GREGORY GILLESPIE (1936–2000) first exhibited in New York at Forum Gallery in 1966. John Canaday, writing for The New York Times, soon predicted that Gillespie “just might emerge as the most important painter at work today.” On the occasion of his first retrospective exhibition, at the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC in 1977, Jo Ann Lewis, in The Washington Post, speculated that “. . . the art world may be ready, once again, for realist art with content—something beyond the mere virtuosity of the photo- and hyper-realists.” But Gillespie’s virtuosic and provocative European street scenes and interiors, near-hallucinatory landscapes, disturbing sexual fantasies and startling self-portraits were too diverse and visually disparate to place him in an art “movement” or category. He was different, perhaps too different for the kind of iconic recognition that could result in great fame for other artists; no singular stylistic or pictorial imagery united all his work. But the brilliant intensity, psychological depth and unending drama of his paintings attracted a diverse following nonetheless. Gillespie was exhibited at major museums from New York to California, and his works were purchased by devoted and important collectors across America and in Europe. When Forum Gallery presented a survey of his self-portraits in 1991, the works on view, dating from 1968 to 1991, were on loan from collections in New York, New England, the mid-Atlantic, the Pacific coast and Milan, Italy. In all, Forum presented 16 Gregory Gillespie exhibitions, and a second retrospective was organized by the Georgia Museum of Art in 1999, traveling to four museums.
Roberta Smith’s New York Times obituary (April 29, 2000) notes that “His art was known for an obsessive attention to realistic detail, but the term realist fit only a narrow swath of his sensibility.” Gillespie sought a “reality beyond our sense”. He stated, “I’ve always felt that the important thing is allowing the deeper, more intuitive, subconscious voices to get through, and so I like the freedom to explore combinations of techniques and approaches in order to express the full range of my emotional responses.”
Looking back at Gregory Gillespie’s work through the lens of 20th Century context, there can be no question that his extraordinary ability to depict and transform the world around him, coupled with the strength of his perceptive observation of himself and others, resulted in some of the most haunting, imaginative and progressive visual art of our time. Gregory Gillespie was the ultimate inside-outsider, a gifted and highly trained painter who was a student of art history and practitioner of analytic thought who walked his own path, never part of a movement or group, and, in the end, unfailingly appealing but impossible to categorize.
_Robert Fishko
“We can conceive of Gillespie’s paintings as private interior landscapes into which we are transported by the power of the artist’s imagination and the cunning of his hand. We become travelers in a strange and fascinating region where we may experience the metamorphosis of places, objects, and people, and where the simplest things, painted with painstaking clarity, become bewitched and transformed.”
_ Abram Lerner, Gregory Gillespie, retrospective exhibition presented by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; traveled to Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA, 1977; catalogue essay.
"…For Gillespie an important goal of paintings has come to be the creation of a convincing, three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface; therein for him lies the compelling attraction and timeless mystery of art. This conclusion derives in part from a technical respect for such Renaissance artists as Masaccio and Carlo Crivelli, as well as from an intellectual consideration of contemporary artists such as Rauschenberg and Johns. Illusion is the starting point of Gillespie’s art…(he) is the first to admit that such technical mastery is only the necessary means to an expressive end, which is for him intensely personal...
...Gillespie reveled in the exposure to Italian and Northern painting, and throughout his work allusions to past art occur in an apparently incidental, daydream manner. His subject matter was influenced by the details of everyday Italian life – peeling walls that have been restuccoed for centuries, the intricate geometric patterns of tile floors, sacred relics deeply imbedded in obscure niches of small churches, the illusionistic absurdity of a wooden window frame painted to simulate wood grain. He was fascinated by the tendency to decorate the environment in strange and intricate ways. Gillespie is related to the Italian and Northern Renaissance painters in sensibility and technique. He paints only on wood panels and builds his paintings in thin layers of oil and magna. While he likes the tough surface of wood, its use more importantly lends him a great flexibility of composition, as he often literally saws off or adds on pieces of wood as the dimensions and elements of a composition are expanded or diminished. His paintings are sometimes quite small (many paintings are no larger than 7 x 9 inches), and range in subject matter from landscape, still life, and genre or allegory to interior scenes, self-portraiture, “shrine” and “wall” paintings, and anthropomorphic fantasies...
