Gregory Edwards

Gregory Edwards (born January 19, 1981) is a contemporary artist who lives in New York City.
Education
After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2003) he moved his studio to Brooklyn New York until April 2007 when he relocated to Frankfurt Germany. He attended Städelschule in Frankfurt, Germany.
Exhibition history
In 2005 Edwards participated in the group show "Sugar and Stress" at Fredericks Freiser Gallery, New York, exhibiting two paintings: Future Primitive, and Nobody. Other New York group exhibitions include "Diversity + Self-Identity" at the School of Visual Arts Gallery, "Psychic Reality" (Bellwether Gallery, 2006), Participant Inc (2006), and "The Poster Project" at Printed Matter in 2006.
In a press release in 2006, Edwards' work was described by art historian and patron of the arts, Esme Watanabe in this quote: "Gregory Edwards shifts in and out of various modes of painting. Images are built out of autonomous systems that come from different perspectives, yet are held together by a basic empirical language."
In 2007 he exhibited in a group show, "Post-Mass Audience Age" in Hamburg, Germany with Ritter & Staiff Gallery at HFBK Gallerie.
In 2011 Edwards had his first solo show in New York at 47 Canal, This was followed by his second solo show in New York also at 47 Canal in 2014.
Edwards was one of the first artists to show with Canal gallery, which is a commercial art gallery started by Margaret Lee (artist/dealer) and Oliver Newton (dealer).
In 2013 Edwards' work was included in DIS magazine's DISimages shoot with artist Bjarne Melgaard. In December 2013, Christopher Bollen interviewed Edwards for a feature in Interview Magazine. This is an excerpt from their conversation:
"The question mark might serve as an entry point to the 32-year-old artist's ongoing interest in the push and pull between abstraction and representation, the open-ended sense of play in his wild, often ostentatious patterning and his rigid structural control, and flat, thinly applied surfaces. After all, a question mark added to any last word turns the work of interpretation onto the audience."
Edwards' work is informed by his lifelong interest in literature and every day visual culture. His use of words in his paintings signal universal themes that vacillate between being both meaningful and empty at once. Edwards' paintings also position themselves in a space between abstraction and realism in the sense that image making weaves in and out of cognition of subject matter. He works with concepts of visual unease and ideas that are at once simplistic and universal. Among his predecessors are artists like Michel Majerus who used abstraction and contemporary throw-away popular visual culture as important jumping off points in making work that straddles the world we live in with the conceptual ground of painting.
Of his 2014 solo show, Artplaces wrote "The paintings recall the vintage aesthetic of MS PowerPoint and Word Art. The exhibition’s press release reports a few excerpts from a one-hour audio meditation posted on YouTube in order to relieve negativity and stress in people; the words painted on the works’ surface - “INFORMATION”, “EMOTION”, “ATTRACTION”, “INNER CHILD” etc. - refer to the inspirational sloganeering of self-help culture."
Edwards was included in the 2015 instalment of Greater New York, at MoMA PS1. Also in 2015, Edwards was invited by curator Franklin Melendez to take part in the exhibition A Sentimental Education, at Galerie Andreas Huber

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