GARY SCHAFTER

ARTIST STATEMENT

From 1985 to present, I have been living and working in San Antonio, Texas as a professional artist.  Originally, I moved to San Antonio to complete my M.F.A., which I received from the University of Texas, San Antonio in 1985.  Since graduate school, I have had 26 solo exhibitions and have participated in many group shows.  During this time, I developed a long and valued relationship with the Craighead-Green Gallery, at which I have had 12 solo exhibitions and have participated in multiple group shows.  I have approximately 300 paintings in private and public collections, including the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

General artistic concerns and themes 

At the core of my methodology is a commitment to the ‘tradition’ of painting, to understanding the historical dialogue between surface and illusion, the pictorial and the plastic, subject and content.  For approximately the past 20 years, I have been investigating, in general, the issue of mediated representation and, specifically, the problematic relationship between the image and its referent. 

The problem of making art intelligible is fundamentally semantic, not aesthetic.  In my work, painting subjects (e.g. still-life, landscape, animals, etc.)  become ‘convention ready-mades’, a foil, by which to explore the relationship between neutral subject and active concept.  Often with irony and humor, I hope to encourage the viewer to recognize the inherent slippage—the subject depicted as subject, and the painting as an artistic conceit as content, articulating the artifice inherent in all representational art.’

What I hope to be obvious in my work is the joy of painting and my excitement about and commitment to the beauty of the creative process.

PAST EXHIBITION: 11.18.17-12.30.17 | Jackson, Schafter, Ziegler