Paintings and Works on Paper by Hope Gangloff

Right now there are two great solos exhibitions by the young artist, Hope Gangloff. The exhibition at the Susan Inglett Gallery in Chelsea will be open until March while her exhibition at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut will be open until June. Gangloff, who began her career as an illustrator, draws from a multitude of historical styles and specific painters but her work is completely contemporary and her own. In her paintings and works on paper, you can see vivid colors and forms of the German expressionists in the early 20th century, the whitish, ghostly skin of her figures which reminds one of Egon Schiele, the cropping of space, and the merging of foreground and background creating a compressed, claustrophobic space which was utilized by the modernists, and the use of obsessive line and focus on patterning and decoration found in Klimt. What jars the viewer is the deft combination of these techniques and stylistic devices with the contemporary subject matter of her work. Gangloff works from life and from photographs of her close group of friends, some musicians and other artists, and the ephemera of their life(books, cards, cigarettes, beer bottles). There is a feeling that you are joining the party or the aftermath of the party with her friends and an intense decadent, psychological treatment to her subjects. There is both a comfort and relaxation in their attitude and activities that you would find in an intimate group. Her paintings, acrylic on canvas, are quite large and the figures close to life size and she uses a variety of brilliant colors, while her very intricate smaller drawings, she uses a honed down palette of whites, variations of blue and red inks on clay-coated paper which creates a chalky opacity and serves to intensify the hues. They are beautiful!!