Alicia Gibson (b. 1980, Manhasset, NY) is an American artist based in Brooklyn and Woodstock, NY. In Gibson’s practice, ephemeral gestures become visually resonant, transforming the intimate and impulsive into high-energy, psychologically charged visual experiences. With humor, irreverence, a keen sense for the absurd, and a love for material excess, Gibson makes visible the intensity and contradictions of inner life.

Encountering an Alicia Gibson painting is akin to reading a highly personal visual monologue written in color and gesture, with the look and feel of a private notebook rendered at full painterly scale. Her richly layered, high-chroma compositions channel visual chaos and obsessive mark-making drawn from journals, confessional writing, found objects, and informal drawing habits. Handwriting, scrawled language, and impulsive notation are transformed into vibrant surfaces, with biting, often humorous titles that extend the psychological register of the work.

Gibson builds her paintings through thickly layered oil paint along with irreverent and humble materials such as puff paint, fake money, fake fur, burlap, lace, and fragments of personal correspondence. This material accumulation recalls the improvised visual logic of adolescence with its stylized names, pop-cultural crushes, half-legible phrases, and emotional shorthand. These elements function simultaneously as visual noise and psychological record, recombining memory, satire, and vulnerability into what Gibson has described as a process of venting and self-reflection. Humor and wit operate as tools for survival as much as critique, allowing her to move fluidly between personal experience and broader social commentary.

Drawing from formative visual habits such as doodling, journaling, slam books, and marginalia, Gibson treats youthful mark-making not as a precursor to art but as a fully realized aesthetic and psychological system. Impulsive gestures, repetitions, and scrawls become sites of meaning, elevating private notation into a rigorous visual language.

Across these surfaces, oversized words and phrases often dominate the composition. These terms, drawn from overheard, misread, or emotionally charged language, become visual pressure points as words circulate, stall, and repeat, lodging themselves in the mind. Painting functions as a means of release, as Gibson converts fixation into image and interior tension into catharsis. Akin to the ethos of Arte Povera and its embrace of the provisional, tactile, and culturally charged object, Gibson resists polish and hierarchy, allowing the gestures of the hand, the traces of making, and the lived energy of materials to carry conceptual and emotional weight

Gibson’s practice is informed by an early engagement with philosophy, including the study of Hegel and Kant, though she ultimately found painting to be a more functional and embodied mode of inquiry. Where philosophy seeks to systematize experience through abstraction, her work approaches similar questions of subjectivity, contradiction, perception, and becoming through sensation, materiality, and lived experience. The canvas becomes a site where thought is not resolved but actively wrestled with in real time.

Rather than presenting narratives of resolution or triumph, Gibson foregrounds process itself, particularly the oscillation between feeling, reaction, reflection, and reinterpretation. Humor and satire operate alongside anger and vulnerability, at once blunt, self-lacerating, and witty. Her work collapses the distance between private thought and public address. While figures are largely absent, the paintings remain intensely embodied, staging the mind as a theatrical arena where memory, desire, shame, and identity collide.

Gibson received her BA from Boston College, completed post-baccalaureate studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and earned her MFA from Hunter College in 2009. Solo exhibitions include Friend from Foe at Loyal (Stockholm), Purgatory Emporium at CANADA (New York), Marvin Gardens (Brooklyn), Real Estate (Brooklyn), and Julius Caesar Gallery (Chicago). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (New York), Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York), The Breeder (Athens), Lyles and King (New York), Regina Rex (New York), Derek Eller Gallery (New York), David Petersen Gallery (Minneapolis), and Adams and Ollman (Portland). Her work has been reviewed in Frieze, The New York Times, Art News, Hyperallergic, and Art Papers.

Education

2009 MFA, Hunter College, New York, NY
2004 Post-Baccalaureate Degree, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
2002 BA, Boston College, Newton, MA
2001 Pont-Aven School of Art, Brittany, France

Solo Exhibitions

2023
Totally Tails, Marisa Newman Projects, New York, NY

2021
Bacronym in a Sentence, Grifter, New York, NY

2017
Friend from Foe, Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
Backseat Bingo, Marvin Gardens, Brooklyn, NY
Not in a Million Beers, Real Estate, Brooklyn, NY

2016
Purgatory Emporium, Canada, New York, NY
Flip the Script turn the Tide, Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago, IL

Group Exhibitions

2025
So Long, Bobby, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY

2021
Friends of Marvin Gardens, Curated by Anthony Miller, Stanley’s, Los Angeles, CA
Side Bar, Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY

2020
100! A group exhibition commemorating Loyal’s 100th show, Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden
Make me One With Everyone, Grifter, New York, NY

2019
Go Away Road, Curated by Adrianne Rubenstein, Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden
There’s Something About Painting, Curated by Michael Pybus, Tatjana Pieters Gallery, Ghent, Belgium
Abby Lloyd & Alicia Gibson: Someone’s Happy, MX Gallery, New York, NY
A Fairly Secret Army, Curated by Paul Whiting, Wild Palms, Dusseldorf, Germany
Scattered and Smothered, Presented by Howard’s, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA

