Warehouse Style

July 2 through 31, 2021

opening reception Friday, July 2 from 5 to 7 pm, walk in traffic welcome

additional walk in hours Saturday July 3 from 11 to 4

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-roomed location in the Canyon Road art nexus to two expansive warehouse spaces in the Siler-Rufina area, long a working neighborhood for artists and craftspeople. The two now spend most of their time making art and hosting visitors only by appointment.

This change — and its freedom — are widely expressed in a new exhibition featuring a proliferation of work by these artists, who are excited to invite the public back with an opening reception on Friday, July 2.

The exhibition presents oil and multimedia paintings by Vaughn-Gruler in one showroom, with Gruler’s kinetic steel sculptures, tree lights, assemblage paintings and fine art furniture in the other.

Each is adjacent to the artists’ studios and opens via garage-door to the parking lot next to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return exhibition, allowing for outdoor mingling.

In Vaughn-Gruler’s space, a new body of work in meditative, process-based paintings fills the showroom with a concert of repetition, movement, and mark making. In Zephyr Alphabet, the ancient Vesica Piscis symbol of overlapping circles appears amongst other shapes that Vaughn-Gruler says are like asemic writing, with intent but not translation.

Her new Knobs and Buttons pieces, meanwhile, incorporate circular wood chips pressed into layers of thick, glossy, and viscous paint. Reminiscent of a motherboard, the piece plays with the idea of language and organizing space, as if one can discover the buttons to push within this abstract plane.

View more work by Blair Vaughn-Gruler »

Over at Unit #5 is the world of Gruler, which combines steel sculpture, fine art furniture, and paintings more like sculptures. It’s almost as if Gruler’s work in different genres has come full circle. He’s started creating large-scale sculptural paintings that are reminiscent of books or some kind of index shelving. These are constructed with small paintings and repurposed steel parts combined on a wooden base and integrated with graffiti-style acrylic paint.

He’s also expanded his work in sound sculptures toward purely kinetic sculptures based on heavy industrial springs. These support other repurposed steel parts as well as richly colorful chunks of repurposed glass. Durable outdoors, the industrial assemblages move with the breeze and shifting angles of glass interact with natural light. In Gruler’s work, raw materials are the making and the meaning, and in this show, he’s taken that interaction to a new level.

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 fits together more,” he says.

View more work by Ernst Gruler »

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.

Read more about Warehouse Style »

Visit Us