The Ann Tower Gallery is pleased to present Recent Paintings by Gary Bower in our second floor gallery.

Distinguished New York artist Gary Bower has kept strong ties to Lexington since 1972 when he was a visiting artist in the Department of Art at University of Kentucky. Since then, he has held several positions, including serving as the director at the School of the Arts in Lacoste, France; visiting artist positions at the School of the Chicago Art Institute, Bard College, and the University of California, Davis, CA; and Staff Critic in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at major museums and galleries throughout the United States, most recently last spring at OK Harris Works of Art, New York City.

Bower is showing both abstract and representational paintings that are visionary, innovative, and penetrating. In the abstract works, his palette of color, in conjunction with countless repainting to adjust edge and tone, creates a surface effect that is at once painterly, layered, and textured, but also flat on the canvas, angular and grid-like. The representational works are still lifes that juxtapose realistically painted objects with abstract passages. These works resonate with multiple meanings, personal iconography, and ultimately, with mystery.

In a catalogue of Bower's work, critic David S. Rubin wrote that his paintings, "…enact marriages between the intuitive and the rational, the emotional and the calm, or the painterly and the linear…" Bower's new pieces are testament to this ideology; they show the tension that has been present in his work for the past 35 years. The dual aspects of his work stem from the contrast created by sharp angular lines evocative of the minimalist aesthetic and painterly brushstrokes attributed to more traditional forms of art. Rubin wrote that Bower achieved this "by adopting the views, early in his career, that opposites are not mutually exclusive and that compatibility is preferable to polarity…"

Bower was born in Dayton, Ohio and attended The Ohio State University where he earned a B.A. degree in Philosophy and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship as well as a Regional Arts Council Fellowship Award. He has been featured in many publications including The New York Times and Art in America. Bower's work is included in private and public collections spanning the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; the Cleveland Art Museum, Cleveland, OH; the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha, NE; the Patrick Lannon Collection, Los Angeles, CA; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, the Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; the Richmond Museum of Art, Richmond, VA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and the Wexner Center for Visual Arts, Columbus, OH.

Presently, Bower divides his time between teaching humanities at the State University of New York at Cobleskill and working in his studio in the Catskills.