FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Regen Projects is pleased to announce representation of New York-based artist Georgia Gardner Gray. The artist will present her first exhibition with the gallery in 2025.
Framed by complementary projects in performance and sculpture, Gardner Gray grounds her practice in painting, staging scenes of contemporary life through a lens inflected by history and a gimlet eye on the present.
Working primarily in sculpture and assemblage as a student at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Gardner Gray embraced painting after establishing herself as part of a community of artists in Berlin in 2014. Regularly composed of one or more human figures, Gardner Gray’s paintings narrate sites of connection and alienation, private vulnerability and public anonymity amid an urban melee. Recalling the vocabulary of types and characters typical of Italian Commedia dell’arte, Gardner Gray’s paintings animate a kind of street theater, orchestrating telling cues of gesture, posture, pose, and styling into stories of common concern and quotidian folly.
Interested in subcultures, fashions, and those that define them, Gardner Gray embeds her paintings with loaded symbols, part of a spirited iconography of modern life that spans her practice. Encouraged by her connection to the New Theater of Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, plays such as Concorde: Saturn Returns (2018), written with Steven Warwick, feature dramatis personae suspended between the specific and the stock, from famous to familiar. Juxtaposing Queen Elizabeth I beside characters deemed, “The Firestarter” and “Punk” (a role embodied by Gardner Gray herself), all performed alongside life-size mannequin versions of Wolfgang Tillmans, Anna Wintour, and Grace Jones, among others, seated within the skeletal silhouette of the eponymous aircraft.
As Patrick Armstrong wrote in 2019, “Georgia’s practice relishes in these oppositions—order versus disorder, abundance versus decay, beauty versus the abject, control versus anarchy. The battle between these often takes place microcosmically—in the space of one train car, one restaurant, or indeed even one mind—but implication is broad…Like on train cars, these territories are where polite society can meet its opposite, where humanity can bristle up against itself” (Patrick Armstrong, “Georgia Gardner Gray at the Downer,” published by The Downer, 2019).
The subject of an early career survey at Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany and an accompanying publication in 2018 (Georgia Gardner Gray, Mousse Publishing, 2018), Gardner Gray’s work has been featured in solo presentations at Unge Kunstneres Samfund/Kunstnernes Hus, Norway and Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany. Gardner Gray’s interdisciplinary and fluid practice embodies the emerging front of a new generation of artists reformatting the legacy of modernism for this century.
On the announcement, Shaun Caley Regen stated, "The first time I saw a painting by Georgia Gardner Gray, it was immediately arresting. It told a tale, and it was entertaining. It had a witty repartee, and a reve d’enfant sense of beauty (and horror). Neither dystopic nor naive, it set up an irreverent scenario that the best stories manage to convey. Upon meeting her and putting the person with the work, it was clear that Georgia's innate intelligence and imagination make for a brilliant palette from which to draw. I am thrilled to be working with her, and to share these exquisite paintings with our audience."
In addition to Regen Projects, the artist is represented by Croy Nielsen in Vienna and Sadie Coles HQ in London.
Georgia Gardner Gray (b. 1988, New York, NY) lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union for Science and Art, New York, NY.
Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work include Works 2015 – 2018, Kunsthalle Lingen (2018), Concorde, Unge Kunstneres Samfund/Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2017), and Precious Provincials, Kunstverein Hamburg (2017).
Gardner Gray’s work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions including Before Tomorrow, 30 Years of Astrup Fearnley Museet, Astrup Fearnley Museet (2023); Lose Enden, Kunsthalle Bern (2021); HERE HERE – DAS ICH UND ALLES ANDERE, Braunsfelder Family Collection, Cologne (2018); New Theater: Selected Plays, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015), among others.
Work by Gardner Gray is included in numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo and Kunstsammlung der Stadt Lingen.
She is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Lingen Art Prize, among others.
For all press inquiries, please contact +1 310 276 5424 or Grant Johnson at grantjohnson@regenprojects.com.
For all other inquiries, please contact Jennifer Loh, Stephanie Dudzinski, Magnus Edensvard, or Anthony Salvador at inquiries@regenprojects.com.
Image: Georgia Gardner Gray, Steam Room, 2022. Oil on canvas, 118 x 86 5/8 in (228.6 x 241.3 cm).