Bob Thompson & Candida Alvarez @ Gray Gallery, NYC - "Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez" Exhibition

Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez

Real Monsters in Bold Colors

Gray Gallery, New York

April 30 - July 3, 2025

GRAY announces Real Monsters in Bold Colors: Bob Thompson and Candida Alvarez, an exhibition exploring the interplay between two artists who have reshaped the discourse of figurative and abstract traditions. The exhibition brings together works by BOB THOMPSON (1937-1966), who exhibited with GRAY in the first decade of the gallery’s history, with new paintings by CANDIDA ALVAREZ (b. 1955) in the gallery’s first project with the artist. 

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. Candida Alvarez states, “Very few painters admit to their influences. However, Bob 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,  Candida Alvarez is creating new paintings using Thompson’s compositions as a starting point. Real Monsters in Bold Colors will coincide with Candida Alvarez: Circle, Point, Hoop, the first large-scale museum survey of her work at El Museo del Barrio.

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

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.

Candida 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 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, Candida 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.”

Candida 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; Addison Gallery of American Art; Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.

BOB THOMPSON

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. Bob 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 Bob 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. Bob Thompson returned to the US, renting an apartment in the Lower East Side in 1963. In the same year, GRAY first exhibited Bob 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, Bob 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.

GRAY NEW YORK

1018 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10075

www.richardgraygallery.com

Bob Thompson @ 52 Walker, NYC - "So let us all be citizens" Exhibition

Bob Thompson

So let us all be citizens

52 Walker, New York

April 21 – July 8, 2023

52 Walker presents its seventh exhibition So let us all be citizens, which features a range of paintings by BOB THOMPSON. The works on view spotlight the artist’s jazz-influenced style and how he used this method to engage new audiences within the history of painting. Looking at his particular consideration for color, line, and figuration—developed during a period when abstraction was the dominant trend in American art—this intimate exhibition pays homage to the friction Bob Thompson generated between his proximity to and deviation from cited and canonical sources. The show’s title is taken from a speech that Bob Thompson gave at a church as a teenager, “Building through Citizenship.” Forecasting the artist’s passion for the tenets of freedom and expression, the phrase “So let us all be citizens” encapsulates the power of Thompson’s work to widen the scope of what is imaginable in contemporary painting and for whom.

Though his career as a painter spanned only a brief eight-year period, from 1958 through his untimely death at age twenty-eight in 1966, Bob Thompson left behind a singular and influential body of figurative work that remains vitally resonant. Taking cues from the exploratory and improvisatory music with which he was engrossed, the artist painted spirited, colorful compositions that considered the interplay of bodies, allegories, and natural landscapes while reconfiguring European masterworks. Including paintings from important public and private collections, this solo presentation at 52 Walker is one of the first in New York City devoted to Bob Thompson since his retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1998.

From the late 1950s onward, Bob Thompson incorporated classical and art historical references into his visual language. Early works by the artist, Wagadu (1960) and Untitled (1961), feature his confident linework and flat planes of color; the former’s namesake references the Arabic term for the ancient Ghana Empire. The Ascension-like composition of Caledonia Flight (1963) is enlivened by fantastical creatures and its red-purple palette. The Gambol (1960), based on Paul Gauguin’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98), is another example of Thompson’s dynamic figuration, showing the artist exploring brushwork by layering quick strokes across the canvas and juxtaposing dark colors—a signature of this early period.

Bacchanalia, a prominent theme for renaissance and European modernist painters, also became a significant subject for Bob Thompson from 1960 onward. Triumph of Bacchus (1964) references this topic explicitly and shows a “processional” composition—a hallmark of Thompson’s later work—loosely based on history paintings akin to those by the French baroque artist Nicolas Poussin. Alongside Paolo Uccello, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Francisco de Goya, Poussin was a looming influence for Bob Thompson in his mature period, and he would derive and combine much of these artists’ compositions for his own. La Mort des Enfant de Bethel (1964–1965) takes its title from a seventeenth-century baroque Laurent de la Hyre painting and recasts the original composition into a more naturalistic setting—albeit with a vibrant, high-contrast palette.

Bob Thompson: So let us all be citizens is curated by Ebony L. Haynes and presented by 52 Walker. A companion group exhibition, So let us all be citizens too, which considers Thompson’s influence on both his contemporaries and subsequent generations of artists, is on view concurrently at David Zwirner London. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which represents the estate of the artist, also have a Bob Thompson solo exhibition in New York.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Robert “Bob” Thompson (1937–1966) first entered Boston University to study education before leaving for the University of Louisville to pursue art in 1957. There, he met painter Sam Gilliam and joined the more established artist’s collective Gallery Enterprises. After his sophomore year, Thompson spent a summer painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he encountered Lester Johnson and Jan Müller, whose work Thompson particularly admired.

Around 1959, Bob Thompson moved to New York, where he mingled with jazz musicians Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman, Milford Graves, Sonny Rollins, and Nina Simone, among others. He also encountered Allan Kaprow’s Happenings as well as other developments in conceptual art; however, the artist would eschew these experimentations to engage more intimately with works by the established masters of European art history. After mounting his first solo exhibition in New York at Red Grooms’s Delancey Street Museum in 1960, Thompson received a grant to go to Europe; he would travel to and settle in Paris, Ibiza, and Rome for short periods of time, viewing works of art at museums and galleries firsthand while maintaining his studio practice. He returned to New York in 1963, joining Martha Jackson Gallery and presenting solo shows there in 1963 and 1965. He traveled to Rome in 1965. Despite warnings from his doctors and loved ones, Bob Thompson continued to drink and use drugs heavily after an emergency surgery. After being hospitalized for appendicitis, he died in Italy at the age of twenty-eight in 1966.

52 WALKER, NEW YORK

52 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.52walker.com