Michael
Gallagher

My paintings are about space that doesn't exist. A surface that is unambiguously flat — paint on canvas — that insists, visually, on depth. That contradiction is not a trick. It is the subject.

I came to this through Abstract Expressionism, which I studied at USC, at UCLA under David Hockney and Tony Berlant, and at Yale under Jack Tworkov, Josef Albers, and Al Held. What interested me was not the emotional gesture — the mark as autobiography — but the mark as illusion. What does a brushstroke do to space? Can abstraction lie?

In the early 1970s, a group of us — James Havard, Jack Lembeck, Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, Tony King — were working through versions of this question simultaneously. We named what we were doing Abstract Illusionism, opened Razor Gallery at 464 West Broadway in SoHo, and showed the work. The Guggenheim acquired Pralaya in 1980. The Metropolitan acquired While Under His Very Pillow Rush Herds of Walruses and Whales in 1982. The work found its footing.

I have been at it for fifty years. The specific problems have shifted — the role of color, the relationship between painted gesture and photographic image, the tension between surface and depth — but the central question has not. A painting should do something to the eye that the eye cannot fully explain. That inexplicability is where it lives.