Gerald Peters Contemporary is pleased to announce its participation in Expo Chicago 2023 with a solo presentation of paintings by artist Patrick Dean Hubbell.
A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, the presentation will expand on a series Hubbell began while pursuing his MFA in 2021. Now known as his Tack Room series, the associated paintings and drawings are a montage of visual influences, spanning the genre of American West history painting with particular focus on Native American portraiture.
In the series, the artist interrogates biases about Native peoples and histories of the American West, puncturing romanticizing imagery by deconstructing it. Tack Room centers around Hubbell’s blind contour paintings, an extensive series the artist produces by consulting a well-known work of art depicting figures of the American West and then blindly outlining a rough copy of the scene on the canvas.
The resulting works reveal the clichéd cowboy hats and warbonnets of nineteenthcentury paintings produced by the likes of George Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Charles M. Russell, albeit reduced to faint yet eminently recognizable core imagery that indicates just how deeply such stereotypes have been internalized by Native and nonNative audiences alike.
The newest works of the series, produced specifically for Expo Chicago, are scaled to 5- and 7-foot-tall canvases. The dimensions recall the works of prominent Native artists like Fritz Scholder and T.C. Canon who similarly drew from clichéd source material in the production of paintings aimed at de-mythologizing portrayals of the American West and the region’s modern Indigenous inhabitants.
Accompanying the Tack Room portraits will be a selection of Hubbell’s well-known gestural abstractions. These early canvases combine gathered natural earth pigments from the Navajo Nation with synthetic oil and acrylic paint. The color intensity produced by this combination of materials supports references to the Southwestern landscape, its unique vegetation, and floral color entities.
Together, the two series reflect a synthesis of Hubbell’s experience growing up on his family’s Navajo Nation farmland, deep connections to his Diné heritage, and the struggles he has faced as a Native artist in the contemporary art world.
Waiting For Western Art To Listen, 2022
oil, oil stick on canvas
40 x 30 inches
$8,000
Not Your Reference: American Western Art, 2023
oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
60 x 48 inches
$15,000
Disrupting The Gaze of American Western Art, 2023 oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
84 x 72 inches
$25,000
The Sun Will Set On the Art of The American West One Day, 2023
oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
84 x 72 inches
$25,000
American Western Art: It’s Your Time To Be Let Out To Pasture, 2023 oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
84 x 72 inches
$15,000
Microcosmic Meditation, 2016 oil, natural earth pigment on canvas 84 x 72 inches
$18,500
Hear Us: American Western Art, 2023
oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
60 x 48 inches
$15,000
Blind Contour Headdress in Blue, 2022 oil, oil stick on canvas 40 x 30 inches
$8,000
The Essence of Your Natural Process, 2016 oil, natural earth pigment on canvas
84 x 72 inches
SOLD
Do I Really Have To Sit For This Portrait?, 2022 oil, oil stick on canvas
48 x 36 inches
$10,000
One Day Your Western Art Collection Will See Us, 2023 oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
84 x 72 inches
$25,000
$30,000
Waiting For A New Day in American Western Art, 2023
oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
60 x 48 inches
$15,000
The Wind Keeps Me In Balance, 2017 oil, natural earth pigment on canvas
84 x 72 inches
$18,500
Waiting
$25,000
For The Sun to Set on the American West, 2023 oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
84 x 72 inches
Not Your Subject: American Western Art, 2023 oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
60 x 48 inches
$15,000
We Are More Than Just A Relic for Western Art, We Are Here, 2023 oil, oil stick, charcoal on canvas
84 x 72 inches
$25,000
Waiting To Be Let Free From The Gaze, 2022 oil, oil stick on canvas
60 x 48 inches
$15,000
