Andrew Gbur

Using hewn cultural samples—from early-20th-century lithographs to Peter Pan—Gbur is an unreliable tour guide through a redundant, feverish daydream— a successful attempt at what can only be called “pop- intimacy”. Vivid shapes adorn a plain surface like jewels in a window, and the accumulations always pose risk—a rakish smile. Each of these paintings within the exhibition suggests a direction to pursue: unlike guideposts on a trail leading the traveler, Gbur’s paintings accumulate to suggest a mental pathway, or a phrase. A painting is a careful amassing of jagged shapes, but these shapes are yielding, soft, and—with an active viewer—easily dissolved into a solution of fragmented language and collective memory.

-Todd von Ammon

Andrew Gbur (b.1984) is an American artist living in Pennsylvania. He has been in group shows at: MoMA PS1, New York, Mallorca Landings, Spain, Know More Games, New York, Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and has had solo shows at Eleven Rivington, New York, and most recently at The Still House Group, New York. He is a graduate of Yale University, and an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome.