soft color as the rectangle below). There is a gentle tension between the three triangular units, as well as between the flat surface on which they appear, like mirages in a void. For all its brooding atmospherics and sensual touches, the surface remains peculiarly inviolable. It supports the dallying shapes, innocently floating on its flatness­, linear and painterly jottings on a deep sea, visual straws for the spectator to grasp. Komarin's shapes linger on his surface, inviting us to enjoy their paradox: child-like drawings and painterly markings in a witty arrangement. Innocence and sophistication subliminally align in Komarin's painting.

Dale and A Suite of Blue Seo, Peter's Pond Lake (both 2007), make the landscape anchor of Komarin's abstraction clear, even as they show it veer energetically towards ironical purity. There are the same gestural patches, now compacted into a sort of composite painterly material. But the drips, the seemingly slapdash brushwork, the flowing together of broad fields of excited color, have an ingenious flair. Purity is pushed toward its contradictory limits-perhaps most evident in the abrupt difference between the large plane of dripping black and the smaller plane of luminous blue in the latter painting-reminding us of the conflicted consciousness that informs traditional abstraction. There is much more harmony in the glowing yellow field of A Suite of Blue Seo, Bishop's Gale (2007)­the same sea in an altogether different light?-but there is the same irksome tension and peculiarly "introverted" and sketchy shapes, holding their own as they drift on the flat sea. Its strong underlying current becomes explicit in the meandering lines of A Suite of Blue Sea with French Wig (2007), a sort of unraveling of the drawn shapes, although the complex of color patches remains intact. The transparency of the drawn shapes and the opaqueness of the color patches makes for another level of formal and expressive tension.

One can call Komarin's abstract paintings quirky formalism, if one needs a label, but I think it is better to think of them as a smart synthesis of spontaneous gesture, geometric composition, and iconic form, with a certain tendency to monochrome. These are the four "basic formal options" of abstract painting, as Rosenthal says, and in Komarin's paintings we find them mixed to lyrically absurd effect. Incident at Osborne Grove (2007) makes the point clearly: its (near) monochromatic surface-Hi// and Rue Madame in Red (both 2007) are almost completely monochromatic--is marked by spontaneous gestural "incidents" that take more or less geometrical form, becoming peculiarly iconic or emblematic. Process painting and structural painting uniquely and inevitably fuse to insinuating expressive effect.

Some of Komarin's paintings are manifestly erotic, others latently melancholy, but the point I want to make is that Komarin is an aesthetic fundamentalist with an ironic twist. The twist prevents his work from becoming decoratively empty-the fate of so much abstract art, as the theorist Max Horkheimer remarked. Komarin engages the decorative but finesses it, as the critic Clement Green­berg said Matisse did; Komarin has a certain debt to Matisse, and to French "luxury" painting in general, as Greenberg called it. A good part of the irony is that Komarin's paintings hover indeterminately on the boundary between purity and imagery. As soon as they seem one-sidedly abstract, they become "impressions" of a natural environment. This doubleness keeps them fresh even as it confirms their traditional modernism. For Komarin reminds us that abstraction has its roots in Impressionism, and Impressionism is rooted in the preoccupation with the painterly metier implicit in the Realism of Courbet and Manet. Komarin is a modernist painter, that is, he is acutely aware of his medium and takes a certain "critical" stance to the planar surface, but he is also aware that a mod­ernist surface that lacks a poetic charge becomes a shallow facade. One might say that Komarin has re-organized increasingly mechanical and self-sufficient modernist painting by reminding us of its broadly based heritage in romantic naturalism, that is, in emotional atonement and caring observation of nature. Indeed, Komarin renews the fantasy of nature in which abstraction is deeply rooted.

Nature contradicts itself by way of changing atmosphere and light, even as it remains self ­regulating. The apparent randomness or irregularity within its regularity suggests that nature is in subliminal evolutionary process. I think that what makes Komarin' s paintings important is that they harness the paradoxical randomness of nature, furthering the evolution of imaginative abstraction. Abstraction had become too "regular" and uninspired-set in its ways-for its own creative good; it needed an infusion of chance to arouse it from complacency, and renew its visionary power. Ab­straction is no longer revolutionary, but it can still be a breath of fresh visual air. One might say that Komarin imaginatively searches out fresh modes of randomness, as nature seems to. The evolutionist Dean Keith Simonton notes that evolutionary change begins with "chance permutation" of "fundamental units [in painting color and line] that can be manipulated in some manner .... These elements must be free to enter into various combinations."(2) The elements are identical, but arranged in different ways, to what Simonton calls "iconoclastic" creative effect.

