Acclaimed Artist Gary Komarin Unveils Cake Paintings at MARCH

Gary Komarin

 

MARCH in San Francisco is currently presenting Cake Paintings, an exhibition featuring works on paper by Gary Komarin.  The exhibition opened on September 27.

 

Inspired by his mother, a consummate baker, and his father, an architect, Komarin’s Cake Paintings series cleverly explores the intersection of the domestic with the architectural. The water-based enamel and spackle paintings are rendered on paper bags.  The reoccurring cake iconography is endlessly evocative --lending itself to many layers of interpretation and the spontaneous, bold lines, combined with the unusual media, strike a delicate balance between sophistication and simplicity. 

 

“I have long been intrigued by the way paper bags are designed and the way that they fold back into such a beautifully flat object after being so very volumetric in their ‘open’ stance,” said Komarin.   “These bags have a terrific surface on which to paint and an almost puffy physicality once paint is applied.”

 

Like many artists of his generation, Komarin is indebted to the New York School, especially his mentor Philip Guston, whom he studied with at Boston University.  Guston’s influence is evident in Komarin’s assimilation of drawing and painting. Komarin builds layered surfaces with water-based house paint in a thinned out sluice mixed with spackle and water. The paint offers hybrid colors that seem slightly ‘off’ and the spackle creates a beautiful matte surface, 

 

Komarin has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. In 1996, Komarin’s work was included in a pivotal exhibition at 41 Greene Street in New York City, along with work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston and Bill Traylor.  In 2008, he had a solo museum exhibition at the Musee Kiyoharu Shirakaba in Japan. Upcoming exhibitions include a show in Dublin, featuring works by Komarin, Robert Motherwell and Larry Poons, as well as exhibitions in Madrid, Korea and at London’s Vigo Gallery.

 

Articles and reviews of Komarin’s work have appeared in the New York Times, Art in America and Arts Magazine and his work can be found in many noted museums and collections throughout the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Denver Art Museum and, the Boston University Museum of Fine Arts.

 

Komarin lives and works in Roxbury, Connecticut.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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