Greg Rose: new arrangements

new arrangements

We are pleased to present new work by Greg Rose in his second solo show at the Carl Berg Gallery. These paintings on paper continue in the spirit of his earlier works offsetting the randomness of nature with the control of the man-made. These new works however lean more towards the organic with brushwork that is looser and more spontaneous.

Greg Rose has always been interested in the gap between things that happen “naturally” and things that happen “by design.” There is a mannered place between these two extremes where both thought and action crossover and become confused - resulting in a gesture that is poetically staged and awkwardly ideal. It is in Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, that he has found a perfect source of inspiration that represents this collision of aesthetics.

In these new paintings, he is not attempting to remake an image of an Ikebana arrangement. It’s the abstract spirit of “arranging” that he’s after. An ideal positioning of paint marks that balance intuition and design; a balance between the strange and the familiar, between the graceful and the awkward, between the organic and the architectural; a balance between compulsive (dis)ordering and just letting go.

Greg Rose has exhibted extensively including exhibitions at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco, Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, ACME in Los Angeles, Newmark Gallery in Washington D.C., and will be featured in a solo-exhibition at the Hosfelt Gallery in New York next fall.