But then these "heterogeneous variations" must be "subjected to a consistent selection pro­cess" if they are to make "adaptive" sense. I am suggesting that Komarin's witty abstraction, with its seemingly chance interplay of formal elements in iconoclastic combinations, is a creative way of adapting to and rejuvenating an abstraction that has become decadent by way of becoming overly familiar and comfortable with itself, and with that aesthetically stale, emotionally fiat, and perceptually unchallenged. His paintings are a mutation of abstraction-a necessary mutation if it is to survive in convincing form-if it is not to become hackneyed and meaningless. Komarin's abstract paintings are all the more engaging because they exist on the boundary between subjective and objective statement. Simonton writes: "On a subjective plane, the more stable a permutation, the more attention it commands in consciousness; the unstable permutations are too fleeting to rise above unconscious levels of processing." We process Komarin's paintings simultaneously consciously and unconsciously, experiencing them as both ingeniously stable compositions-stabilized by their dialectical gesture and geometry, functioning as spontaneous figures on an atmospheric ground, transcendentally distant yet intimate, like nature itself-and unstable permutations of transient elements. It is their fleeting appearance-their sense of being in timely process--that makes them emotionally engaging, even as their combination in an abstract composition gives them a peculiar permanence and timelessness.

EDUCATION

1975-1977 Boston University, MFA in Painting, Graduate Teaching Fellowship with Philip Guston
1975 Brooklyn Museum School, NY
1974 School of Visual Arts, NY
1973-1974 New York Studio School, NY
1973 Albany State University, BA in Art and English Literature

EXHIBITIONS, AWARDS, & COLLECTIONS

AWARDS

The Joan Mitchell prize in Painting, New York
Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship In Painting, New York
Elizabeth Foundation Prize in Painting, New York
Benjamin Altman Prize in Painting, National Academy of Design Museum, New York
The New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Painting
Graduate Teaching Fellowship in Painting, Boston University Graduate School of Fine Arts

SELECTED group EXHIBITIONS

2019
Bloom: Color, Caress & Seduction, Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA (May)

2015
‘Robert Motherwell, Larry Poons, Gary Komarin’, Dublin, Ireland

1996
McEnroe Gallery, ‘Guston, Basquiat, Komarin, Traylor’, New York, NY

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019
’Testing Boundaries’, Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA

2018
Madelyn Jordan Gallery, ‘The Vicomte and Some of His Parts’, New York, NY
Bruce Lurie Gallery, ‘Transfiguration’, Los Angeles, CA
Robischon Gallery, ‘Swiss Positions’, Denver, CO
Kathy Dimmit Fine Arts, ‘The Mother Tongue’, Houston, TX

2017
Julie Nester Gallery, ‘Swimming Pink’, Park City, UT

2016
Robischon Gallery, ‘Mr. Blonde’, Denver, CO
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Gary Komarin, The First Green Rushing’, Ketchum, ID

2015
Mark Borghii Gallery, ‘A Wilder Blue’, Bridgehampton, NY
Gallerie Design -e- Space, Don’t Tell LIzzie Borden, Paris
Gallerie Baobob, Incident at Osboiurne Grove, Bogota, Columbia
Gallery 88, East Meets West, Seoul Korea
Madelyn Jordan Gallery, New Paintings and Works on Paper, New York, NY
Mark Borghii, Group Exhibition/Selected Works, Palm Beach, Florida

2014
Mini Gallery, New Paintings and Works on Paper, Asissi Italy
The Morrison Gallery, Farmers Logic, Kent, Connecticut
Galerie Proarta, Komarin, Warhol, Bacon, Arp, Zurich
Cuadro Fine Arts, New Paintings and The French Wig, Dubai
Mark Borghii, Group Exhibition /Selected New Works, Bridgehampton, New York
Gail Severn Gallery, New Paintings, Sun Valley Idaho

2013
Vigo Gallery, In Which the Baron Fallow, London, England
Gail Severn Gallery, Jack’s Bridge, Ketchum Idaho
Annual Galleries, Solo Exhibition, Paris, France
Galerie Proarta, Arp, Motherwell, Komarin and Heilman, Zurich, Switzerland
Elins Eagles Smith Gallery, Tapping Reeve, San Francisco, California
Gremillion and Co. Fine Arts, The Road so Bare and White, Houston, Texas
Cuadro Gallery, The Early Influences, Dubai
Lotte Gallery, Solo Exhibition, Seoul, Korea

