Hope Gangloff
Love Letters
January 30 to June 5, 2011
The first solo museum exhibition by the New York City-based artist Hope Gangloff, including her most recent large-scale paintings and a survey of past works, will be presented at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum from January 30 to June 5, 2011.
The phrase Love Letters—chosen by Gangloff as the title of her exhibition—both affirms the artist’s admiration for the people in her life who become her subjects and for the act of painting itself. Her canvases are not only forgiving—as is true love—they are close and personal.
Her portraits of friends—hip beauties in lush environments—capture a panoply of emotions that reflect a generation of young adults trying to cope with our current economic times, giving her personal vision of modern American life. In her own way, she documents our era by making permanent fixtures of her friends with all their pros and cons.
Being visually accurate or realistic is not Gangloff’s interest; she focuses on what she perceives to be the subject’s defining features. The work amplifies her own feelings about her subjects and their situations. She explains, “It has to look right, but it doesn’t have to be right; it has to feel good.”
Curator Mónica Ramírez-Montagut notes: “Her paintings and drawings make us feel her and her subjects and feel for them as well; they make us feel for ourselves and the period to which we belong. In the midst of the struggles of our current everyday lives, Hope finds both beauty and passion.”
Hope Gangloff was born in Amityville, New York, in 1974 and studied fine art at Cooper Union in New York. After leaving art school, Gangloff worked in a bronze foundry for seven years and made illustrations for publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Spin Magazine, and Built by Wendy. Her images of gorgeous New Yorkers and glamorous friends hang in galleries and museums around the world, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Boston, Miami, and Rome. Gangloff has been represented by Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, since 2005.
Hope Gangloff, Sara VanDerBeek in Her Bath Closet, 2010
Collection of Cynthia and Stuart Smith
