Public is pleased to present Glass Cannon, the first UK solo exhibition by New York based artist Alex Gibson, whose paintings on panel exercise a type of compositional mapping, balancing the instantaneously recognisable with the abstraction of accumulation. Gibson’s compositions puzzle together scattered annotations with episodic sequences that spill onto the surface and sink beneath a confluence of superimposed characters. Across twelve new works, the artist slips between gesture, symbol and image, toying with our desire for narrative resolution in a game of resistance and restraint.
Making his own dry pastel chalks from pigment and marble dust, Gibson’s works read with the directness and immediacy of drawing. Effortlessly blurring the categories of visual media – compressing elements of cartoon, comics, photography, pornography, art history, and film noir – Gibson populates his works with figures in various states of ‘finish’, together coalescing into a cacophonic heap of high and low. In works such as Intimacy and Purpose Pursuing Luck (2024), the artist demonstrates the impact of juxtaposition: ‘good’ drawing with ‘bad’ drawing, vulgar with poetic, passion with ambivalence. Leaning into such stereotyped genres of visual culture, Gibson toys with deceiving clarity, only to rupture the fallacy of cohesion with persistent interruption.
Stars and scribbles recur in Clockwork (2024), fracturing densely overworked segments with teasingly simplistic doodles and linework. Clouds of blue and black shift like an atmospheric haze, dissolving and resurfacing competing areas of focus, demonstrating the artist’s sensitivity to compositional balance and the viewer’s vulnerability to obvious seductions and manufactured distractions. Such spatial tension is only achieved through a high level of mathematical precision and technical certainty, though Gibson manages to maintain an outwardly crude and deceptively messy state, producing a visual overload that refuses singularity.
Through a distinctive push and pull of line and form, Gibson articulates how we operate within a given visual economy. It is as much a critique of representation as it is a critique of interpretation, viewer bias and visual complacency. In Gibson’s works, readability is traded for abundance, and accumulation becomes the form itself. Provisional relationships between object and form continually shift, producing a phantasmagoria that operates under its own relational logic. Our desire for cohesion, narrative resolution, and the immediately-legible leaves us vulnerable to miss, mistake, and misidentify – though only through our perpetual failure does the composition open and emerge.
Alex Gibson (b. 1991, Northampton, MA) lives and works in New York, USA. He received an MFA from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2019) and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY (2013). Recent solo exhibitions include Slippery Slope, Someday, New York (2023) and Super Darling, M+B, Los Angeles (2022).
