Exploring the word as image and the image as word, Graham Gillmore’s work balances between treacherous antipodes: pathos and wit, defiance and charm, and more basically, the anguish of experience and the rapture of its aesthetic expression. The twisting knife of a smartass remark, the threatening anonymity of a clinical evaluation, and the famous-last-words potential of pillow talk are articulated in his oeuvre with a chromaticism their ruthlessness seems to beg. Employing puns and punch lines both lewd and mawkish, and referencing cliches, board games, rebuses, barroom banter, and graffiti, his paintings are by subtle turns playful, earnest, and caustic. At times surrounded by bubbles that are interlinked via intestinal networks of lines, the letters and syllables he depicts take on lives of their own, as though reverberating in the mind suggestively, or suspiciously, connoting an overwhelming variety of possible meanings that appear to jostle for recognition. Expressive of a charged synthesis between distinct types of mark- letter and stroke- his works appear as the visual equivalents of utterances, whether poignant or pointed… or of how we receive and interpret these. Many paintings seem to emphasize tone ( as it denotes both voice and color ), implying at once the intensity of the experience a given message or phrase insinuates, and the private stamina required to endure its meaning on the one hand, or its ambiguity on the other. Thus while rage, disgust and disillusionment seem to propel it, his art is also tempered by a humor that is all the more expansive, even forgiving for this, and which acts as the grace note essential to beauty.

Visually, Gillmore’s paintings vacillate between a sleek neon intensity bordering on the lurid, and a bumbling home spun quality recalling a troubled adolescent’s secret notebook. At times broadcasting the artificial vibrancy of candy or cosmetics, his palette suggests how the moth might see the flame. The quasi-confessional quality of certain paintings, meanwhile, intimates any urban sophisticate’s biography, suggesting the universality of both our humiliations and our kneejerk laughter at those of others. With that intinctual excoriation turned on himself, it appears that the artist achieves a pervasive sympathy with the human quandary, one that in its lacerating irony is all the more sincere.

-Thomas Breidenbach

Gillmore lived in New York for over 25 years and has positioned himself internationally. His reputation extends across Canada, the United States and in Europe with recent exhibitions held in Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City, San Francisco, New York, Miami Beach, Madrid and Berlin. Earlier exhibitions include “Learn to Read” at the TATE Modern alongside John Baldessari and Carol Bove. His work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Audain Art Museum, British Columbia, the Ghent Museum, Belgium, Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, RCA Records, New York, The Royal Bank of Canada, The Bank of Montreal, The Vancouver Art Gallery, and numerous other institutions and private collections worldwide. He has been featured in publications such as Canadian Art, Border Crossings, W Magazine, Art News, ArtForum, L.A. Weekly, C Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.