Gary Schafter

From 1985 to the present, I have been living and working in San Antonio, Texas as a professional artist. During this period of time, I have had 26 solo exhibitions and have participated in many group shows. I have approximately 400 paintings in private and public collections including the San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, Texas) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
General artistic concerns and themes:

At the core of my methodology is a commitment to the ‘tradition’ of painting, to understanding the historical dialogue between surface and illusion, the pictorial and the plastic, subject and content. For approximately the past 20 years, I have been investigating, in general the issue of mediated representation and, specifically, the problematic relationship between image and its referent.

The problem of making art intelligible is fundamentally semantic, not aesthetic. In my work, painting subjects (e.g. still life, landscape, animals, etc.) become convention ready-mades’, a foil, by which to explore the relationship between neutral subject, and active concept. Often with irony and humor, I hope to encourage the viewer to recognize the inherent slippage- the subject depicted as subject, and the painting as an artis...

M.F.A. 1985, University of Texas, San Antonio
B.F.A. 1979, University of Wisconsin, Superior