Gary Gissler
Anita Rogers Gallery is pleased to announce ‘against interpretation,’ a solo exhibition of works by Gary Gissler from 2008-2025. The exhibition will be on view September 3 through October 4 at 494 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor in New York City. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Wednesday, September 3, 6-8pm. RSVP here.
Literature and language play a central role in Gissler’s work, both in conceit and in practice. Gissler’s large mixed-media panel works appear to be minimal, abstract paintings (and, in many regards, they are) but are actually constructed from meticulously hand-cut and layered fragments of printed text by artists, thinkers, and writers such as Susan Sontag, Herman Melville, Bob Dylan, and Aldous Huxley. The artist’s process and the resulting works mirror one another; both are journeys of searching, of questioning, and of deep discovery. His pieces offer viewers a choice: one can linger on the surface observing the quiet beauty of the worked panel’s broader composition, or one can lean in and unearth the layers. The embedded text comes in and out of view, and getting to the meaning is hard-won and fleeting. The works, like the process, are meditative and slow in a way that allows patient viewers to spend time with them and move internally to the space beyond language.
The body of work on view has been informed by the thousands of texts Gissler has encountered over the course of his life, most formatively Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, and Sontag’s Against Interpretation. The complexities contained in these texts, particularly around the nature of interpretation and reality, along with the monomaniacal search for meaning in Moby Dick serve as the foundation of this exhibition. The show is centered around a large-scale installation consisting of 136 individual drawings, each encapsulating a single handwritten chapter from Moby Dick. By layering word upon individual word from each chapter, Gissler creates a dense graphite image so rich that it becomes reflective – in each piece, the viewer literally sees glimpses of themselves. Although the entirety of each chapter, every word, every letter, is right there on the page, the accumulation of words on top of one another renders it illegible. The meaning is just beyond reach.
At the core of Gissler’s work is a tension we all experience, whether we are aware of it or not: language is the only tool we have to interpret reality, yet it is also the thing that distances us from it. The methods we have to make sense of the world around us – language, analysis, meaning – are imperfect. In an attempt to understand, communicate, and connect, we create an additional layer between us and our experiences, and yet it never quenches the desire to share our worlds in this way.
Gary Gissler has exhibited widely over three decades, including shows at Castello 925, Venice, Italy; Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, NY; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA; Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA; the Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; and the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX, often with accompanying catalogues. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Flash Art, Art News, The New Yorker, ArtNet, and others. He has been awarded a Pollock Krasner Grant, a Chinati Foundation Artist Residency, and an Emily Harvey Foundation Residency. Collections include the RISD Museum and the Neuberger Museum, as well as numerous private collections. Gissler works between New York City and the Catskills.
For further information and photographs, please contact Elizabeth Thompson at elizabeth.thompson@anitarogersgallery.com, or call 347.604.2346. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 10am – 6pm.