Wendell Gladstone

Over the past decade, Wendell Gladstone has produced figurative paintings that evoke dream-like spaces, free from the logic that typically governs traditional representation. He uses allegory and metaphor to examine a wide swath of cultural references—from art history to contemporary politics and personal experience—and allows his subconscious to guide the narratives.

Gladstone interrogates the hierarchical struggle among a cast of characters as they cycle through chronicles of rapture, unrest, and revolt. Looking to historical European satirical cartoons and Aztec stone carvings, his paintings survey the boundless energy of the human psyche. With a bright, often candy-colored palette layered with transparent mediums that subtly reveal the forms beneath, his works immediately seduce the viewer and only later reveal psychologically charged subtexts.

Wendell Gladstone (b. 1972, Boston, MA; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received his BA at Brown University, an MFA in Painting at Claremont Graduate University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Kravets/Wehby, New York, NY; and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. CA;, and, in 2003, at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. Select museum group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV; the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY; the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; and the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX. His works have been written about by Artforum, Art in America, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Artsy, Artnet, Installation Magazine, Elephant, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, and WhiteWall.

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Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Safe Haven, a series of new paintings by Los Angeles- based Wendell Gladstone. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The new paintings in Safe Haven continue the artist’s interest in surreal and psychologically charged spaces, often populated with a cast of humans, animals, and hybrid forms. Expanding upon the idea of a ‘haven’, or a place of refuge, this exhibition conjures the varying degrees in which tenderness and precariousness overlap. Binaries blur between intermingled bodies— what is understood as interior and exterior, bound and liberated, giving and receiving, fluidly shift within a single work. This series examines an unfolding relationship between human connection, power, and safety through notions of gazing and physical contact.

Giving license to his subconscious to guide the narratives and structure, the paintings allow for Jungian archetypes and parables of the past to mix with the artist’s personal experience and the zeitgeists of today—culminating in a body of work which shifts mythologically into the present and champions the potential for lucidity to provide a sense of clarity in unsettling times.