The work presented in Collage / Painting in November 2011 incorporates Bart Gulley’s life-long interest in three traditions: fine art, classic American commercial graphics and design, and architecture. For much of his career as a painter, Bart saw these traditions as being opposed, but he’s now drawing from across these disciplines to extend the American vernacular.

Much of the work shown is collage, a medium that enables Bart to quickly create unexpected compositions characterized by strong contrasts and abrupt juxtapositions of shape, scale and material. He says, “Chance plays a major role in how I make each work. I try to make new discoveries without predetermined outcomes. I lose one type of imagery and find another – one that surprises me and enables me to wed intuited sensation to analytical intention.”

Bart notes that an underlying consistency underpins all his work, whatever the medium. “I’m interested in how relationships get set up and the language that’s created in the interaction between process and intent. The final work is self-contained, in that all the parts relate to and act on one another. My primary purpose is to make abstract works that resemble the concrete – that have an essential physical force. It is the unexpected element, the surprise that I look for that tells me when they are done.”

Critic Dominique Nahas says:

“Gulley’s attention to the phenomenal and the analytical permeates his thought and process, and emerges as one of his signature aesthetic strategies. By uncovering structural relationships between oppositional qualities that are felt simultaneously, he creates internal landscapes and geometries that derive from the real, but rely upon multiple viewpoints ... There is nothing casual in Gulley’s work; his paintings make manifest a stringent mindfulness in which fastidious buoyancy, unexpected flexibility and lightness of being become imminent.”

Bart Gulley has exhibited throughout the US. He has received grants from Skowhegan, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The Millay Colony for the Arts. In spring 2011 Bart showed 40 works with the sculpture of Stanley Boxer at the Anderson Center for the Arts in Oneonta, NY. In summer 2011 he exhibited at the Albany Institute of History and Art in “Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region”. In November and December he has a solo exhibition of work, From Image to Object: Painting to Collage at DHR International, One Newark Center in Newark, NJ and is in the group show Black and White: Extreme Value at the New York Institute of Technology Gallery 61 in New York City. He has a two-person show at Architecture for Art in Hillsdale, NY through December 11. www.architectureforart.com

Bart has a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Queens College, NY. He taught painting and drawing at the Parsons School of Design from 1990 to 1995. He now teaches privately in his restored barn/studio in Chatham, NY.