Gary Lang: Hybrid Variations

Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to announce a solo exhibition of work by Gary Lang. A highly regarded mid-career painter Lang is captivated by line and color. Hybrid Variations marks a significant advancement of Lang’s quest to remove painting from composition and image-making -- and liberate the artist’s activity to elemental mark making and process.

Referencing the progression based experimentation of a composer; he remakes the essential property of the line into a loose and expressive conduit for wild atonal color pattern configurations. After living in New York City since 1985, Lang returned to Southern California in 2001. He embarked on a printmaking project at Atelier Tullis in Santa Barbara. This project represents the artist’s most comprehensive vision for a new palette of materials incorporating oil monotype with a progressive stratum of hand applied vinyl acrylic and oil paints on paper. A wall-size installation of an amalgam of individual paper sheets assembled by the Lang that fills the gallery with powerful statement of color and line will be the highlight of the exhibition.

Lang is at once an abstract expressionist and a minimalist. He is simultaneously interested in the artist’s personal act of painting as well as the conceptual elements of the visual outcome. Lang says, “When I drag the brush across a surface, a bit of humanity is transferred onto the page. Art is away to extend humanity through touch. I touch a surface with paint from a place of profound belief.” These hybrids of painting and printmaking explore the philosophical pursuits of the artist, in which Lang tackles the nature of human experience.

This exhibition marks the inaugural effort by Edward Cella Art & Architecture to support the development of new bodies of work by significant mid-career California artists with documentation though both exhibition and publication. To this end, ECAA is releasing an accompanying catalog, Gary Lang: Hybrid Variations that features an introductory essay by Meg Linton, Director of the Ben Maltz Gallery and Public Programs Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.