EWAN GIBBS: CHICAGO
May 7 – June 19, 2010

Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new drawings by British artist Ewan Gibbs. This will be the artist's first exhibition with the gallery and his first ever in Chicago. Gibbs began this project by taking over a thousand photographs of the city of Chicago, focusing primarily on the city's famed architecture. Gibbs then returned to his studio in England and, selecting a fraction of those images, he created sixteen drawings over the course of several months.

Using minuscule hatch marks and circles, Gibbs draws in a strict grid across the page. This deliberate, labor-intensive technique means that it can sometimes take weeks for the artist to complete a single drawing. The resulting image is recognizable at a distance, while abstract and fleeting up close.

Most of the drawings in this exhibition are done in the artist's signature size, a standard A4 sheet, measuring around 12 x 8 inches. In addition, Gibbs is debuting an even more intimately-scaled group of drawings, each about the size of a business card.

Ewan Gibbs' work is currently the subject of a one-person exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who commissioned him to make a group of eighteen drawings in honor of the museum's 75th anniversary, and in 2012 he will have a solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among many others. Ewan Gibbs obtained his BFA from Goldsmiths College at the University of London. He lives and works in Oxfordshire, England.