Gibson LeGaré

Gibson LeGare’ is an artist living and working in Northern California. His creative life began in New York City in the 90s, where he designed and installed a window  for Barney’s New York in his early twenties — an early expression of the tension between art and commerce that has shaped his career ever since. During those years he exhibited paintings at Momenta Gallery, Galapagos Art Space, and White Columns Gallery, while also designing and building sets for fashion and music videos.

Since relocating to California, LeGare’ has worked in film and commercials as a scenic artist. Through it all, painting and drawing have remained non-negotiable. Studio or no studio, he has never stopped making work. It is his life’s work in the most literal sense.

After exhibiting at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2015, he stepped back from showing work publicaly and turned inward — determined to find his own voice, free from the pull of the surrounding creative  and commercial culture. What emerged from that period is a practice rooted in stillness and intention. His purpose, as he has come to understand it, is to process the chaos of postmodern life and distill it into something calm and uncluttered. He works exclusively with water-based, eco-minded materials and creates no imagery that can be directly tied to the outside world. His forms and energies come from nature.

He asks nothing of his paintings except that they exist honestly. He does not try to convince the viewer of anything, nor does he offer fixed meanings. It is the process, not the product, that matters most — and his highest aspiration is simply to create something beautiful whose meanings will reveal themselves over time, to the viewer and to himself.