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  • Land Fall by John Gibson

Land Fall

John Gibson

Lincoln Center Editions United States
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Artwork details

Artist
John Gibson
Title
Land Fall
Description

b. 1958, Northampton, MA

John Gibson has been creating paintings of balls for over twenty years. Searching for something that would maintain a sense of pictorial space but remain as abstract as possible, Gibson found his solution in the balls, which serve as conduits for rhythm and pattern, providing a way to sculpt volume and space. Rather than working from observation, he invents subjects by taking patterns he finds out in the world - in textbooks, in museums, in toy stores - and curving them visually. The resulting paintings seem to contain a powerful kind of potential energy, each sphere on the verge of rolling out of the composition and into
reality.

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Ackland Museum Chapel Hill, NC
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

Date
2005
Medium
Screenprint
Edition
108
Signature
Signed
Sheet
37 x 34 inches
Status
Available
Price
$3,500.00
The Artist

John Gibson

For over thirty 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.

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