…Many of the interiors of the Sixties contain tables, but neither chairs nor space to sit down; these omissions intensify their rigid and sacramental character. They are often claustrophobic – defined as box spaces, the checkerboard tablecloths and tile floors spelling out their own perspective…In Roman Interior (Still Life) (1966-67) the architectural anonymity is enlivened by the presence of the child’s sketch on the wall, the cheery tablecloth, and the “caffé Bourbon” box set on the window sill. Gillespie debated for some time over the selection of an object to place on the table of this Roman Interior, but concluded that the wrinkles of the checkered tablecloth were object enough, and elected to introduce a second focal point in the form of the small deep window on the right. Creating a play of indoor/outdoor space, the window overlooks a view of the Castello St. Angelo, incorporated by means of a postcard. While working on the painting Gillespie changed the postcard image frequently, enjoying this variable element. The checkered line horizontally dividing the wall was painted after, and its position determined by experimentation with decorative tape bought from a bicycle shop.”
_Hugh M. Davies and Sally E. Yard, excerpt from Gergory Gillespie: The Timeless Mystery of Art, Arts, December 1977.
“…Gillespie mingles fragments of his art and life. Objects related only by their association with his work and family – masks, paintings, plants, vegetables, toys – all dominated by a studio manikin – are rearranged against a wall. Some of the objects are rendered in trompe l’oeil fashion, others are painted in a straightforward, nonillusionistic style. This mixture of conventional realism and outright illusion keeps the viewer’s perceptions in a state of imbalance…There is no straining for dazzling perspective or for the polished finish of a Harnett, yet the individual forms are convincingly defined and occupy their own space without destroying the flatness of the picture plane…the arrangement of shapes and patterns of color has been carefully planned without making the abstract nature of these decisions too obvious.”
_ Abram Lerner, Gregory Gillespie, retrospective exhibition presented by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; traveled to Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA, 1977; catalogue essay.
“In the case of Gregory Gillespie – an artist of singular sensibility – the terrors of anxiety have yielded paintings that transform reality into intense dramas of perception – acute, often obsessive responses to a world that is seen more as a threat than an arena of open-ended discovery…. Dense, confining, claustrophobic, (Gillespie’s world) is a universe in which figures, objects, landscapes, street or rooms seem paralyzed and transfixed within the trauma of their very existence.”
_ John Gruen, Gregory Gillespie’s dense reality, Art News, March 1977
“Gregory Gillespie is an American realist of a prophetic kind. Unlike the photorealists and hyperrealists, who have established themselves as leaders in the pendulum-swing away from abstraction, Gillespie puts a similar acutely detailed reproduction of visual reality into the into the service of profound and often disturbing introspection...In their intensity Gillespie’s self-portraits are comparable to Vincent van Gogh’s, although they rise above Vincent’s in their analytical severity…They are more comparable, although in total contrast stylistically, to Rembrandt’s, which over a much longer period of time recorded the evolution of the painter from his youthful ebullient self to a tragic philosopher of the human condition in old age…(Gillespie’s) self-portraits at least recognize the significance of artists as exceptional individuals who, in the course of acquiring self-knowledge, may help us to discover knowledge of ourselves.”
_John Canaday, review of Gregory Gillespie retrospective exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The New Republic, February 4, 1978
“The naturalistic and the bizarre, religion and pornography, whimsy and madness: Gillespie fuses chaotic contradictions in his exploration of the human psyche.
In a work titled Peg with Hand on Thigh, (Gillespie’s wife) is shown sitting in a slightly ratty old chair on a n old-fashioned hexagonal-tiled bathroom floor, nude but for the uncomfortable-looking shawl tied around her shoulders. Both the self-portraits and the nude are executed in the style that has become Gillespie’s trademark – more naturalist than realist, every detail of figure and surroundings right, but done as if by a Renaissance painter, with rich tonalities that somehow go back to the beginnings of perspective and the smooth strokes and color of the Flemish and Italian masters.”
_ Gerrit Henry, Gregory Gillespie’s Manic Masterpieces, Art News, December 1986
“Mr. Gillespie’s art exhibits an emotional response to physical things that recalls the impulse behind the reliquary and the votive offering. For him, art’s transformations are sacred stuff…Rather than eliminating troubling elements, Mr. Gillespie holds them front and center, the better to tame them. His is an art of precarious balances; between chaos and order, carnality and transcendent spirituality, the quotidian and the bizarre… The roots of Mr. Gillespie's style can perhaps be traced to the profound impression left by his Roman Catholic upbringing. ''I've always thought that in some deep ways Catholicism has had a huge effect on my art, as it has on my soul,'' says Mr. Gillespie, remembering his childhood struggle with sin and redemption…Mr. Gillespie has never lost his childhood obsession with sin, though his religious beliefs have evolved over the years, as the frequent Buddhist and Hindu symbols in his paintings attest. He explains, ''Buddhism says there's a reason why you're suffering and that suffering can be understood through introspection and by understanding the way the mind works.''
_Miles Unger, Finding the Reality That Lies Just Beyond the Real, review of A Unique Vision retrospective organized by Georgia Museum of Art, The New York Times, October 31, 1999