bG Gallery
TED GALL & WRONA GALL: Stories in Pigment & Metal
November 11 - December 5, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 11, 5-8pm
bG Gallery proudly presents new bodies of work by master metal sculptor Ted Gall and the west coast debut of seasoned abstract painter Wrona Gall, entitled Stories in Pigment & Metal. This exhibition is curated by Sung-Hee Son and opens November 11th, 2023.
Ted Gall (T. Gall) is an American master sculptor of over fifty years experience, renowned for creating thought provoking, dramatic and elegant figurative metal sculptures. T. Gall is an expert in the lost wax casting process for creating his bronze and stainless steel artworks, where he incorporates multi-layered articulating faces, unexpected symbolisms, cosmic themes and tiny human figures making their ways toward more hopeful outcomes. The expressions on his faces are patient and stoic even as their surroundings and adornments are wild, mysterious or otherworldly.
In this new body of work he collides human and animal imagery with fantastical casts of objects collected and reimagined from nature. Rich colors are brought to life through skillful patinas, and artfully rough cut hardwoods like Red Gum Eucalyptus and deeply colored stones like black granite comprise his pillar bases. In Urchin Head we encounter a sea green person’s head with a tentacled crown and miniature aquatic explorers roaming behind and inside it. Sculptor’s Head depicts a horse’s head that opens to a human one, which then lifts to reveal a scene of an artist carving a horse and the horse leaving, alluding to a cyclical pattern of creation and release. In House of Wisdom, the largest of T. Gall’s sculptures in this exhibition, a winged male torso upholds a multi-level house with branches extending outward from its center. There, downtrodden figures carrying briefcases and satchels make their way into the house in search of rest and healing. Gall’s imagination orchestrates worlds within worlds filled with allegories of redemption, creation, fantasy and humor.
Ted’s sculptures tend to work in ways that dreams do, presenting familiar images in unexpected combinations and contexts, leaving us to puzzle out what to make of them. He leads us to uncover masks behind masks and behind tableaux, drawing us down to deep places or bringing the depths almost into view, yet never presuming to tell us what we are seeing. As James Hillman has said, “everything within is able to be understood in a double sense, hermetically and metaphorically”, this is to be said of Ted Gall’s work too.
In Wrona Gall’s west coast debut, the artist creates sweeping and compelling colorscapes with the ever shifting sky as her focus and muse. The universality of the sky provides her with an endless source of inspiration. After a forty-year career painting in an industrial loft in Chicago, Wrona relocated to Ojai, California in 2015 where the open horizon of Ojai’s natural beauty expanded her vision from roof-top viewed swatches of blue to vast horizons that glow with emotional intensity.
As a child Wrona often stared out her bedroom window and studied the movement of clouds to escape from family drama. The changing panorama suggested the possibility of change from negativity to positivity. The sky’s mutability still provides a personal source of serenity that infuses her work. To create her translucent veils of colors, she stopped using brushes and manipulates her pigments directly with her hands. She grinds pigments - both dry and liquid - into her wooden panels to create the feathery wisps that dominate even the dark stormy reflections. Critics have referred to these glazes and scumbles as Turner-like gauzes of light and color. Her current work at bG Gallery has a sensual depth that encompasses how humans interact with the sights, sounds and scents of nature. Even her small panels evoke the majesty of cosmic visions. Her art goes beyond traditional representation of meteorological effects to introduce an emotional depth that resonates a strong experience of nature recreated in an interior environment, both physical and reflective.
Her grandest painting, A Summer’s Day fills a large wood panel with bright shining light across expanses of clouds down to a low horizon meadow of orange and yellow poppies. Energy and movement in brilliant turquoise, azure to deep dark shades of indigo comprise the scene in Azure Moment. Tempest Sky, although the smallest of her paintings at 10 x 12 inches, still draws the viewer into her richly encompassing atmospheric realms. Subtle intrusions of geometric lines and interior borders throughout her works reconnect us to the relationship between the human or man-made and natural worlds, the encroachment of anthropogenic elements into nature, and the search for balance between the two.
The artists will be exhibiting their work together for the very first time, bringing the intricate and evocative creations of Ted Gall’s sculptures with the expansive contemplative skyscape paintings of Wrona Gall into one realm in Stories In Pigment & Metal.
The opening exhibition will be held Saturday, November 11, 2023, 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. The artists will be in attendance. The exhibition will run through Tuesday, December 5, 2023.
bG Gallery, Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave., #A2, Santa Monica, CA 90404
(310) 906-4211 | info@bgartdealings.com
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 12:00pm - 5:00pm and by appointment