Wendell Gladstone

Public Gallery is pleased to present A Face Drawn in the Sand at the Edge of the Sea, a solo exhibition of six new paintings by Los Angeles based artist Wendell Gladstone, marking his debut with the gallery and in the UK. In Gladstone’s highly constructed surrealist compositions, subjects with otherworldly eyes and slender limbs intertwine in improbable contortions and lounge in gritty sand, set across beachy dreamscapes that play with surface texture and pattern. The impossibility of Gladstone’s worlds perhaps mirrors our estrangement from simpler times, and affectionately conveys a longing for connection with others and the natural world.

In the titular work of the exhibition, the artist depicts a large family collectively molding a representation of their mother in the sand, capturing a desire to create likeness even as encroaching waves wash into the lowest register of the composition. A swooping bird rendered to resemble stained glass interrupts the narrative sequence with a Muybridge-like motion. The title of the work gestures to Foucault’s The Order of Things, a history of knowledge published in 1966 delineating acceptable forms of truth within respective historical periods. Foucault characterizes the episteme of the Renaissance as one concerned with resemblance and similitude, the Classical era with ordering and difference, and the Modern episteme as the age of history. Starry-eyed and seductively stylized, Gladstone’s delirious subjects appear unperturbed by the rising tide, caressing one another while shaping the sand into a primitive resemblance of human form.

Then, Now, Warmth Hereafter (2024) depicts a figure with outstretched arms framing windows to unknown realms, or perhaps portals to the past and future – a turn to history telling over projects of resemblance. While Gladstone’s narratives are purposefully oblique and unburdened by a historic period or geographic site, they simultaneously enact the structural sensation of order, time and place with specificity. By using a diverse combination of surface textures, the artist mirrors his curiosity for different ways of thinking, inviting his viewers to transcend ideological differences in epistemic motivations and embrace the position of his depicted subjects. While at times seemingly innocent and alien, perhaps Gladstone’s subjects can also be viewed as all-seeing, all-knowing, apertures onto a future time to come.

Wendell Gladstone (b. 1972, Boston, MA, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. He received his BA at Brown University, an MFA in Painting at Claremont Graduate University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Kravets/Wehby, New York, NY; and Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles. CA;, and, in 2003, at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. Select museum group exhibitions include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV; the Chelsea Art Museum, New York, NY; the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; and the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX.