Artists

Alex Gibson

Press release

Public is pleased to present Glass Cannon, the first UK solo exhibition by New York based artist Alex Gibson, whose paintings on panel exercise a type of compositional mapping, balancing the instantaneously recognisable with the abstraction of accumulation. Gibson’s compositions puzzle together scattered annotations with episodic sequences that spill onto the surface and sink beneath a confluence of superimposed characters. Across thirteen new works, the artist slips between gesture, symbol and image, toying with our desire for narrative resolution in a game of resistance and restraint.

Making his own dry pastel chalks from pigment and marble dust, Gibson’s works read with the directness and immediacy of drawing. Effortlessly blurring the categories of visual media – compressing elements of cartoon, comics, photography, pornography, art history, and film noir – Gibson populates his works with figures in various states of ‘finish’, together coalescing into a cacophonic heap of high and low. In works such as Intimacy and Purpose Pursuing Luck (2024), the artist demonstrates the impact of juxtaposition: ‘good’ drawing with ‘bad’ drawing, vulgar with poetic, passion with ambivalence. Leaning into such stereotyped genres of visual culture, Gibson toys with deceiving clarity, only to rupture the fallacy of cohesion with persistent interruption.