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.