Aaron Gilbert at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

This Friday, June 17, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis will open a show of two new epically scaled paintings by Aaron Gilbert. Coming from a long line of antecedents, Gilbert is a painter of our new unrelenting modern life, as lived by those at the margins. He is a painter of the mystical and the ordinary, of the spiritual hidden inside the everyday. His subjects possess a strength and resilient grace under pressure.

“The bodies I depict are under the weight of capitalism. I want that force to be very present. I want it to be as dominant in the work as it is in our lives. You have the pres- ence of these forces but then I’m interested in finding where we can access the power that can circumvent the rules of the game.”

“The sacred is what I’m invested in. Deciphering how we access a power that transcends all the material structure of this world. I would say that I operate on the idea that none of us know how powerful we are. None of us know what we’re capable of doing or why we’re here and, to me, the most interesting thing in being alive is trying to decipher that and unlock it and be a transformative force in the world.”

“I like the moments in painting history that live on a bridge between two ways of think- ing, there’s these breaks of logic between Giotto for example and then Trecento, Quat- trocento. Like Fra Angelico, you’re still in this world of magic, but then you’re also half- way into this world of logic and reason.”

Born in 1979, Aaron Gilbert is a 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award recipient and was named a Young American Painter of Distinction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010. Gilbert has exhibited paintings at PPOW Gallery, Lyles and King, Lulu, Deitch Projects, and the Brooklyn Museum. His work is currently in the permanent col- lections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Mu- seum of Art. Gilbert holds an MFA in painting from Yale and a BFA in painting from RISD.

Installation view, Aaron Gilbert, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome. Photo: Daniele Molajoli

Installation view, Aaron Gilbert, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Rome. Photo: Daniele Molajoli