Gallery Exhibition: The Importance of Line

Jul 27 - Aug 27, 2021 9AM-5PM

Patton-Malott Gallery

Anderson Ranch Arts Center is pleased to present The Importance of Line, a two person show featuring the work of Rico Gatson and Andrea Santos – the artists are Guest Faculty at the Ranch during the month of July.

Though Rico Gatson and Andrea Santos both work in abstraction, their approach to the use of color and mark making vary greatly – Gatson uses bold swathes of color to create compositions that seemingly vibrate while Santos’ minimal approach is layered and more nuanced, conveying the intimate subject matter of her work. What ties their practices together is the attention to, and emphasis on, the quality of line.

The exhibition is free and open to the public. A reception will be held with Rico Gatson on Tuesday, July 27th on the Anderson Ranch quad. Click here to register.

Featured Artists:

Rico Gatson works in a variety of media including painting, video, sculpture and installation, though he considers himself an object-maker inspired by Conceptualism, Afro-Futurism and spirituality.  For the past twenty years, his body of work has been recognized for its powerful political discourse often rooted in significant moments in Black history.  He presents the viewer with a myriad of images related to pivotal moments that include the Watts Riots, the presidential election of Barack Obama and the formation of the Black Panthers.  Gatson’s striking, graphic visual language combines African textile-inspired colors and bold patterns with stark black and white line work.  The compositions also recall the geometric compositions of Constructivist propaganda posters and reference religious icon painting, jazz rhythms, and the kineticism of Piet Mondrian’s proto-Op art of the 1940s.  The experience of Gatson’s work is a combination of dynamic movement embedded with layers of social commentary that is often conveyed emotionally and physiologically rather than explicitly defined.

Andrea Santos’ work is influenced by her solo travel through various landscapes in the American West. Witnessing an immense amount of time in the sculpted land and reckoning with her own temporarily, Santos developed a desire to unearth the layers of geological, cultural, and industrial histories that are present above and below the surface. Informed by extreme vulnerability, her work simulates moving parts that take on unknown forms.  The imagery in Santos’ work is drawn, copied, doubled, erased, or transferred to build a history of mark making that translates as energy and movement.  These processes were developed in conversation with her experience as a professional printmaker.  Rather than building up layers on a flat substrate, she adds and subtracts material throughout the creation of a work, not unlike creating a print in reverse.  Marks may appear as bold gestures or subtle eraser lines – a Xerox cutout frozen in place under a layer of clear resin or pointed shapes cut directly into wood panels. These disparate images are folding into one another, breaking the confines of the frame and rattling illusions of surface, material, object, and image.