About the Artist:

Sunsets never really go out of style. Greg O’Malley’s paintings are gradients first and foremost, lines of color brushed carefully together until each bleeds perfectly into the next, the end result the kind of perfectly in-key chromatic transition most often seen above distant skylines in the late evening. Their palettes mingle sickly-sweet reds, oranges, and pinks with pale blues; sometimes, a dark-hued band gives the canvas a weighted density while other works are content to simply float ethereally.

The pieces are motivated by a non-ironic pursuit of beauty, a rare commodity in the hyper-saturated world of contemporary painting more obsessed with self-critical navel-gazing than clear-eyed aesthetic questing. It’s not so folksy as all that, though. O’Malley sabotages his own impulses with thick swaths of opaque impasto, like lengths of duct tape stretched over the background.

-Kyle Chayka