May 07 – June 25, 2005

Opening reception: May 7, 6–8 pm

Lora Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition by British artist, Ewan Gibbs, entitled From the Empire State Building.

The exhibition will include eight new drawings on graph paper – seven in pencil and one in ink – measuring 11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches. The sources for these images are photographs taken by the artist from the observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York City.

The drawings are composed of thousands of single marks, either circles or lines, one per square of the graph paper. Gibbs speaks of his working process as "building" the image. Each drawing is built square-by-square with the artist's focus on one mark at a time, one moment at a time, rather than on the image as a whole. Gibbs hopes to erase an artist's narrative and to focus on the way we see or perceive. While the meticulous nature of Gibb's work draws us in, each drawing is enhanced as we pull away and observe a larger atmospheric field.

Each drawing in this series has the same title, From the Empire State Building, as a deliberate choice by the artist, so that when we attempt to differentiate the works, we are forced to engage more deeply with the image.

Ewan Gibbs was born in 1973 and lives and works in London with his wife and baby daughter. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe and has been acquired by The Tate Gallery, London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and, most recently, the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin.