Gail Winbury participated in the Pro Arts Curators Choice show in Spring 2016 and the Ancien Régime: the pre-revolutionary world show in Fall 2018 at Village West Gallery.
Gail Winbury's studio is in Manufacturers Village in East Orange, New Jersey. She studied painting for fifteen years with Chinese-American artist Dorothy Yung, at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, with Joan Snyder and in Europe. She has had over 8 solo exhibitions, and shows in museums and galleries in the States, Italy and Germany. She has won several awards including the Curtis Hilliard Memorial Award. Winbury's work is in many publications such as "Art in America" on-line, an Italian art catalog and a book on Bach's cello solos. There is a catalog of her work from a solo show published in 2016. She was a Resident at the School of Visual Arts (2014), a visual arts fellow with the Bau Foundation in Italy (2015) and was awarded a residency in Arad, Israel (2016). Winbury just completed a residency with Michael David and Brenda Goodman. She lives one month a year in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico where she makes her many of her collages.
Lilly Wei, art critic:
"Winbury produces a richly diverse, and assured body of work. She is a gifted colorist... Experimenting is easy for her, integral to her approach to painting, which depends upon intuition as well as more calculated decisions. Winbury's art espouses themes that are psychological and philosophical, exploring states of being, probing the big questions. Each of her paintings...holds her essential premise, founded on uncertainty and intangible longings, on the complexity of the human condition."
An earlier body of Winbury's work (2011-2016) explores the feminine experience from an empathic and feminist point of view. This art reflects upon the female body and power. In another painting series from 2014-2017, she contemplates the transience of life. Inspired by the loss of her parents, she investigates through oil paint aging and mortality. Her paintings from 2017 emphasize the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and materiality. Winbury pushes painting beyond its traditional 20th century borders to merge the boundaries of painting, drawing, sewing, sculpture and collage.
However, her most recent series is deeply personal and psychological, blending psychological theory, personal experience/memory and abstraction. D.W. Winnicott, an inspiration for Winbury's recent work, believed the roots of the "True Self" (trust, creativity, and spontaneity) grow before the acquisition of spoken language. "The Inscrutable: our intimate selves ", is a visual journal painted over a 9-month period. Each piece holds the truth of a particular mental state, mood, or memory. Like a prism composed of multiple facets, these oil paintings together form a whole. This work originated with the following parameters: use 38" x 38", shift from a warm palette to using hues of blue.
In the end, Winbury's work, is deeply social and psychological. Always emotional, it is driven by her wish to communicate in visual language about the losses, transitions and joys inherent in the human condition.
For more information, please visit gwinburypainting.com.
