NEW YORK, NY.- This exhibition highlights the two artists’ use of color and form as vehicles for storytelling, while underscoring their distinct approaches to rebuffing and reimagining the painting traditions that preceded them. Real Monsters in Bold Colors offers a view into the working practice of contemporary artist, Candida Alvarez, by way of the work of Bob Thompson. The exhibition reveals how artists find inspiration in their surroundings, often borrowing, expanding, and riffing off of historical sources as well as other artists, poets, and musicians to make their work.

The exhibition title is derived from an essay on Bob Thompson written by the late poet Hettie Jones (1934-2024) whose close ties with the artist reflects a deep understanding of his vision and conveys the multifarious energy of the creative landscape in 1960s New York. Jones’s language conveys the anxiety of representing humanity and rehashing images and allegories of the past at a time when abstraction was on the rise, but also notes that as a young poet seeing the work, “we also saw the future in those multicolored worlds.”

Bob Thompson is represented in the exhibition with a selection of paintings and works on paper from 1960-65. Thompson is best known for his kaleidoscopic compositions that revalue the work of Old Masters and the allegories within them. His distortions and reconfigurations of familiar compositions flattened and obfuscated figures as a way to insert his voice into the canon of art history. This sentiment resonates deeply for Candida Alvarez who emerged as an artist in New York twenty years later in a similarly interdisciplinary milieu.

Alvarez’s energetic and colorful abstractions likewise draw from art historical motifs as well as her lived experience. Seeded by her daily life, her memories, photographs, and the art and music that inspires her, her compositions evolve, organically, into collage-like abstractions in rhythmic, saturated color. Alvarez states, “Very few painters admit to their influences. However, Thompson gave me the courage to push that relationship, to look at paintings and use them as a beginning point. In fact, I have looked at several painters intently, including de Kooning, Picasso and even Piero della Francesca and now Thompson.” Thompson’s silhouetted and flattened figures reflect a transitional space between abstraction and figuration, an in between space that Alvarez pushes further in her own work. She continues, “Thompson’s work is my liberation. Why not a pink, red or brown body frolicking under a tree?” For her first major New York gallery show since the 1990s and her first project with GRAY, Alvarez is creating new paintings using Thompson’s compositions as a starting point.

Real Monsters in Bold Colors is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Hendrik Folkerts, curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Candida Alvarez participates courtesy of Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL.

Candida Alvarez (b. 1955, Brooklyn, New York, lives and works in Baroda, Michigan) is an artist and educator whose artistic career spans five decades. Her vibrant, multi-layered works are intricate arrangements of visual fragments from her life. She is fascinated by the interplay of color, texture, form, and the tactile and emotional qualities of paint. Regarded as one of her generation’s most innovative and experimental painters, Alvarez’s kaleidoscopic abstract and figurative works weave together personal and cultural memory, art historical references, wordplay, and everyday life.

Alvarez was raised in Brooklyn by parents who migrated from Puerto Rico, and emerged as an artist in the late 1970s. While pursuing her bachelor of fine arts degree at Fordham University, she was working as a curator at El Museo del Barrio. Her first exhibition was at the Museo in 1977, in a group show called Confrontación: Ambiente y Espacio. In the early 1980s, she worked in a studio as part of the International Studio and Workspace Program at PS1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1). She also participated in the foundational artist in residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. These experiences were critical to Alvarez’s development as an artist, connecting her with the wider network of artists, community, conversation and collaboration. After attending Yale for graduate school, Alvarez accepted a teaching position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. In the artist’s words “New York was where I became an artist. Chicago is where I expanded my vision.”

Alvarez has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1981), Studio Museum in Harlem (1985), Pilchuck Glass School (1998), and LUMA Foundation (2023), among others. Recent awards include the Trellis Art Fund Award (2024), the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award (2022), and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (2022). Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Denver Art Museum; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Seattle Art Museum; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Addison Gallery of American Art, among others.

Bob Thompson (1937-1966) was an American artist who experienced a brief but prolific career, spanning eight years, he produced several hundred paintings, drawings, and oil studies. Thompson was highly regarded for his reworkings of traditional compositions of “Old Masters” such as Raphael and Goya, into which he integrated vibrant colors and modernist shapes. Influenced by jazz, Thompson’s art is full of freedom and rhythm.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937 Thompson began to study art with Expressionist Ulfert Wilke at the University of Louisville in 1957. Thompson visited Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1958, where he encountered the expressive work of Jan Müller, Hans Hofmann, and Red Grooms and met many of the artists who would soon after become his peers when he moved to New York. He first traveled to Europe through a travel grant from the Walter Gutman Foundation in 1960, where he was able to study the masterworks with which his practice was in conversation first-hand. Thompson returned to the US, renting an apartment in the Lower East Side in 1963. In the same year, GRAY first exhibited Thompson in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition. The following year, in 1964, GRAY held a solo exhibition for the artist and was included in Yale University’s influential Seven Young Painters exhibition. In 1966, before his 29th birthday, Thompson passed in Rome from surgery complications. His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum, among others.