GARY KOMARIN

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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 through his own potent iconography.

Guston's influence is evident in Komarin's mergence 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 beautiful 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 resultant image is one that appears familiar but resists recognition. Komarin has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. In 1996, Komarin's work was included in a pivotal exhibition in New York City, along with work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston and Bill Traylor.

Gary Komarin has been honored with the Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Painting, the Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in Painting, the Elizabeth Foundation, New York Prize in Painting and the Benjamin Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design Museum, New York. Komarin's art has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world including: The Musee Kiyoharu, Japan; The Musee Mougins, France; the Katonah Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Denver Art Museum, the Museum South Texas, Corpus Christi; the Montclair Air Museum, NJ; the Zimmerli Museum, NJ; and the Arkansas Museum of Contemporary Art.