Gary Komarin was born in 1951 in New York to a Czech architect and Viennese writer. He received his BA in Art and English Literature at Albany State University and in 1977 received his Masters in Fine Arts from Boston University. Whilst completing his Masters, he studied with the abstract expressionist Philip Guston, to whom he later became a studio assistant. Guston’s influence and belief in cultivating the unknown in painting is definitely visible in Komarin’s work, as is Guston’s peculiar sense of form. However, Komarin uses colour energetically and paints with a sense of urgency, using quick-drying materials that allow him to do so; layer upon layer of tempera, water-based enamel and graphite are continuously added and deleted, paint is repeatedly mixed directly onto the canvas and remnants of postcards and papers can often be seen buried beneath the paint. This sense of urgency mirrors the tension created by conflicting renderings of the spontaneous and the deliberate, the conscious and the unconscious or the strange and the familiar, into one painting. The resulting image is one that appears familiar but resists recognition.
In 1996, he participated in the highly successful exhibition entitled ‘Traylor, Guston, Basquiat, Komarin’ at the John McEnroe Gallery in New York City. Komarin has received numerous awards such as the Joan Mitchell Prize in Painting (1999) and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts grant (1999). He has been included in publications such as the New York Times and Art in America and has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the USA as well as in Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, the UK and Japan.
