PRESS RELEASE:

RIO BRAVO Fine Art presents

Gregory Montreuil: “UNTIL NOW”

March 11,–April 29, 2017

Reception for the Artist: March 11, 2017 6:00-8:00PM

Rio Bravo Fine Art is proud to present a selection of works by Gregory Montreuil from the early 1980s until the present. This will be Montreuil’s second solo show at Rio Bravo Fine Art.

Lawrence Durrell wrote; “Human Beings are expressions of their landscapes.”  Similarly, the artworks created by Montreuil reflect the various places in which he has made them. While they are not themselves landscapes they walk us along Montreuil’s trajectory, beginning with formative years in the Midwest where he was born and studied art. He then moved to the urban environment of New York City, where he lived and worked for more than 30 years. While living in New York, Montreuil was simultaneously extending roots to the Southwestern United States and overseas to France. He now lives and creates art in New Mexico and Marseille, France.

Montreuil has always worked within the nonobjective definition of abstraction and has created in several mediums: oil paintings, drawings, collage, and mixed media. With intentionally reduced constructs, his early work used color, while the middle period of more than a decade was intentionally limited to black, white, and gray. The use of color has come back recently.

The exhibition surveys Montreuil’s work chronologically and the artist jokes that “it will consist of Greg’s Greatest Hits.” Seeing works from various overlapping periods together will clarify the parameters and the influence of his immediate environment on the process of making art. Montreuil works with contradictions, such as speed and control, chance and decision, the structured as opposed to the chaotic. He maps different paths through the dilemmas posed by these polarities, seeking both to resolve them and to pull them into focus.

With the metaphor of life and work as a journey, this exhibition will provide a map of the road one artist had taken thus far. Montreuil sums up his attitude in a quote by Susan Sontag: “I haven’t been everywhere, but it is on my list”