Gail Gregg

Gregg has written for ARTnews since the 1980s, contributing articles on artists including Romare Bearden, Carroll Dunham, Faith Ringgold and Amy Sillman, and on topics such as life drawing, museum access, art and Alzheimer's treatment and museum labels, among others. She has written catalogue essays on artists including Yoshitaka Amano, Karen Wilberding Diefenbach, Janet Filomeno, Christopher Pelley, Adam Straus and Richard Tsao. For many years, Gregg served as president of Studio in a School, a non-profit organization that recruits artists to bring visual arts education to public schools and community centers from pre-K to the 12th grade.

Gregg's art reflects the influence of abstract movements such as minimalism, color field painting and the Pattern and Decoration group, as well as landscape painting. In the latter 1990s she began working in encaustic, an age-old, process-oriented painting technique in which hot wax is impregnated with pigment. Critics note Gregg's encaustic work for its mining of the medium's potential for subtlety, rich color, soft luminous surfaces and tactile appeal. Among other qualities, reviewers also note perceptual effects deriving from the paintings' deep surfaces and thickly painted sides, which flirt with illusionism and realism and shift in status between image and object. Between 1999 and 2005, Gregg exhibited small, emblematic encaustic-on-panel paintings with creamy, mottled surfaces that were compared to birthday cakes or thick ice. Many of these works evolved from sketches she made while airborne over the checkerboard, rural landscapes of the Great Plains, including her native Kansas (e.g., Carnation, 2003). Often titled after small towns, these paintings were characterized by simple geometric (but not hard-edged) patterns, rich atmospheric effects, a gauzy density, and palettes in close tonal ranges that recalled classical colors of Italian landscape painting: russets, olive greens and ochres. In a representative description, critic Lilly Wei wrote that the painting Roza (2000) "suggests a textile pattern, a gameboard, an aerial view, things cultivated, crafted by the human hand, created by the human will and imagination … [and] demonstrates a utopian belief in the sense of order, art's antidote to the chaos and terror of life." Alongside her landscape-influenced patterns, Gregg also introduced rhythmic, meditative stripes and grids that referenced Islamic tiles, using local color (e.g., Marrakesh and Fez, 2000). In subsequent work, Gregg shifted her point of departure from the landscape to the detritus of a contemporary throwaway culture. In the process, she pushed her encaustic paintings toward relief sculpture, employing found industrial forms as supports: cardboard shipping materials, 19th-century loom cards, plastic packaging. In works like Riesling (2005) and Yellowtail (2007), cardboard wine bottle dividers were transformed into motifs recalling abstract Native American totems; in other paintings, loom card patterns yielded whimsical forms that ARTnews likened to a merging of Paul Klee and Mark Rothko. With the brightly colored relief One Way (2006), Gregg transcended modest material—protective cardboard packaging from a radio shipping box—to create one of her most sculptural pieces to date. She continued to work with encaustic and found materials into the early 2010s, often exploiting cardboard found on the street for its corrugated line patterns or leathery quality (e.g., Rosebud and Scored, both 2012). • Illustration — Gail Gregg, Gilded Gyre Fragment #92, metal leaf on cardboard, 9.5" x 10" x 1.25", 2014–15. In the "Album" series (2008–10), Gregg channeled her own familial loss into drawings that explored abstraction and the power of visual autobiography by repurposing anonymous family photo albums and scrapbooks found at flea markets and junk shops. She removed the snapshots, leaving life-worn pages with binder holes, intact photo corners and occasional captions—then filled in the negative space left by the photos with graphite or muted shades of pastel that suggested echoes of the absent originals. ARTnews critic Doug McClemont wrote that the austere black, gray or brown grids "were as entrancing as they were melancholic—devoid of actual human presence, yet saturated with mystery" and capable of "excavating universal emotions—the pain of loss, the frustration of gaps in memory—from the layers of history of unseen individuals." Gregg returned to the themes of consumerism and excess in two projects presented in her exhibition, "Fool's Gold" (2015). Her "Gilded Gyre Fragment" series (2015) consisted of constructivist cardboard packing forms that she gilded with metal leaf, creating mysterious, precious three-dimensional objects (i.e., "fool's gold") out of refuse. In a photocollage series, she culled and combined luxury magazine images, enhancing their over-the-top qualities, before mounting the final prints behind shiny acrylic to restore their original glossiness. In other and subsequent collage series, Gregg has created visual puns and surreal narratives—some with an ecological theme—by coupling vintage postcards and supermarket flyer material, abandoned library cards and photos, or tableaux of 1950s family life from magazines and other ephemera of the period.