Loyal is happy to announce a solo exhibition by American artist Mark Thomas Gibson taking place at Loyal on Kammakargatan 68 in Stockholm, Sweden. We look forward to welcoming you to the opening reception with the artist on Thursday, April 19 from 6 to 9 pm.

GAUNTLET is Mark Thomas Gibson’s first solo exhibition in Europe. Gibson is highly regarded in a new wave of figuration. Following his solo exhibition at Fredericks and Freiser in New York this Fall, Gibson was highlighted in Frieze Magazine’s article “Acts of Recognition: A new wave of figurative painting in recent New York exhibitions prompts critical questions about which bodies we depict, for whom and to what end” by David Geers. In this new body of work at Loyal, Mark Gibson conceptualizes the image of a world ravaged by a deluge. The flood is depicted in the exhibition’s four large-scale paintings on canvas and a large drawing comprised of 40 individual works which together make up a single image of a body of water rendered in black ink.

‘The paintings are inspired by drawings I made from the summer of 2016 through spring 2017, a lot of that time post the 2016 Election. I feel like the world was living in the wake of a massive disaster. The paintings are a translation of the feeling of ruin and loss of that moment and the years that have passed. I feel we are in a critical moment.

I feel like I’ve been running a gauntlet. Everything that felt logical or functional has been tossed into chaos. The larger world is madness and my country is being run by a madman. Everything comes into question, my politics, morality, history, love, friends, and work. Nothing is sacred and the volume is cranked to 11.

After a disaster there’s a brief period of time, it’s a silence gap. It’s the point where we can make a choice on how are we going to move forward. The paintings represent an opportunity to present that almost sublime open moment for the viewer. We are all in this together and we will sink or swim as a civilization if we don’t figure this out.’ — Mark Thomas Gibson, April 2018

Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) is an American artist based between New Haven and New York. Gibson received his BFA from Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art in Painting/Printmaking in 2013, where he received the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Award. At present Gibson is assistant dean of student relations and a critic at Yale University School of Art. In 2016 Gibson co-curated the exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo at Yale University, an unprecedented overview of over 90 years of black image production by black publishers, black artists and by non-black artists and publishers allied with foregrounding the black experience. Black Pulp! was reviewed in the New York Times and Art in America.

In 2016 Gibson released his first artist book, Some Monsters Loom Large. His second artist book, Early Retirement, published by Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich in fall 2017 features over 200 pen-and-ink drawings that play off both fine art and comic book vernacular, using the traditional black-and-white palette of graphic novels. Mark Thomas Gibson is represented by Fredericks Freiser Gallery, New York.

His work was recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Exhibition documentation Fredrik Andersson Andersson