Bob Thompson (1937-1966) was an American artist who experienced a brief but prolific career, spanning eight years, he produced several hundred paintings, drawings, and oil studies. Thompson was highly regarded for his reworkings of traditional compositions of "Old Masters" such as Raphael and Goya, into which he integrated vibrant colors and modernist shapes. Influenced by jazz, Thompson's art is full of freedom and rhythm.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937 Thompson began to study art with Expressionist Ulfert Wilke at the University of Louisville in 1957. Thompson visited Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1958, where he encountered the expressive work of Jan Müller, Hans Hofmann, and Red Grooms and met many of the artists who would soon after become his peers when he moved to New York. He first traveled to Europe through a travel grant from the Walter Gutman Foundation in 1960, where he was able to study the masterworks with which his practice was in conversation first-hand. Thompson returned to the US, renting an apartment in the Lower East Side in 1963. In the same year, GRAY first exhibited Thompson in the gallery's inaugural exhibition. The following year, in 1964, GRAY held a solo exhibition for the artist and was included in Yale University’s influential Seven Young Painters exhibition. In 1966, before his 29th birthday, Thompson passed in Rome from surgery complications. His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, among others.

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