Gavin Sewell

I make thoughtful mixed-media works that mediate friction between narrative and materiality. Novelistic pastiche and intuitive abstract painting confront each other in a bricolage of photographs, paint, and found objects. From a trace discovered in a few abject elements at the beginning of my process, I interweave strata, adding and subtracting components strategically or intuitively to create a quirky grammar of intellect and wonder.

While my development has been steadily nourished by great mixed-media artists of the past, including Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg and the Kienholzes, I'm also inspired by contemporaries like Fred Tomaselli, Julian Schnabel and Barnaby Furnas. Due to a lifelong visual impairment, I have access to the Library of Congress audio collection; the books I listen to while painting frequently inform my work.

I think of my pieces as contemporary equivalents to religious icons, memory gardens or totem poles; abstracted story-boards in which the gaze explores systems of interpretation and meaning in a shared situation with the artwork. My practice seizes the narrative debris of Spectacle - advertisements with their flattened affect, litter, hyper-real media images, plastic paint - and humanizes t...

The Art Students League, New York
St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland
Colby College, Waterville, Maine
Portland School of Art, Portland, Maine

current representation / représentants actuels

Carturla, Bordeaux, France
Central Park South Gallery, New York, NY
C. Parker Gallery, Greenwich, CT
ModArt, Miami, FL
World Trade Art Gallery, New York, NY
Zenith Gallery, Washington, DC

upcoming exhibitions / expositions à venir

2018 QCC Art Gallery, New York riverrun-yes!
2018 Whisper, ModArt Gallery, Miami, FL

solo exhibitions / expositions solo

2014 Material Madness, Zenith Gallery, Washington, DC
2013 Thoughtful Objects, Greenpoint Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2011 Phenomenology, The Durst Organization, New York, NY
2008 Recent Work, 205 Club / nAscent Art, New York, NY
2008 Gavin Sewell, Potion Art Space, New York, NY
2007 Suzanne deCarion Fine Art, Laguna Beach, CA
2005 Stressless Art Space, New York, NY

group exhibitions / expositions collectives

2018 What’s Real to You?, Zenith Gallery, DC
2018 Sliver, with The Painter8, Charles Clark Gallery, Vancouver, BC
2018 Sliver, with The Painter8, PL Labs- Theatre Conspiracy, Vancouver, BC
2017 Modern American Craft, with Zenith Gallery, Washington DC
2017 Saucy, with The Painter8, Vancouver, ...