Gary Komarin

Gary Komarin (born 1951) is an American artist. Born in New York City, Komarin is the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer. Like many of the best artists of his generation he is indebted to the New York School, especially his mentor Philip Guston with whom he studied at Boston University. According to a New York Times article by Barry Schwabsky, “Guston’s lesson in cultivating the unknown has clearly stuck with Mr. Komarin. And on a more superficial level, the teacher’s peculiar sense of form can also still be traced in his former student’s work – in the way Mr. Komarin’s bulbous forms can seem to echo, in an abstract way, the cigars, cyclopean heads and naked light bulbs in Guston’s paintings.”

Contents

• Music for gary komarin
• Artist gary komarin feature in documentary still
• References

Komarin prefers non-art industrial canvas tarps and drop cloths as opposed to traditional painting media and materials. He builds layered surfaces with latex house paint mixed with spackle and water. The house paint offers hybrid colors that seem slightly ‘off’ and the spackle creates a beautiful matte surface. Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that “from these seemingly unlovely methods Komarin gets paintings that vibrate with historical memory, echoing such things as Matisse’s driest most empty pictures, Robert Motherwell’s spare abstractions of the 1970’s, or the early New Mexico and Berkely paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.” Komarin's Cake paintings, which he has been painting since 1996 when he first showed them in New York, were written about by Sarah King for Art in America, who wrote, "Komarin’s most successful works are serial such as Pop Art-like cake images, in which versions of a crudely outlined central image are repeated against a succession of subtle lyrical backgrounds."

The chaotic surfaces of Komarin’s pieces create a vitality and tension between the spontaneous and the considered, the accidental and the consciously executed. It is the natural result of the artist’s process based on his belief that intention and control should be totally removed from the act of painting. According to Komarin, the best paintings “paint themselves.” Using a fusion of house and oil paint, spackle, and other assorted mediums, Komarin loses himself in the act of painting, free and confident, seeing the serendipitous interaction of the conscious and unconscious.

His works are not all inherently abstract, either, in his delightful, natively drawn Cakes (painted on rough paper bags), and The French Wigs (painted on canvas), Komarin places the image front and center, akin to Joe Bradley’s “Superman.” The simplistic, yet beguiling Cakes sometimes lean like the Tower of Pisa, while dripped frosting showcases Komarin’s playful manner and charm. According to the artist, the Cakes are a marriage between the domestic and the architectural. He credits his mother’s cake baking, as well as his father’s career as an architect, as the genesis for this image.

While steeped in 20th century abstract philosophy, Komarin’s works also connect to a new type of abstraction, described as “provisional painting,” by Raphael Rubinstein, in Art in America, and “The New Casualists” by Sharon Butler, in Two Coats of Paint. The central idea describes “a calculated tentativeness,” “a concern with multiple forms of imperfection,” [focusing on] “the off kilter, the overtly off hand…” Like Komarin, they seek to get back to the process of painting itself, favoring playful, unpredictable encounters. It is obvious that this current trend is aligned with Komarin’s artistic sensibility.

Komarin has been invited to show in Dublin in a catalog exhibition titled 'States of Feeling' essay by John Daly. Works by Robert Motherwell, Gary Komarin, Sir Antony Caro and Larry Poons. Komarin has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. In 1996, Komarin’s work was included in a pivotal exhibition at 41 Greene Street in New York City, along with work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Philip Guston and Bill Traylor. In 2008, he had a solo museum exhibition at the Musee Kiyoharu Shirakaba in Japan. The exhibition and catalogue, Moon Flows Like a Willow, was orchestrated by the Yoshii Foundation in Tokyo with galleries in New York, Tokyo and Paris. Komarin was also invited to exhibit his Vessel grouping on paper at the privately owned Musee Mougins in Mougins, France. This museum is privately owned by one of Komarin’s London collectors. Komarin's work has also been including in curated group shows in New York, Dubai, and Zurich along with works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jeff Koons, Yves Klein, and Joan Miró. Komarin has also exhibited in the past decade in catalog exhibitions in New York, Bogota, Zurich, Dubai, Paris, Palm Beach, Houston, San Fransisco, Denver, Assisi and London.

Gary Komarin has been honored with the Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Painting, the Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship in Painting, the Elizabeth Foundation, New York Prize in Painting and the Benjamin Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design Museum, New York.

Articles and reviews of Komarin’s work have appeared in the New York Times, Art in America and Arts Magazine among others. His work may be found in many noted museum, corporate and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Denver Art Museum, the Museum South Texas, Corpus Christi; the Montclair Art Museum; the Newark Museum; the Zimmerli Museum; the Yoshii Foundation, Tokyo; the Arkansas Museum of Contemporary Art; Boston University Museum of Fine Arts; the Microsoft Corporation; Blount International; the United Bank of Houston; the Hyatt Corporation; AT&T and American Airlines.

In October 2016, Komarin was invited to be in a documentary film produced and directed by 60 Minutes producer Harry Moses. The documentary is titled 'The Painter's Path' with music by Django Reinhardt. This film is on Komarin's website and can be viewed on videophone as well.

Komarin lives and works in Roxbury, Connecticut and keeps a pied–à–terre in New York City.