Gabriele Evertz approaches painting as a humanist and color as a romantic. Evertz, who moved from Berlin to NYC at the age of 19, sees her work as bridging two opposing aesthetic traditions: a philosophical Northern European and a pragmatic American approach to painting. In contrast to other color painters who employ a theoretical or programmatic approach to color, she believes "color is a living thing, which gives us access to abstract ideas and concepts".
Over the past two decades, Evertz has developed and continues to refine a purely experiential, highly saturated palette involving twelve colors. For her, the history of color organization became a tool that informs her systematic color structures. She also often uses black, white, and gray in her work, but prefers not to call them "neutrals", which she feels is "inadequate to describe the experience of them". Additionally, she views complementary colors within her system, such as blue and orange, not as antagonistic, but rather as "true chromatic partners".
In recent years, Evertz has paid particular attention to the color gray, which she feels has been historically overlooked. "We need to refresh our eyes to it", she states, "words fall short to describe it". In her paintings on view at the gallery, gray is juxtaposed against subtle variations on the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), as well as part or all of her twelve-color system.
With a background in both painting and architecture, Evertz assigns structure to color in her work in the form of vertical stripes. The stripes span the entire height of her paintings from top to bottom, and commonly appear in varying widths as well, often within the same painting. She continually employs diagonal shifts placed between repeating sets of vertical lines, which she describes as "the origin of action in her work". The result is an exuberant, ever-shifting color experience that elicits a sense of time in her paintings.
Throughout her career, Evertz's investigation of color has only become increasingly more experimental, impassioned, and optimistic, emphasizing research over result. Summarizing the scope of her practice, she very concisely states, "in the absence of truth, there is art".
Gabriele Evertz (b. 1945 Berlin, Germany) has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including in Australia, Germany, Italy, and New Zealand. Her recent museum exhibitions include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA (NYC), Heckscher Museum (Huntington, NY), Hillwood Art Museum (Brookville, NY), Columbus Museum (Columbus, OH), Ulrich Museum (Wichita, KS), and Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen, Germany).
Her work is included in many public collections worldwide, including The British Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museum, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Jersey State Museum, Parrish Art Museum, Stiftung für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst Zurich, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wilhelm Mack Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Her work has been recently reviewed in publications, such as Artcritical, NY Arts Magazine, ArtSlant, and The Village Voice.
In addition to her painting practice, Evertz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, NYC. She is a key protagonist in the renowned Hunter Color School, alongside other color painters, including Vincent Longo, Doug Ohlson, Robert Swain, and Sanford Wurmfeld. Over the past ten years, she has also curated several critically-acclaimed artist retrospectives and surveys of abstract painting at Hunter College, including Visual Sensations: Robert Swain Paintings, 1967-2010; Presentational Painting III; Seeing Red: An International Exhibition of Nonobjective Painting (co-curated with Michael Fehr); Set in Steel: The Sculpture of Antoni Milkowski; and Mac Wells: Light into Being (co-curated with Robert Swain).
Evertz holds an MFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from Hunter College, New York, NY.
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