2012
Hillsboro Gallery of FineArt, Dublin, Ireland States of Feeling: Gary Komarin,
Robert Motherwell and Larry Poons
Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado
Bonbright Gallery, Down and Dirty Whites, Los Angeles, California

2011
Galerie Proarta, Zurich, Switzerland
Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum Idaho
Gremillion and Co. Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

2010
Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado
Cuadro Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emerates
The Neilson Gallery, Cadiz, Spain

2009
Spanierman Modern, New York, New York
Galerie Proarta, Zurich, Switzerland
Broadbent Gallery, London, England

2008
Gail Severn Gallery, Blue Scrubbed White, Ketchum, Idaho
Kiyoharu Museum, Kiyoharu, Japan
The FineArt Society, London, England
Gremillion & Company Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

2007
Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho
Spanierman Modern, New York, New York
The Goss Gallery, Dallas, Texas
Elins Eagles Smith Gallery, San Francisco, California
Costello-Childs Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona

2006
Karolyn Sherwood Gallery, Incident at Echo Lake, Des Moines,lowa
Galerie Proarta, Zurich, Switzerland
SG Modern and Contemporary Fine Arts, New York, New York

The Fine Art Society, The Bourdon Gauge, London, England
Gremillion & Company Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

2005
Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, San Francisco, California
J. Johnson Gallery, Jacksonville Beach, Florida
Donna Tribby Fine Arts, Palm Beach, Florida

2004
Karolyn Sherwood Gallery, Des Moines, lowa
Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona
Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, Texas
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, Canada
Hamiltons Gallery, London, England
Galerie Proarta, Zurich, Switzerland
Broadbent Gallery, London, England
Gremillion & Company Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

2003
McGrath Gallery, New York, New York
Kraft Leiberman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado
Kunstart Zurich, Galerie ProArta, Zurich, Switzerland
Galerie Proarta, Zurich, Switzerland

2002
Gremillion & Company Fine Arts Houston, Texas
Peyton/Wright Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Galerie ProArta, Zurich, Switzerland
Lizan Tops Gallery, East Hampton, NewYork
Steven Vail Gallery, Des Moines, lowa
Ballard Featherston Gallery, Seattle, Washington

2001
The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
Museum of Fine Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
Vanier Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona
Gremillion & Company Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

2000
Peyton/Wright, New York, New York
Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta Georgia
Gremillion & Company Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

1999
Aurobora Press, San Francisco, California

1998
MOFA, New Orleans, Louisiana
CS Schulte Galleries, Millburn, New Jersey

1997
Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Washington

1996
Mark Miller, East Hampton, New York
Drew University, Madison, New Jersey

1995
Sandier Hudson Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana

1994
Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, California

1992
Klarfeld Perry Gallery, New York, New York

1991
Grace Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida

1990
Scott Hanson Gallery, Los Angeles, California

1989
Brian Reddy, Little Silver, New Jersey
Bruce Helander Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida
Sandier Hudson Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
Scott Hanson Gallery, New York, New York

1988
Princeton University Gallery, Princeton, New Jersey

1987
Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York, New York
Sandier/Hudson Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
Meredith Long & Company, Houston, Texas
Bruce Helander Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida

1985
Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York, New York
Sandier/Hudson Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
Bruce Helander Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida
Meredith & Long Gallery, Houston, Texas

1984
Joy Horwich Gallery, Chicago,Illinois
Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, California

1983
Meadows Museum of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York, New York
Meredith & Long Gallery, Houston, Texas

1982
University of Texas/Irving, Irving, Texas
Meredith Long and Company, Houston, Texas

1981
Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon
Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York, New York
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Art Gallery, New York, New York
William Campbell Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas

1979
Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York, New York

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2016
Madelyn Jordan Fine Art, ‘In With the Pop’, Scarsdale, NY

2015
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Color IV’, Ketchum, ID
Mark Borghii, ‘Group Exhibition/Selected Works’, Palm Beach, FL
Seattle Art Fair, Seattle, WA, Gail Severn Gallery, ID
San Francisco Art Market, SF, CA, Gail Severn Gallery, ID
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Color & Form as Metaphor’, Ketchum, ID

2014
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Color III’, Ketchum, ID
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Gary Komarin Part II’, Ketchum, ID
San Francisco Art Market, SF, CA, Gail Severn Gallery, ID
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Gary Komarin’, Ketchum, ID

2013
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Preview 2014’, Ketchum, ID
Gail Severn Gallery, ‘Color II’, Ketchum, ID
San Francisco Art Market, SF, CA, Gail Severn Gallery, ID

2012
Pavilion Des Arts Et Du Design with Galerie Jean-Francois Cazeau, Paris, France
Palm Springs Fine Art Fair with Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, Palm Springs, California
India Art Fair, New Delhi with Neilson Gallery, Cadiz, Spain

2011
Contemporary and Modern Masters, Jean Francois Cazeau, Paris, France

2010
Contemporary Painting, A Survey, Spanierman Modern, New York, New York

2009
Hillsboro Fine Arts, Dublin, Ireland

2007
Katonah Museum, Katonah, New York

2006
The Hungry Eye, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, New York
Works on Paper, Spanierman Modern, New York, New York
Long Island Abstraction, Spanierman Modern, New York, New York
Discardingly Yours, Dean Jensen Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

2005
The Fine Art Society, London, England
Kunstart Amsterdam with Nico DeLaive
Gallery Goss Gallery Inaugural Show, Dallas, Texas
London Art Fair with Broadbent Gallery, London, England
San Francisco Art Fair with Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery, San Francisco, California
Transversal, curated group show, Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado

2004
Ronald Feldman Gallery, Philips de Pury & Co.,New York, New York
Slow Art, Broadbent Gallery, London, England
32 x 32, Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, Texas
London Art Fair Broadbent Gallery, London, England
Works on Paper with Burton Marinkovich, The Armory, New York, New York
Bologna Art Fair with Broadbent Gallery, London, Engand

2003
The Americans, Warhol, Francis, Lichtenstein, Christo, Komarin at Galerie Proarta,
Zurich, Switzerland
Basel Art Fair with Hamiltons Gallery, London, England
Milan Art Fair with Galerie Arte, Milan,Italy
Art of this Century with Mira Godard Gallery, The Armory, New York, New York
Broadbent Gallery, London, England
Richmond House Project with Hamiltons Gallery, London, England
New Abstraction, Lizan Tops Gallery, East Hampton, New York
Kratt / Lieberman Gallery Inaugural Exhibition, Chicago, Ilinois
Luke Honey, London, England

2002
13th Anniversary Show, The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia
Kunstart Fair with Galerie ProArta, Zurich, Switzerland
Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado
Galerie ProArta, ZUrich, Switzerland
100 NJ Artists Make Prints, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey
The Morris Museum, Morristown, New Jersey
The Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, New Jersey
The Maker’s Mark, The University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana
Works on Paper with Burton Marinkovich Fine Art, The Armory, New York, New York

2001
Juried Exhibition, National Academy of Design Museum, New York, New York
Almost Giddy, Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee
New Directions, Masur Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana
Report & Find, Robischon Gallery, Denver, Colorado
Paintings on Paper, Tim Hill Gallery, Birmingham, Mississippi
New York/New Works on Paper, Lizan Tops Gallery, East Hampton, New York
Chicago Art Fair with Tandem Press, Chicago, Illinois
San Francisco Art Fair with Tandem Press
Works on Paper with Burton Marinkovich Fine Art, The Armory, New York, New York

2000
The Print Fair at the Armory with Tandem Press, New York, New York
Homage to the Twentieth Century, New Orleans Center for Contemporary Arts,
New Orleans, Louisiana
Chicago Art Fair with Thomas McCormick, Chicago, Illinois
St. Louis Print Fair with Burton Marinkovich Fine Art, Washington, DC
The Baltimore Print Fair with Gary Godwin Gallery
Works on Paper with Burton Marinkovich Fine Art, The Armory, New York, New York

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Museums
Galeria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
Musee D’Art Classique, Mougins, France
Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX
Boston University Art Museum, Boston, MA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Little Rock, AK
Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX
Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ
Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
Zimmerli Art Museum, New Hyde Park, NY
Musee Kiyoharu, Shirabata, Japan

