Gary Komarin

His works are recognized for their spontaneity, playful figuration, and painterly expression, reflecting his dedication to the potential of concrete art.

For him, abstraction is not a formal dead end but a medium to include more possibilities, avoiding the limitations imposed by recognizable imagery.

Notable exhibitions include: Komarin’s work incorporates elements of spontaneity, abstraction, and symbolic motifs drawn from his New York upbringing and European heritage.

[8] According to a New York Times article by Barry Schwabsky, “Guston's lesson in cultivating the unknown has clearly stuck with Mr. Komarin.

And on a more superficial level, the teacher's peculiar sense of form can also still be traced in his former student's work – in the way Mr. Komarin's bulbous forms can seem to echo, in an abstract way, the cigars, cyclopean heads and naked light bulbs in Guston's paintings.”[9] Komarin prefers non-art industrial canvas tarps and drop cloths as opposed to traditional painting media and materials.

The ‘cake’ is a stable form, and the linear treatment of a legible image - along with the atmospheric treatment of the off white surround - allows for a different kind of balance between the painting's two colors than if they were used in purely abstract forms such as Alber's squares or Mark Rothko's more nebulous hovering color fields.

If his marks appear awkward and childlike, it's because he has learned over the years how to turn off his internal critic and work from a place of detachment that allows for freshness, newness, and authenticity.

Komarin keeps things fresh and loose by doing several paintings at a time, working quickly on the floor on large squares of untreated, raw, canvas — sometimes even drop cloths — with big, inexpensive brushes and open buckets of latex enamel and other copious materials such as house paint or Spackle.

There's an element of control, of course, but the paint may drip, splash or bleed in unexpected ways, gifts of accident that the artist may choose to keep or not.

Those decisions, while still intuitive, draw on a stored knowledge base, a liftetime of observing and evaluating form, color, and line, so that when something happens, for better or worse, he recognizes it.

In this same year, several of his paintings were added to the private collections of novelists Casey Maitlin and Martin Amis, respectively, as well as the writer Candace Bushnell.