Wigmore sleeps perhaps too soundly on a suburban lawn; Blaze glowers through parted elevator doors; Ben sits in a windowsill, light from the street illuminating a modest hoarder’s paradise. These are but a few of the characters that populate Hope Gangloff’s world and so her paintings. Surprisingly these candid moments are not captured in the instant, but contrived and painted wholly in the studio. Complete sets are built in the service of spontaneity, to create the semblance of I.R.L. Caught up in the backdrops are the bits and pieces, attributes and signifiers that serve to individualize and distinguish the sitter. Current events and popular culture are captured in the mix by way of news clippings and assorted ephemera, grounding each painting in the present day. In the end, friends, family, admirers, admired arrive in Queens to sit for hours and days all to see their essence materialize on canvas. Their presence and engagement lends a palpable dimension and depth, infusing each painting with a humanity that radiates from sitter to painter to viewer. Painting from life, Hope Gangloff paints Life.
HOPE GANGLOFF was born in 1974 in Amityville, NY and is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art and Science. She has exhibited internationally with an upcoming solo exhibition Spring 2017 at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA, and previous solo museum exhibitions at the Broad Art Museum, MI; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT and a three person show at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Last Magazine, Modern Painters, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Vice, and The Village Voice among others.
Hope Gangloff was selected as the Cover Artist for the 2017 Winter/Spring Program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music - part of BAM's tradition of visual art on the cover of BAMbill. Gangloff joins the ranks of luminaries such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, and Rosemarie Trockel, who have been chosen and generously supported the programming at BAM since 1993. Her work, “Starlee Kine – Writer’s Kitchen” currently hangs in the lobby of Brooklyn Academy’s historic opera house at 30 Lafayette Avenue.
