Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Ted Gahl: Paintings. Ted Gahl’s recent paintings – created before and during his quarantine – capture loneliness, longing, and the granularity of the present moment. Abstracted figures and household objects are confined in compositions of cultural quarrel, but uplifted through the artist’s lively exploration of color via energetic brushwork.
In speaking about his process, Gahl noted: “I have always been interested in how imagery begins to shift. You work with it enough, and you see it transform into different formats that lead you into a new visual narrative.” Gahl paints from symbolic references such as mosquitoes, a figure waiting at a train station, tables, chairs, hammers, and nails. In the artist’s 2020 Quarrel Painting, a dark red hammer and a blue nail confront each other over a harsh, symmetrical compositional divide, perhaps conjoined by door hinges, as a rich black encroaches on the hammer’s red atmosphere. Here, the hammer and nail oppose one another in a way that captures America’s current cultural schism.
This exhibition is open by appointment only.
