Upcoming Exhibition

GRAY is pleased to announce Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, an exhibition exploring the interplay between two artists who have reshaped the discourse of figurative and abstract traditions. The exhibition brings together works by Bob Thompson, who exhibited with GRAY in the first decade of the gallery’s history, with new paintings by Candida Alvarez in the gallery’s first project with the artist. The exhibition opens at GRAY New York with a public reception for the artist on April 30 and remains on view through July 3, 2025. 

This exhibition highlights the two artists’ use of color and form as vehicles for storytelling, while underscoring their distinct approaches to rebuffing and reimagining the painting traditions that preceded them. Real Monsters in Bold Colors offers a view into the working practice of contemporary artist, Candida Alvarez, by way of the work of Bob Thompson. The exhibition reveals how artists find inspiration in their surroundings, often borrowing, expanding, and riffing off of historical sources as well as other artists, poets, and musicians to make their work.

The exhibition title is derived from an essay on Bob Thompson written by the late poet Hettie Jones (1934-2024) whose close ties with the artist reflects a deep understanding of his vision and conveys the multifarious energy of the creative landscape in 1960s New York. Jones’s language conveys the anxiety of representing humanity and rehashing images and allegories of the past at a time when abstraction was on the rise, but also notes that as a young poet seeing the work, “we also saw the future in those multicolored worlds.” 

Bob Thompson will be represented in the exhibition with a selection of paintings and works on paper from 1960-65. Thompson is best known for his kaleidoscopic compositions that revalue the work of Old Masters and the allegories within them. His distortions and reconfigurations of familiar compositions flattened and obfuscated figures as a way to insert his voice into the canon of art history. This sentiment resonates deeply for Candida Alvarez who emerged as an artist in New York twenty years later in a similarly interdisciplinary milieu. 

Alvarez’s energetic and colorful abstractions likewise draw from art historical motifs as well as her lived experience. Seeded by her daily life, her memories, photographs, and the art and music that inspires her, her compositions evolve, organically, into collage-like abstractions in rhythmic, saturated color. Alvarez states, “Very few painters admit to their influences. However, Thompson gave me the courage to push that relationship, to look at paintings and use them as a beginning point. In fact, I have looked at several painters intently, including de Kooning, Picasso and even Piero della Francesca and now Thompson.” Thompson’s silhouetted and flattened figures reflect a transitional space between abstraction and figuration, an in between space that Alvarez pushes further in her own work. She continues, “Thompson’s work is my liberation. Why not a pink, red or brown body frolicking under a tree?” For her first major New York gallery show since the 1990s and her first project with GRAY,  Alvarez is creating new paintings using Thompson’s compositions as a starting point. Real Monsters in Bold Colors will coincide with Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, the first large-scale museum survey of her work at El Museo del Barrio.

Real Monsters in Bold Colors is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Hendrik Folkerts, curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Candida Alvarez participates courtesy of Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL.