WALLY GILBERT
“Broken Image”
Feb 2 to 21, 2016
Opening Reception Thursday, Feb 4, 6 to 8
Chelsea: Viridian Artists Inc. is pleased to present the exhibition “BROKEN IMAGE”, digital prints on aluminum by Wally Gilbert. The show opens February 2nd and continues through February 24, 2016. There will be an artist’s reception Thursday, February 4th, 6-8PM. In this exhibit of new “Broken Images”, Gilbert continues exploring the microcosmic possibilities of the fragment.
With 6 large 60×40 inch images, along with some 11 small 30×20 images on aluminum, the scientist that the artist is experiments with both color and the fragmentation of a building and of a tree. As new & fresh as these images are, Gilbert has often referred to his images “as fragments of the whole” and that identification remains applicable to these works as well.
In The “Broken City” images one can still see the echo of the shapes of buildings and windows but the transformation is extreme. The same can be said of the “Broken Tree” which seems to implode on the surface with a burst of branches that appear to be coming from a hot core surrounded by darkness. Complex recreations of the forms and luminous color transformations abound in these works.
In the early 2000’s, Nobel Laureate Walter “Wally” Gilbert started pursuing photography on a professional level. Since then, he has had over 50 solo exhibitions around the world.
As in past exhibitions, Gilbert continues his fascination with transforming images on the computer experimenting with color and other digital effects. He loves pushing colors to their extreme and continues to do so in this new body of work, sometimes to express the psychological pain of the artistic process, sometimes exploring through color transformations, how we see objects.
In his first exhibit at Viridian in 2006, “The Norblin Project”, Gilbert explored & documented an ancient and abandoned factory in Poland. About the works in that show, Ed McCormack in Gallery & Studio said “For Gilbert, the continued exploration of the fragments of reality particularly via the computer & creating strategies to provoke accidents … inspire the search for & evolution of the next image.”
In his solo “Stillness & Motion” in 2008 the images were derived from travels. In the “Squares and Triangles” exhibit at Viridian in 2011, the critic Peter Frank said “Gilbert … systematically unfolds entirely unassuming shapes into elaborate scintillations.”
His 2013 show “New Black & White Images” exploited the play of natural light across the objects to produce haunting results without color but in his 2014 exhibition “Transformations”, his images again glowed with color driven to full saturation creating new and strange interactions, until they became – in the artist’s words – “abstract meditations”.
In his previous career as scientist, Gilbert was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1980 for his landmark work in DNA gene sequencing. As a scientist, he examined the world in its smallest details, but now through his photography, he makes the small huge to reveal the beauty that he sees in the world around us.