Gaylen Gerber: Supports

The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to present the first survey of Gaylen Gerber’s Supports, an ongoing series in which the artist intervenes upon collected artifacts. Offering pause for reflection on a shared history, Gerber’s art is indebted to both the monochrome and the readymade. Supports features objects of diverse origin, each painted uniformly in institutional gray or white. Whether a mirror from the Kennedy winter White House, a Brazilian milagre, or a vintage coke bottle, each is undated and bears the title Support. Gerber’s attentive, almost “reverential” brushstrokes, as Roberta Smith has described them in the New York Times, render the objects visible in a new way.

For his exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago, Gerber places the works in the gallery to suggest a cohesive visual field, yet at the same time, he differentiates each object through the regularity of its painted surface. The resulting installation encourages recognition of a shared reality, even as it enables diverse emotional responses to individual Supports, ranging from delight to distress