Corporate and Private Collections

Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, AK
AT&T Corporation, New York, NY
Alan Berger, NY
Barry Blitt, CT
Bashaar Al Shroogi, Dubai
Blount Corporation, Atlanta, GA
Continental Airlines, Houston, TX
Candace Bushnell, NY
Christian Levett, Mougins, France
Craig Van der Brule Design, NY
David Alan Greer, Los Angeles, CA
Dick Cavett, NY
Doug and Judy Hamilton, NY
Faegre & Benson, Des Moines, IA
Foundation Yoshii, Tokyo, Japan
Garner Tullis, New York, NY and Tuscany, Italy
Gisep Biert, President of Morgan Stanley, Zurich, Switzerland
Herbert Palmer, Los Angeles, CA
Houston Palmer, Los Angeles, CA
Houston Memorial Hospital & Medical Center, Houston, TX
Hyatt Corporation, Houston, TX
James Maher, New York, NY
Jeffrey Hoffeld & CO., New York, NY
Jennifer Luce, La Jolla, CA
Jersey City Museum, Jersey City, NJ
John McEnroe, New York, NY
John Rubenstein & Associates, Bernardsville, NJ
Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy, NY
Julie Rhodes Design, Houston, TX
Katherine Newman Design, Toronto, Canada
Kimball Museum, Chairperson, Private Collection, Fort Worth, TX
Lars Malmberg/Galerie Proarta, Zug, Switzerland
Luke Honey, de Pury and Luxembourg, London, England
Maison Klein, Curator, Jewish Museum, New York, NY
Marian Boesky, New York, NY
Margarate Naeve, Houston, TX
Maxwell Davidson, New York, NY
McDonald’s Corporation, Los Angeles, CA
Michael Hoban, London, England
Michael Liener, Aurobora Press, San Francisco, CA
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA
Nancy Nordstrom
New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Trenton, NJ
Newark Public Library, Newark, NJ
Nordstrom Coporation, Seattle, WA
Norioshi Horiuchi Collection, Seattle, WA
Noyes Museum, Oceanville, NJ
Prudential Insurance Company of America, Boston, MA
Robert Lamm, Los Angeles, CA
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Ruth O’Hara, New York, NY
Segura Press, Tempe, AZ
Scott Oki, Seattle, WA
Sheila Simonian, New York, NY
Steven’s Corporation, Los Angeles, CA
Susan Dicker / Dicker Fine Arts, Malibu, CA
Tanaka Shiroga, Tokyo, Japan
Tandem Press, University of Wisconsin
Tim Jeffries, London, England
Toby Clarke, Director of The Fine Art Society, London, England
Touche/Ross, Inc., Atlanta, GA
Transco, Inc., New York, NY
Twin Palms Press, Austin, TX
United Bank of Houston, Houston, TX
Wendy Olsoff, P.P.O.W., New York, NY
Zions Bank, Idaho & Utah

ARTICLES & REVIEWS

“Still” Clifford Still Documentary, Interview with Gary Komarin, Amie Knox and Chad Herschberger, 2011
Dining Rooms by the AD 100, Architectural Digest, February 2015
Cover Story: The Art Issue, CT Cottages & Gardens, November 2014
Art in America, May 2008
King, Sarah S., Art in America, July 2003
Brandenberg, Andreas, Zuger Presse, ‘Complex Paintings from Overseas’, Galerie ProArta, 2002
Taylor, Art, ‘Komarin at Lizan Tops’, East hampton Arts, New York, 2002
Schwabsky, Barry, ‘Paintings do the Talking Without Too Many Specifics’, The New York Times, 2000
Grayson, Clive, ‘Gary Komarin at Susan Conway’, The Washington Post, 1995
Waddington, Chris, ‘Subjects Simple but Art Deceptively Sophisticated’, The New Orleans Lagniappe, 1996
Langdon, Davis, ‘French Wig in East Hampton’, Hamptons Gazette, 1998
Foxworth, Janet, ‘Gary Komarin’s The Naming of John Dreamer’, The Atlanta Journal, 1997
Reed, Vincent, ‘Komarin Explores the Painterly’, at Klarfeld Perry Arts Magazine, 1993
Lloyd, Amy, ‘Gary Komarin Shows New Expressive Work at Sandler/Hudson’, Art in America, 1994
Loughery, John, ‘Komarin, The Master of the Elemental Image’ at Maxwell Davidson’, Arts Magazine, 1991
Watson, Edward, ‘Surrealist Loads Canvas’, The New Jersey Star Ledger 1989
Russell, John, ‘The Dog Days of August’, The New York Times, 1987
Zimmer, William, ‘Something-But What?’, The New York Times, 1985
Zimmer, William, ‘A Rich Array…From Newburgh to Newark’, The New York Times, 1985
Everingham, Carol, ‘A Comical View of the American Dream’, The Houston Post, 1982.
Perry, Paloma, ‘Stories in Paint’, The Atlanta Journal, 1981
Kutner Janet, ‘Komarin Shows Strong Work’, The Dallas Morning News, 1981
Baker, Ralph, ‘Komarin Paintings and Works on Paper’, the Museum of Art at The University of Oregon, Eugene, catalog essay 1980
Parks, Addison, ‘Gary Komarin New Work at Maxwell Davidson’, Arts Magazine, 1979