Leroy Neiman Center - 37 S. Wabash Ave
James Gobel creates paintings made of felt, yarn and other fabrics that refer to a range of artistic movements–Renaissance and Baroque portraiture; German Neue Sachlichkeit painting, Pop Art and most recently American 50’s Abstraction. His paintings reflect and pre-archive more subtle experiences, ambulatory or occasionally pedestrian collages, and pictures that note evidence of radical social identities camouflaged in plain site. Marks recall graffiti-scratched bathroom stalls, fingerprints, spills and coded text messages are crafted to divert or modify the instinctual impulse to read a picture.Chair of Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Gobel received his BFA at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1996) and his MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999). He has had solo exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum (2000); Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York (1999, 2001, 2002, 2005); Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco (2008 & 2010) and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2008 & 2012). Gobel’s work was included in the traveling museum exhibition curated by Dave Hickey, entitled, Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland, Las Vegas Art Museum (2007) and Surface Value, Des Moines Art Center (2011) and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (2014) and most recently a solo exhibition at Second Floor projects in SF (2016).
Image provided by artist.
