Michael Gregory

Michael Gregory, Floating World, oil on canvas on panel, 62" x 56", 2020. Michael Gregory (born 1955) is an American artist known for paintings of Western landscapes, barns and silos, and flowers. His images, while detailed and realist in appearance, are composites of real-world locales and objects painted from imagination, observation and memory. Critics suggest that unlike many contemporary realists or other landscapists, Gregory avoids nostalgia, traditional notions of verity and authenticity, or irony. They characterize his paintings as mythic, allegorical vehicles for metaphysical reflection on human experience and the interior essence of places, things and ideas. Ann Lauterbach writes that he employs landscape as "a mode of human thought and imagination, dense with cultural markers and historical significance, as real as it is imagined. The American West, Gregory seems to be telling us, is in fact, an illusion, a phantom, a construct." He has exhibited at venues including the de Young Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Arkansas Art Center, Hunter Museum of American Art and Butler Institute of American Art. After living in Bolinas, California for several decades, Gregory is based in Rhinebeck, New York.

Early life and education Gregory was born in Los Angeles in 1955. After graduating, he was inspired by road trips through California's flat Central Valley to return to an earlier interest in landscape influenced by Dutch masters and 19th-century American painters Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Some critics liken their fabricated status to still lifes composed in terms of abstract planes and colors or Hollywood set constructions—convincing in their familiarity and detail, yet unsettling upon close inspection, with aspects revealed to be vaguely awry. Bill Berkson writes, "[Gregory's] subject is nature as an excess that defies any concept of necessity. It is neither a picturesque garden nor an innocent victim of human management. It is not an art object." as well as galleries such as Nancy Hoffman (New York, 1988–present), Berggruen (San Francisco, 1985–present), and Gail Severn (Ketchum, ID, 1993–present).

Recognition Gregory's work is held in the collections of the Boise Art Museum, Bolinas Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, San Jose Museum of Art, Tacoma Art Museum, and U.S. Embassy (Brussels), as well as corporate collections. He was an artist-in-residence at the Evansville Museum of Arts, Science and History in 2003.