Booked a year in advance, Black Book Gallery opened two new exhibits on April 11: Max Kauffman and Brian Robertson in Meta Structures and Greg Gossel in Fender Bender.
One can expect well-known, well-marketed and world-renowned artists at a large, also well-known museum or art gallery. As most emerging artists now know, they must also learn a set of self-promoting skills if they want to receive any substantial recognition in the art world. While the artists currently displaying their work at the Black Book Gallery aren’t exactly emerging, they maintain a strong personal relationship with Black Book that transformed the opening of the dual exhibits into a friendly hangout—an experience one doesn’t always find at a larger-scale opening.
Max Kauffman and Brian Robertson
Meta Structures
Main Gallery
“Meta,” referring to “beyond” or “extra,” is the reality constructed in Kauffman’s and Robertson’s work. Both artists combine elements of abstraction and structure to create a mixed sense of what is familiar and unfamiliar.
“My recent work has been delving into architecture: how house versus home affects us, how comfort—inherent from inanimate objects and places we inhabit—shapes us,” said Kauffman to the gallery in an interview.
Upon immediately looking at his work, I was drawn to the most recognizable elements: a house, platform or window. But as my eyes adjusted to the chaotic scene and looked beyond the commonplace structures, more intricate pockets of colors, dots, patterns and lines began to unfold. What first appeared as one solid structure soon unraveled into individual rabbit holes and I often found myself inches from the painting, scanning slowly from side to side as I got lost in every last detail.
Robertson’s work appears to be more precise and clean in relation to the elements he manipulates. Abstract and colorful patterns are often placed into perfectly lined boxes that give objects an abstract feel. The titles of his paintings, such as “Home Reception Unit” or “L.A. Rover,” use trigger words we recognize yet the image itself looks technologically enhanced.
Greg Gossel
Fender Bender
Project Room
Greg Gossel is a collector of comics. “I found new appreciation for the exaggerated facial expressions and drawings of both comics and cartoons as I grew older,” he said to me at the gallery. Scenes from the Jetsons and images from Archie Comics appear in his collaged artwork along with harsher images of police brutality. “They’re [his work] very colorful so they come off as really inviting at first but as you look closer, the different layers reveal a larger narrative,” he continued. Through trial and error, Gossel layers, combines and collages several pieces to see what emerges from these essentially random accidents.
The three artists—completely different in mediums and color tones—evoke a similar understanding that reality is more than the simple definitions and structures we place it in and that nothing is as it first appears nor should anything be taken at face value. The exhibits will only be running until May 3 and are free to the public.