2018
Mixed Bag, Curated by Joe Bradley and Jeremy Willis, Real Estate Fine Art, Brooklyn, NY
Alicia Gibson and Carol John, Howard’s, Athens, GA
Shadowboxing, Lane Meyer Gallery, Denver, CO
Actually Weird, Curated by JJ Manford, Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY
White Columns Benefit Auction, White Columns, New York, NY
Friends of Marvin Gardens, Rod Barton, London, England
Tell Him What We Said About “Paint It Black”, Curated by Andy Mister, The Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery, NH

2017
Geranium, Stems Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
First Ever and Only East Hampton Biennial, Curated by Woobie Bogus and Adrianne Rubenstein, East Hampton, NY
Crunch, Curated by Matthew F. Fisher, The Breeder Projects, Athens, Greece
Postcards From the Edge, 19th annual, Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, NY
Alicia Gibson, Jennifer Levonian, Bruce M. Sherman, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR
Friends, Do Not Fear, Curated by Daniel Gibson New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2016
Fort Greene, Curated by Adrianne Rubenstein, Venus Over LA, Los Angeles, CA
Hill of Munch, Curated by Brian Belott, Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY
No Boys Allowed, Carroll and Sons Gallery, Boston, MA
Frieze Art Fair, CANADA Gallery curated by Katherine Bernhardt, New York, NY
X, Lyles & King, New York, NY
Six: A Benefit For Regina Rex, Regina Rex, New York, NY
Future Development, David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
35 Works On Paper, Beers, London, England

2015
Drops of Jupiter, Curated by Katrina Fimmel and Talia Shulze, Bannerette Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Trust Fall, Curated by Jennifer Sullivan, Spring//BBreak Art Show, New York, NY
Ornamenting Crime, Curated by Irena Jurek, Galerie Zürcher, New York, NY
Bulletproof Heart, Curated by Jennifer Sullivan and Stevie Mykietyn, Orgy Park, Brooklyn, NY

2014
Anthropocene, Canada, New York, NY
Paradise Sauna, TSA LA, Los Angeles, CA
My Heart is Empty, Curated by Max Guy and John Elio Reitman, The Hills Esthetic Center, Chicago, IL
How The Light Gets In, Brian Morris Gallery, New York, NY

2013
William DeLottie, Alicia Gibson, Adrianne Rubenstein, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY
Snail Salon, Curated by Adrianne Rubenstein, Regina Rex, Brooklyn, NY
Invincible Host, Curated by Elisa Soliven and JJ Manford, Underdonk Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Economy Candy, Harbor Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Honey Ramka Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2012
Joey, Curated by Gina Beavers, The Active Space, Brooklyn, NY

2011
The Unfunny Show, Curated by Matthew Mahler and Matthew Fisher, Small Black Door, Ridgewood, NY
Painting With Pictures II, Curated by David Gibson, Artjail Gallery, New York, NY

2009
Fracture: Divisions in Painting, Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL
Jack the Pelican, New York, NY
All Suffering Soon to End!, Callicoon Fine Arts, Callicoon, New York, NY
Far Out, Apartment Show, Brooklyn, New York, NY
One Day at a Time, Envoy Gallery, New York, NY

2008
The Sugar Show, Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York, NY
Pulse Art Fair, Envoy Gallery/Canteen Magazine Reading Room, Miami, FL
Ice Cream Social, Sara Nightingale Gallery, Easthampton, NY

2006
Global Pop, Curated by Joseph Carroll, Mills Gallery, Boston, MA

2005
Paper Awesome, Pigman Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2004
18th Annual Drawing Show, Mills Gallery, Curated by Raphaela Platow, Boston, MA
Identity Group Show, Lynn Center for the Arts, Lynn, MA

2003
Appetite for Distraction, Acme Gallery, Chicago, IL

2002 – 2006
Drawing Project, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA

Awards and Nominations

2008
Robert Motherwell Foundation’s Dedalus Grant for Fine Art, nominee

2002
Marianne M. Martin Award for excellence in Academics and Fine Art, Boston College, Newton, MA

Bibliography

Review Alicia Gibson at LOYAL by Johan Deurell, Frieze Magazine #193, Jan 4, 2018
Consumer Reports: Alicia Gibson, ARTnews, Jun 15, 2016
The “Fuck Em” Sex and Class Reversals of Alicia Gibson, By Mitch Speed, Momus, May 12, 2016
Alicia Gibson: The Awkward Early Years, Two Coats of Paint, Apr 29, 2016
Alicia Gibson: Interpreting Memories Through Kitsch, Satire and Paint, Frontrunner Magazine, Apr 27, 2016
A New Apartment Gallery Cultivates Community in Brooklyn by Benjamin Sutton, Hyperallergic, Jan 23, 2015
More Now than Then: When Art Reaches Back by Thomas Micchelli, Hyperallergic, Aug 16, 2014
Too Big to Fail: Big Paintings, By Mimi Luse, Art Papers, Jan/Feb, 2010
In These Paintings Imagination and Technique Run Wild, Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, October, 2002
Boston College biannual art publication, Cover, Stylus, 2002