Wendell Gladstone b. 1972

Over the past decade, Wendell Gladstone has produced figurative paintings that evoke dream-like narratives, free from the logic that typically governs traditional representation. In his newest large-scale paintings, titled Cocoon and Intersecting Selves, Gladstone depicts a group of bodies: one peering through an interior window, one engaging with the outside world, and a third embedded into the architecture that separates the other two bodies. For Gladstone, each character represents various facets of an individual, perhaps a meditation on our inner and outer selves, or the mind and body. As with past works, the artist uses a bright, candy-colored palette. He layers with transparent mediums to subtly reveal the forms beneath, immediately seducing the viewer and only later revealing psychologically charged subtexts.