A master of post-painterly abstraction, Gary 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. His style, a merger of painting and drawing, pays tribute to his mentor, Philip Guston. Komarin’s Cakes break the picture plane of his rich and elegantly composed color fields.
Born in New York City, the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer, Gary Komarin absorbed the visual cacophony of sidewalks, brick, sandstone, gravel and the myriad qualities of rough surfaces that were alternately hard, hot, hazardous or cold to the touch–but nothing like grass. The juxtaposition of new and old asphalt patched here and there left indelible impressions. The artist remembers his mother baking cakes throughout his childhood, and doodling cake-like stacks of round discs in his classroom notebooks. Studying under Philip Guston at Boston University, he
was awarded a Graduate Teaching Fellowship.
