• GARY RATTIGAN: Things Go Wrong Quite Often
  • April 26 - June 07, 2008
  • Opening Reception: Saturday, April 26 (7-10PM)

  • 65GRAND is pleased to present Gary Rattigan's paintings in his first show at the gallery since 2006. Don't let the title mislead you-- Rattigan's color and composition are in complete cohesion, making for harmoniously hulking work that's built up off the canvas as much as it's dug out of the pictorial space.

  • Consisting of mostly organic abstractions, the mannered mark making of each painting structures the composition like so much scaffolding-- not unlike the voodoo dowel rods that skewered his previous exhibition's sculptures. Combined with his palette, which ranges from concave blacks to Easter brights, the tensions and fusions of this body of work seem to struggle against their own material reality.

  • The titles top it all off, with their brief, but probing, inquisitions, such as, Are we ignorant of anything that truly matters?, Is God in a small patch of yellow?, and Is it all so impossible? Reading like a list of Zen Buddhist k®‚ans, which reward a changed mind over a made up one, Rattigan's curiosity of the unknown, and brave commitment to exploration of the new, are all spelled out. So can art be our conduit to something sublime? Viewers are invited to look these works over, and maybe find Rattigan puts more faith in asking questions that open eyes, then getting all the right answers in response.

  • Gary Rattigan would like his tombstone to read, "He never had a website." He will be present at the opening.