Richard Galling

Region: Midwest

We see and recognize color, gesture, form, and mark in painting as disseminated by art history and through the media. My work makes allusions to gestural abstraction, color field painting, romanticism, as well as other art-historical moments. Here they are reformatted.

Internally, the paintings are composed of a network of marks/ colors revealed through a layering process on transparent vinyl. The forms and marks refer to objects outside the frame, often ambiguous landscapes, foliage, and root structures. The transparent surface below exposes the wall behind, allowing the viewer’s phenomenological relationship to change as conditions of light shift throughout the day. The transparent nature of the work paired with its scale evokes the experience of a window. Additionally, as light passes through the surface and bounces off the wall, the paintings become subtly illuminated and screenlike. This indirectly acknowledges a way in which media apparatuses transmit and sometimes determine our relationship to art objects today.