23 Jun Warehouse Style
GVG Contemporary artist co-owners launch a debut exhibition in their new warehouse gallery/studio spaces
Santa Fe, New Mexico: 7/2/21 – 7/31/21
Opening reception: Friday, 7/2/21, 5pm-7pm
Virtual exhibition: Launches Friday 7/2/21
Walk-in hours: Saturday, 7/3/21, 11am-4pm
Open by appointment through July 31, 2021
1364 Rufina Circle, Units #3 and #5
Warehouse Style Exhibition Page »
GVG Contemporary’s debut summer exhibition, Warehouse Style, is a nod to a pandemic-prompted change in location and business model that ended up being fortuitous. It presents new work by gallery co-owners Blair Vaughn-Gruler and Ernst Gruler. Mid-pandemic, they moved GVG from its adobe, Santa Fe Style location in the heavily trafficked Canyon Road art area to two expansive warehouse spaces in the Siler-Rufina nexus, long a working neighborhood for artists and craftspeople. The two now spend most of their time making art and hosting visitors only by appointment.
“It’s been gratifying to change how we do this,” says Gruler. “Now our visitors meet us, see our studios, and check out the showrooms. I think people come away from that having had a really good experience.” Visitors can pull paintings out of racks and view what’s happening now, either in Vaughn-Gruler’s sky-lit studio, where she’s able to work on larger canvases, or in Gruler’s metal shop and showroom, where metalwork, woodwork, and multimedia paint combine.
With Warehouse Style, GVG Contemporary invites the public back for an opening reception on Friday, July 2. (For those of you visiting us online, the exhibition will be here too, along with all works available for purchase.) The aptly titled exhibition presents what has come out of a year of collective hunkering down and creating. Oil and multimedia paintings by Vaughn-Gruler occupy one showroom with Gruler’s kinetic steel sculptures, tree lights, new paintings and fine art furniture in the other. Each is adjacent to the artists’ studios and opens via garage-door to the lot next to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return exhibition, allowing for outdoor mingling.
Vaughn-Gruler’s space includes a new body of work in meditative, process-based paintings that fill the showroom with a concert of repetition, movement, and mark making. In Zephyr Alphabet, the ancient Vesica Piscis symbol of overlapping circles representing unity appears amongst other shapes that Vaughn-Gruler says are like asemic writing—they are made with intent but not translation. Though the artist’s extensive career has been an investigation into process, and she certainly has a trademark vocabulary, each painting finds a new way of “working things out,” as she says. “I’d be in trouble if I ran out of new ways to think about repetitive mark making,” she adds with a chuckle, “but that’s not happening any time soon.”
Her new Knobs and Buttons pieces, playful and light, incorporate circular wood chips pressed into layers of thick, glossy, and viscous paint. Reminiscent of a motherboard, the pieces play with the idea of language and organizing space, as if one can discover the buttons to push within this abstract plane. Yet the magic happens beyond each individual canvas, which, however mesmerizing, resonates anew in the full exhibition. “When you get a whole showroom of my paintings together, all the bodies of work talk to each other and it all make sense,” says Vaughn-Gruler. “I’m excited to share that experience.”
Over at Unit #5 in the world of Gruler, his work in different genres has come full circle. In addition to his fine art furniture and elegant (real) tree-lights, he’s started creating large-scale sculptural paintings that look kind of like shelving, books, or some kind of cosmic index system. These are constructed with small paintings combined on a base and completed with graffiti-style acrylic and repurposed steel parts. Like Vaughn-Gruler’s Knobs and Buttons pieces, it’s as if he’s created a portal system.
Thus, Gruler, who could never be pigeonholed as a furniture maker or painter or sculptor, is more everything that he is than ever before; and it shows in this exhibition. He reflects that the materials keep pulling him forward. Unlike Vaughn-Gruler, he does not divide a canvas with plan and process. Rather, he follows textures, shapes, and colors, sometimes pulling from his racks to incorporate finished work into new compositions.
He’s also expanded his metalwork in sound sculptures toward purely kinetic sculptures. Based on heavy industrial springs, repurposed steel parts are combined with richly colorful chunks of repurposed glass. Durable outdoors, the industrial assemblages move with the breeze and shifting angles of glass interact with natural light. Gruler’s kept a few in his own backyard, and he admits: “I’ve never photographed something so much.” As the ever-changing light of New Mexico skies play through the glass and the wind moves the sculpture from below, even the maker can be entranced. In Gruler’s work, raw materials are the making and the meaning.
Gruler attributes these new integrations to compressing the gallery and studio into one, and spending more time in the latter. “Everything is here, so it’s starts to fit together more,” he says. Separate and together, these showrooms, like the artists who run them, are the direct, prolific, fluid, and cohesive results of what happens just on the other side of the exhibition walls. Warehouse Style is about embracing transition, running with freedom, and combining the elements we always had to make us more whole.