Gaylen Gerber
Gaylen Gerber (born June 8, 1955, McAllen, Texas, U.S.) is an American artist and educator known primarily for his gray monochrome paintings, which he titled Backdrop or Support. Often foregrounding the works of other artists with his own painted backgrounds, he challenged viewer perceptions of art’s context and neutrality.
Gerber studied at the State University of New York, Brockport (B.S., 1977), the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in Manhattan, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (M.F.A., 1980), where he taught since 1987. In the early 1980s he created gray monochromatic paintings with subtle shifts in the painted surface that made the iconography difficult to see without repeated viewing from multiple positions. These early works reveal his interest in how context affects perception.
After a decade of making art within a limited set of parameters such as colour, size, and reference, Gerber branched out and increasingly emphasized installation strategies. For his exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago (1992), he installed a temporary wall spanning the width of the gallery and hung his paintings in a continuous row, barring access to most of the exhibition space. Both the promenade of paintings and the gallery’s architecture thereby played roles in the overall art experience, and visitors were forced to acknowledge the influence of these limitations on any interpretation—or even viewing—of the work.
Gerber incorporated the art of other artists into his work both to reveal the complexities of authorship and to explore the shared attributes of distinct artists and their art practices. For example, at the exhibition Documenta IX (1992) in Kassel, Germany, he installed his paintings in a contiguous line between the painted panels of the Swiss artist Adrian Schiess, which were at one end of the wall, and the paintings of the German artist Gerhard Richter, which occupied the other end. By using his own works as a line of demarcation, Gerber established equivalencies between two distinct artists.
Other international exhibitions followed. In a cooperative exhibition for the inauguration of the MUDAM Luxembourg (Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art) (2006), Gerber again situated his work in relation to the works of other artists, including American post-conceptualist Stephen Prina (whose work includes paintings, sculpture, photography, video, and performance art), American text-based conceptualist Kay Rosen (who explores the verbal and visual structures of words), and Swiss text-based conceptualist Rémy Zaugg (who also explored words and their context and presentation). Gerber’s gray paintings, associated with institutional neutrality, integrated cohesively with the other diverse works. By becoming part of the background or architecture (indeed, these paintings were often titled Backdrop), Gerber’s works subtly foregrounded the other artists’ paintings while drawing viewers’ attention toward the physical context of the exhibition.
In an exhibition at Kunstverein Ruhr in Essen, Germany (2010), Gerber continued to explore the role of a modified exhibition space in the interpretation of art. Adding a new wall with a large opening, he divided the gallery into two spaces and installed orange-tinted lighting in one room and blue in the other room. He applied silver leaf to the reverse of several large pieces of coloured Plexiglas, souvenirs from another artist’s exhibition, and then placed them on walls painted in similar and contrasting hues. Everything was bathed in tinted light, suffusing colour with colour to the extent that it was uncertain whether the differences perceived were contained within the artwork, the room, or the light of the exhibition space. Characteristic of Gerber’s practice, this exhibition accentuated the conditional nature of interpretation, subsequently returning the viewer to a visceral experience that suspends easy apprehension.
In the 2010s Gerber began coating everyday objects, artworks, and artifacts with gray or white oil paint. Each work was undated and titled Support. By covering an item in paint, Gerber often succeeded in erasing the piece’s defining characteristics. For example, viewers might have recognized the shape of a smoking pipe at Gerber’s exhibition at Wallspace, New York (2013). However, without being able to see such distinguishing features as materials or markings, they probably would not have recognized the object as a 1969 smoking pipe by the Italian designer Joe Colombo. The uniformity of the titles further obscured the objects. A 19th-century copy of a stilllife by 18th-century Dutch painter Jan van Huysum in a gilt frame (exhibited at Layr, Vienna, 2020) was indistinguishable from an original artwork, a painting by another artist, or a landscape. In each case viewers had to rely on exhibition texts to understand the significance of the object. Gerber therefore considered not only how meaning is made but also how viewers are dependent on the curator or institution to understand or appreciate an object.