The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Hope Gangloff: Love Letters exhibition brochure

Gangloff

Hope Gangloff: Love Letters January 30 to June 5, 2011 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Hope Gangloff: Love Letters

This first solo museum exhibition of the work of New York City-based artist Hope Gangloff includes a site-specific mural, her most recent large-scale paintings, and a survey of past works.

Hope was born in Amityville, New York, in 1974. When she was in high school, her father, who worked for UPS, transformed the upper level of the family barn into a studio for her. He visited often, asking if she was done with the painting she was working on. She remembers those days fondly; she has a photo of herself with her Dad in her current studio—and he continues to ask her if she is done with her paintings.

Hope studied fine art at Cooper Union in New York and for many years has made her living by doing illustrations for renowned publications such as The New York Times and The New Yorker. After college she also worked in a bronze foundry for seven years. In 2001, she created a large-scale mural in New York City and this prompted her to explore work on a larger scale. In 2006, gallerist Susan Inglett asked Hope if she would open the gallery’s new space with a solo exhibition of her work. Since then, the artist has had a series of projects, residencies, and exhibitions that have kept her busy painting and away from illustration. One of those projects is this exhibition at The Aldrich, for which she has made new work and a mural.

Tattoo Everything, 2007 Collection of Michael K. Densen

Love Letters, the title of this exhibition, was suggested by Hope. This title is not a surprise, since she constantly and emphatically states, with admirable ease, that she loves her friends, her husband, her dog, and nature. I will venture to say that she loves painting just as much and that her canvases bring all those irrepressible love affairs together. Talking with her about current or future paintings is like talking about decadent desserts: you can feel the tinge of anticipation, with a little hint of anxiety and definitive

Van at Night, 2008 Collection of Raymond Foye

sensuality, as well as the sensation of some sort of guilty pleasure. The mouth waters when envisioning those sensuous lines and intense colors, the patterns and textures of the beautiful objects that surround her subjects, her friends’ tactile features that ultimately reveal very intimate traits like tattoos, chewed nail polish, bags under the eyes, exposed thighs, chests, and breasts.

Hope portrays her closest friends from life and from intimate photographs she takes while on vacation, at dinner, or hanging out at their houses or studios. Yet, the actual painting starts once she has drawn the one feature she settles on as particularly defining her subject. “I nailed her nose” or “I finally got his hand right” is the first step.

From there, she uses a three-foot stick with a brush tied to one end, so that it is from afar that she draws the outlines of the character and a couple of objects that help her balance the focal points of the whole composition. Here, she may redraw that hand, the outer line of the body, or the head—possibly more than a couple of times. This is a long process, as for her it is more important to find this particular balance than to render the perspective or body proportions accurately. “It has to look right, but it doesn’t have to be right; it has to feel good,” she explains.1 And this “feel good” quality of her paintings is where she finds she has the most fun: “You get it to be any way you want it to be!” Freedom of expression does feel good.

Being visually accurate or realistic is not her interest. Some elements of the composition do come from photographs, but mostly she just gets a feeling from them. Photographs, to her mind, show some features distorted, so in the end they are not particularly helpful. It is her take that in order to paint an arm that is, let’s say, behind the subject, you have to know what an arm looks like and not just paint what is in the photo. And you also need to feel and know your subject; the latter is very important. Just recently, a friend of Hope asked the artist to paint her, “because she does not know what she looks like, so she wanted me to tell her.”

Sasha, 2006 Collection of Victor Masnyj

Confronted by a similar era of instability, Hope’s work presents love letters of incredible compassion to her comparably estranged friends. An uncontrollable will to shape a roster of intense emotions on a canvas is her way of processing and understanding the world. We get the feeling that Hope has to make these paintings. This brings to mind the “Letters to a Woman Painter” that German expressionist painter Max Beckmann2 wrote in 1948. Parts of that letter may well have been addressed to Hope: “The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies 3 outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves,” wrote Beckmann, and, he added, “learn the forms of nature by heart so you can use them like the musical notes of a composition. That’s what these forms are for .... We will enjoy ourselves with the forms that are given us: a human face, a hand, the breast of a woman or the body of a man, a glad or sorrowful expression …. This alone is enough to make us forget the grief of the world, or to give it form. In any case, the will to form carries in itself one part of the salvation for which you are seeking. The way is hard and the goal is unattainable, but it is a way.” 4

Steam Room, 2010 Collection of John Kirkendoll

Hope’s paintings not only bring together her love for the visual world and her love for the friends she depicts, they provide a glance into her spirit as well. The work amplifies her own feelings about her subjects and their situations, more than those of the subjects themselves—as in the work of Edward Hopper, who, like Hope, was also an illustrator. Hopper’s unassuming everyday scenes and objects ultimately presented the American experience, an existential one manifested through subjects in isolation and inwardness. Their prevailing absorption, estrangement, and silence presented an America of incertitude.

For Beckmann, paintings of this sort are a way to salvation. They are the realm where we seek our souls: “The visible world in combination with our inner selves provides the realm where we may seek infinitely for the individuality of our own souls.” 5 Perhaps for Hope these paintings are amorous gateways to her and her beloveds’ souls; could these paintings be their salvation and their comfort?

