Gabriele Evertz

The Gray Series

Emphasizing color intensity and existential expression, my work has as its goal a certain kind of rapture. The Gray Series is a cyclical body of work of sustained investigation of the admixtures of black and white and color in painting.

This particular series, The Black Room, produced in 2012, is organized in a one-inch grid, split diagonally into 120 bands, that are painted sequentially in a tonal range of four to eight or more black and white admixtures that collectively appear as luminous gray tones in an all-over, non-compositional field.

Aesthetic content is derived intuitively from what could be perceived as the polar opposites of chromatic relationships set in repetitive engagement with the play of light as it unfolds out of darkness.

Twelve pure, highly saturated hues symbolize the spectrum. Their size and ambiguous figure-ground arrangement may lead to a new and unexpected sense of scale. Uniform precision of the painting facture frees the viewer to concentrate on color effects. But autonomy of color - and its interaction as content - is not exclusive of the personal.

In my work, I think of color as manifest in the phenomenological, and I am interested in the fleeting shifts of light. Sensations are experienced in a slow way of viewing, akin to meditation: As the gray diagonals merge into an unspecified position or infinite field, the pure, spectral colors take turns to enter the viewer’s space in rising intensity, striving perhaps not to particular ends, but -- by contrasting the undefined -- to make visible a profounder reality, rarely achieved in everyday experiences.

Inspiration for The Black Room is an actual bedroom from a Roman villa of the first century B.C., which can be observed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Its walls are of a very deep gray, sparsely decorated with elongated colored lines that symbolize architectural features. These murals have a highly polished finish, presumably to glitter magically in the candlelight.

The paintings of Gabriele Evertz are comprised of precise stripes and subtle diagonal lines of color, in varying combinations from fully saturated to a range of values, organized in spatial relationships and patterns that explore the sensations and phenomenological aspects of color. As an abstract painter, her process minimizes strong figure-ground relationships and complex compositions so that the viewer can focus purely on the color and its impact on their perceptions and interpretations, triggering their own memories, emotions and feelings. This exhibition focuses on a new body of work, The Black Room, produced in 2012, in which Evertz explores a greater use of gray—a wide range of mixtures of black and white—that predominates the canvases and prefigures something serene and contemplative, which is indeed the experience one feels when viewing the large—60 x 60 inch square—paintings of the rhythmically patterned and angled values of gray regularly interrupted by only thin columns of saturated hues. The grays are luminous and provide a sensuous and seductive quality to these large canvases. The exhibition also features a selection of recent paintings from earlier series that are comprised largely of the hues of the color spectrum.

Gabriele Evertz is a member of the American Abstract Artists and key member of the Hunter College Color School. She was born in Berlin, Germany and moved to the US as a teenager. She studied at Hunter College in New York City, where she now teaches painting. Her paintings have been included in many international museum and gallery exhibitions. Evertz’s works are in the permanent collections of many museums, including: Brooklyn Museum, NY, The Columbus Museum of Art, OH, Harvard University Museum, MA, Hallmark Collections, KS, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Museum of Modern Art, NY, New Jersey State Museum, NJ, Parrish Art Museum, NY, Princeton University Library, NJ, Ulrich Museum, KS, Whitney Museum of Art, NY, The British Museum, London, England, Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Hagen, Germany, Stiftung für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zurich, Switzerland, Wilhelm Mack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany, among others.