Aaron Gilbert at Chris Sharp Gallery

Artist: Aaron Gilbert

Exhibition title: The door to the other world is always open

Venue: Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, US

Date: December 11, 2021 – January 22, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Los Angeles and New York-based artist Aaron Gilbert.

Known for his depictions of complex familial and romantic interactions as well as unique individuals in precarious social and economic situations, Aaron Gilbert paints from his own personal experience, an abiding interest in story telling, and a deep relationship with art history. The work is as influenced by writers such as Toni Morrison and Jorge Luis Borges as it is by the technique and narrative capacity of renaissance painting, the muralism of Diego Rivera, and Mexican retablo painting. What he does is rooted in a commitment to portraying his milieu as well as a quest to locate something which approximates the transcendent and redemptive in the everyday.

For his exhibition at Chris Sharp Gallery, Gilbert has pushed his work to a new level. The show is dominated by a monumental painting of a mother and son navigating love, loss, and uncertainty in a world that remains forever precarious. What is it to be 23, brilliant and scarred? Bound to histories that continually push you to the edges of capitalism. A shining star steps down from the RV that is his home to the pavement of Washington Blvd. Can we save those who have been sent here to save us?

Aaron Gilbert (b. 1979, Pennsylvania) lives and works between New York and Los Angeles. A selection of recent solo and two-person exhibitions includes: (2021) 1981–2001, Martin Wong / Aaron Gilbert, P·P·O·W, New York; (2019) Solo Booth with Lulu, NADA, Miami; and Psychic Novellas, Lyles & King, New York, NY. Recent and forthcoming group exhibitions include: (2021), Picturing Motherhood Now: Images of a New Era, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (forthcoming); Any distance between us, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience and Resistance in the Art of Our Time, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, NY, the Brooklyn Museum, NY, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY and the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio. In 2022, he will have a solo exhibition at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, Italy.