Caldwell Snyder is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition of recent paintings by artist John Gibson. We are holding an artist reception here at the gallery on Saturday, September 30th from 4 to 6pm. We will be serving Margerum Wine and non-alcoholic cocktails by Tilden. The exhibition will be on view in Montecito September 27th through October 15th.

For over forty years, John Gibson has focused exclusively on the shape of the ball, using it as a tool for exploring the space of painting. Often decorated with a minimal pattern to emphasize its illusory curvature in space, he uses his subject to comment on the elusive goal of depicting life in a way that captures and approximates, but never quite aligns with, three-dimensional reality. The tension between flat and dimensional space has always been central to painting; in a sense, the history of painting is the story of its engagement with this concept, from the invention of perspective to the breakthrough of cubism, which fused the two, to the flattening of the picture plane in modern abstract painting. Gibson’s patterned spheres allude to this history while at the same time retaining their integrity as basic objects—an interplay of opposing forces: flatness and roundness, lightness and darkness, simplicity and complexity.