G ARY KO M A RI N
The Disappointed Mistress no.24, 80 x 66�
The First Green Rushing no.7, 60 x 48�
Aruba, 102 x 96”
Aruba, 102 x 96�, detail
Big Pink, Lilly Pond Lane
Bishop’s Gate, 80 x 66”
A Suite of Blue Sea, Salina, 60 x 48”
A Suite of Blue Sea, Alden Road, 60 x 48”
Ipso Facto in Orange with Black, 68 x 80�
Swimming Pink, 72 x 56�
Don’t Tell Lizze Borden, 72 x 60”
“Komarin gets paintings that vibrate with historical memory, echoing such things such as Matisse’s driest most empty pictures, Robert Motherwell’s spare abstractions of the 1970’s, or the early New Mexico and Berkeley paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.” Kenneth Baker San Francisco 2007
Yarrow, 72 x 48”
Chiesana, 44 x 46�
Chiesana, 44 x 46�, detail
Incident at Osbourne Lane
Rue Madame in Red, Hakodate, 72 x 60�
That She Had Wanted, 80 x 66�
Wide Water, Lantana, 72 x 120�
Big Pink, Eleuthera, 74 x 70�
The Vicar’s Wife, 72 x 66”
The First Green Rushing, Georgica, 72 x 60�
Via Ferrata, 80 x 66�
A Suite of Blue Sea, Putney Road, 84 x 64”
“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
Rue Madame in Red, Bogota, 72 x 60�
Big Pink, Peter’s Pond, 72 x 48”
Cap Ferat, 80 x 56�
Condor, 48 x 62�
She Don’t Get the Blues in the Blue Room
The Ballad of Billy Ball, 72 x 48�
In the French Hotel, 44 x 48�
Farmer’s Logic, 44 x 48”
Palo Alto, 74 x 62�
Matador, 80 x 66�
Blooblue, 50 x 48”
“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 designo and colore and works on the canvas directly.� Joan Waltemath The Fine Art Society London 2006
Swiss Positions, 72 x 48�
Wide Water, 80 x 90�
Shroedinger’s Cat, 60 x 48”
A Suite of Blue Sea, 60 x 48”
A Wilder Blue, 60 x 69�
Rue Madame in Red, Lyons, 60 x 48�
Goodly Drawn in Green with Pink, 48 x 50�
Big Pink, Aix en Provence, 72 x 48�
Big Pink, Aix en Provence, 72 x 48�, detail
A Suite of Blue Sea, Salina, 60 x 48”
Lilly Pond Lane, 72 x 48�
“Komarin is a grand simplifier, taking economy of means to its ultimate pitch in images as rawly elegant as the green-striped nose in Matisse’s portrait of his wife, as provocatively deadpan as the cartoonish Klan figures in Guston’s late work.” Chris Waddington New Orleans 2004
A Suite of Blue Sea, Morandi, 60 x 48�
A Suite of Blue Sea, Sonora, 60 x 48”
The Disappointed Mistress no.22, 72 x 48�
A Suite of Blue Sea, Juniper, 60 x 48”
A Suite of Blue Sea, Romulus, 75 x 66”
A Suite of Blue Sea, Zug, 62 x 50”
A Suite of Blue Sea, Altimera
Jango, 72 x 68�
The Disappointed Mistress, 72 x 60�
Marrakech, 44 x 48�
The Disappointed Mistress no.24, 80 x 66�, detail
“First, the canvas is placed flat on the studio floor. Working with long handled brushes, I move around quickly losing sight of top and bottom. North, South, East and West. One hopes to get lost in the painting, and yet to maintain enough hold on unfolding visual events to not lose that which is worth saving. Over-painting is not desirable. One learns when to stop, when to leave the room. The forms in the painting are pulled from the subconscious, and must travel a while to find their position on the canvas. A well painted form in the wrong location is useless.� Gary Komarin Roxbury, CT 2015
Traylor Guston Basquiat Komarin Art Historical Recreation of New York Exhibition 1996 Catalog essay by curator of Contemporary Arts in Phoenix Art Museum: Phoenix, AZ
Philip Guston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, & Gary Komarin Art Historical Recreation of New York Exhibition, 1996
Philip Guston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, & Gary Komarin Art Historical Recreation of New York Exhibition, 1996
Materials used include the following: waterbased enamel paint, charcoal, oil crayon, pencil and spackle.
Born in New York City, the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer, Gary Komarin is a risk taker in contemporary painterly abstraction. Komarin’s stalwart images have an epic quality that grip 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 been called a “painter’s painter.” His status in this regard is based on the authenticity of his work, its deep connection to the tradition of modern painting as well as its sustained individuality as an utterly personal voice. Like many of the best artists of his generation, he is indebted to the New York School, especially his mentor Philip Guston with whom he studied at Boston University where he was awarded a Graduate Teaching Fellowship. Komarin has been particularly successful at filtering these influences throughout his own potent iconography. Guston’s influence is evident in Komarin’s merger of drawing and painting, often breaking the picture plane of his rich and elegantly composed color fields with an assortment of private iconic cake and vessel-like objects. Preferring non-art industrial canvas tarps and drop cloths, Komarin eschews traditional painting media and materials. He builds layered surfaces with latex house paint in a thinned out sluice mixed with spackle and water. The house paint offers hybrid colors that seem slightly ‘off ’ and the spackle creates a beautifully matte surface. Using color energetically, the quick-drying materials allow him to paint with a sense of urgency, which mirrors the tension created by conflicting renderings of the spontaneous and the deliberate. The conscious and the unconscious or the strange and familiar. The resulting image is one that appears familiar but resists recognition.
Komarin lives in the rural hills of Litchfield County, Connecticut.