Ann Gale 

Born in 1966, Gale, whose mother is also an artist, grew up in Rhode Island and began painting around age 7. “I was obsessed with painting people,” she recalls. “I used to love football season, because my father would sit very, very still.” In her undergraduate studies at Rhode Island College and graduate work at Yale, even as she studied printmaking and sculpture, she found herself returning to painting, still fascinated by “that thing about a person’s face that sticks with you, to the point that you’re still thinking about it later.” After Yale she exhibited in galleries in New York, San Francisco and Seattle, where she eventually accepted a teaching position at the University of Washington School of Art. Currently she is on sabbatical, painting full-time thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship she was awarded last year. The APEX show is her first solo outing in a museum.

Ann Gale’s work takes a decidedly formalist approach to figurative painting, without losing any of the pathos of her brooding subjects. She paints from life, and instead of blending colors on the surface, Gale layers hundreds of carefully pre-mixed strokes of paint one on top of the other. From afar, the eye mixes the colors to create stunningly realistic portraits. Up close, one can contemplate the abstract shapes. Her technique, to me, seems to deconstruct what a figure is–to reinterpret the human body through the luscious medium of paint itself. The muted palette she uses has a calming effect, but the work is far from boring due to her intense scrutiny of the human form and her ability to capture the complexity of the singular gaze, body language, and, for lack of a more scientific term, aura of each sitter.