Lounging, relaxed—or even passed out—the artist paints her friends mainly in selfengrossed or aloof demeanors. They may in reality be happy, hyper, uptight, insecure or sad, and yet these canvases are not only forgiving—as is true love—they are close and personal. We are able to scrutinize these subjects while they are perhaps unaware of our intrusion, providing us with the guilty pleasure of a voyeuristic gaze. They are so close that Hope mentions she struggles to fit an entire figure into her canvases, which results in her often stopping at the ankles. My guess is that if you are not able to see someone’s ankles, you are way too near to that person, which only reaffirms the painting’s intimate nature. This also indicates that the scale of her characters, and some canvases, is larger than life, and yet it does not feel monumental. On the contrary, you are somehow enveloped and involved in an aura of affection and familiarity.

We are not sure if Hope’s friends are all incredibly good looking, but she does portray them as such. They bear seductive pale faces and flesh, dramatized by sparse and contrasting reds, and expressive outlines that make them appealing and even carnal.

Hope’s line drawings—much like those of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, an artist of the Art Nouveau era whom she admires—do not shy away from eroticism and a little decadence. And her visibly busy brush strokes, frenzied ink mark making, and broad and gestural lines also bring to mind a sort of formal expressionism, comparable to that of Vincent van Gogh and Egon Schiele, whose works are known for their profound emotional impact and vehement experience of reality. Similar sensations are present in her work, in addition to a sense of angst and defiance translated into suggestive scenes. Hope entices one to touch; her depictions provoke a desire to be part of that private affair: I want to wake him up, pet his dogs, grab the steering wheel while he checks his cell, help him light a cigarette, fill up her glass, brush her hair away from face and shoulders, and so on.

As much as we are involved in these scenes, we are also aware that the subjects are moody and psychologically charged. Their shared indifference and evident fatigue seems to be a strategy for distancing themselves from a rough, uncertain reality. Their despair is paradoxically enhanced by their lavish, splendid, and self-indulgent surroundings. Hope meticulously renders wallpaper, tiles, discarded cans, furniture and fabric patterns, lamps, and hats. These backgrounds, packed with detail and personality, are almost animated, and sometimes become foreground instead of background and as important as the person portrayed. They not only provide for a painting full of detail, they contribute several focal points, scattered and spread all over the work, making it an intense overall composition, as opposed to being concentrated on one single expression.

These objects also serve as an excuse to revisit patterns, lines, colors, even drawings or paintings by someone else. “I have forgotten how awesome stripe patterns are,” she says while she fondles some old book covers and adds, “We do not have any more good covers” and “I like painting him in his studio because I get to paint one of his monochrome paintings as well.”

Beauty and the Beasts, 2009 Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York

The settings also fulfill her fantasies. “In this painting, she needs to look like she is crammed into an igloo, frantically writing with a fire in front of her, surrounded only by ice and fire, which is my own personal fantasy,” she admits. Curiously enough, Beckmann referred to the same materials, “The cold ice burns exactly like the hot 6 fire.” He used this sentence to express the feeling of glory, of intoxication by beauty (passion/fire), and knowledge (reason/ice). Hope’s surroundings could also be understood as metaphors, even though they are somewhat idiosyncratic, like the work of Austrian Secession painter Gustav Klimt. Klimt’s work is known for presenting his subjects surrounded by a thick veil of ornamentation, both abstract and expressionistic, that charges the whole canvas with an overall powerful tension. Klimt is also well 7 known for his depiction of the prototypical contemporary beauty of his time. Similarly, Hope’s carefree beauties are contemporary/hip and presented in a fully charged

The Trouble with Paradise, 2009 Collection of Brad and Tymberly Harris

environment. They bring to mind a recent past era, where most people knew the kind of abundance which is now in decline. Hope’s paintings are, like Klimt’s, the beautified expression of an era.

Indeed, the accumulation of Hope’s inmost and specific portraits ultimately conveys the feeling of a whole generation of young adults trying to cope with our current “Great Recession.” Her paintings and drawings make us feel her and her subjects and feel for them as well, since they exude an air of existentialism. They make us feel for ourselves and the period to which we belong. Hope’s work is the expressive register of our everyday nuances, the pleasure we find in the smallest things, as well as the pleasure we find in both our and her compassion for others. In her own way, she documents our times by making permanent fixtures of her friends with all their pros and cons. In the midst of the struggles of our current everyday lives, Hope finds both beauty and passion.

Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator 1. All quotes come from a conversation with the author in Hope’s studio on October 20, 2010.

2. Max Beckmann’s paintings are famous for their intensity. In his self-portraits, he distorted the figure and its surrounding space in order to present an altered vision of himself and humanity, a result of his traumatic experiences in World War II. Ultimately, his search was aimed at depicting the spiritual dimension of those he portrayed.

3. Max Beckmann, “Letters to a Woman Painter” (1948), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press), 1996, p. 180.

4. Beckmann, p. 182–83.

5. Beckmann, p. 180.

6. Beckmann, p. 182.

7. Jane Kallir, Gustav Klimt: 25 Masterworks (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.), 1989.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877 Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees Mark L. Goldstein, Chairman; A. Peter Sallick, Vice-Chairman; John Tremaine, Treasurer/Secretary; Annadurai Amirthalingam; Richard Anderson; William Burback; Eric G. Diefenbach; Chris Doyle; Linda M. Dugan; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Meagan Julian; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Donald Opatrny; Gregory Peterson; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus.

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

This brochure was made possible by the generous support of Cynthia and Stuart Smith.

Concept /Design: www.lookinglately.com

Sara VanDerBeek in Her Bath Closet, 2010 Collection of Cynthia and Stuart Smith

look. look again.