Background
Gerber was born in Mcallen, Texas, United States, on June 8, 1955.
350 New Campus Dr, Brockport, NY 14420, USA
Gaylen Gerber attended the College at Brockport, State University of New York and graduated from it with his Bachelor of Science degree in 1977.
8 W 8th St, New York, NY 10011, USA
Gerber studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in Manhattan.
36 S Wabash Ave #1201, Chicago, IL 60603, USA
Gerber attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a Master of Fine Arts from it in 1980. In 1987 he began teaching there.
36 S Wabash Ave #1201, Chicago, IL 60603, USA
Gerber attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a Master of Fine Arts from it in 1980. In 1987 he began teaching there.
350 New Campus Dr, Brockport, NY 14420, USA
Gaylen Gerber attended the College at Brockport, State University of New York and graduated from it with his Bachelor of Science degree in 1977.
8 W 8th St, New York, NY 10011, USA
Gerber studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in Manhattan.
36 S Wabash Ave #1201, Chicago, IL 60603, USA
Gerber attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a Master of Fine Arts from it in 1980. In 1987 he began teaching there.
Gerber was born in Mcallen, Texas, United States, on June 8, 1955.
Gaylen Gerber attended the College at Brockport, State University of New York and graduated from it with his Bachelor of Science degree in 1977. He then studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in Manhattan, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the latter in 1980.
In the early 1980s, Gerber produced gray monochromatic artworks with subtle shifts in the painted surface. It made the iconography difficult to see without repeated viewing from multiple positions. These early artworks revealed his interest in how context affects our perception. In 1987 he began teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago.
After a decade, Gaylen Gerber started to explore installation strategies. In 1992 he participated in the exhibition at the Renaissance Society of Chicago, where he installed a temporary wall spanning the width of the gallery and hung his paintings in a continuous row, barring access to most of the exhibition space.
Besides, the artist incorporated the art of other artists into his work in order to reveal the complexities of authorship and to examine the common attributes of distinct artists as well as their art practices. For instance, he installed his paintings in a contiguous line between the painted panels of the Swiss artist Adrian Schiess at the exhibition Documenta IX (1992) in Kassel, Germany. They were at one end of the wall, and the paintings of the German artist Gerhard Richter occupied the other end. By using his own works as a borderline, Gaylen Gerber equaled two distinct artists.
In a group exhibition dedicated to the inauguration of the MUDAM Luxembourg (Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art) in 2006, Gerber again put his work in relation to the works of other artists, such as an American postconceptualist Stephen Prina, American text-based conceptualist Kay Rosen, and also a Swiss text-based conceptualist Rémy Zaugg. Gaylen Gerber’s gray paintings, associated with institutional neutrality, integrated cohesively with the other various works. By becoming part of the background or architecture, his works subtly foregrounded the other artists’ artworks while attracting viewers’ attention toward the physical context of the exhibit.
Gerber continued to study the role of a modified exhibit space in the interpretation of art during an exhibition at Kunstverein Ruhr in Essen, Germany (2010). He added a new wall with a large opening, divided the gallery into two parts and he also installed orange-tinted lighting in one room and blue in the other. He applied silver leaf to the reverse of several large pieces of coloured Plexiglas, souvenirs from another artist’s exhibit, and then placed them on walls painted in similar and contrasting tones. This exhibition underlined the conditional nature of interpretation, subsequently returning the viewer to a visceral experience that delays easy comprehension.
